IQ and the Flynn Effect
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Johnson, "Dome Improvement," WIRED MAGAZINE, MAY 2005 pp. 102-105
-------------------------------------------------
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man or Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences or any critique of The Bell Curve is liable to dismiss 10 as merely phrenology updated, a pseudoscience fronting for a host of racist and elitist ideologies that dare not speak their names.
These critics attack IQ itself - or, more precisely, what intelligence scholar Arthur Jensen called g, a measure of underlying "general" intelligence. Psychometricians measure g by performing a factor analysis of multiple intelligence tests and extracting a pattern of correlation between the measurements. (IQ is just one yardstick.) Someone with greater general intelligence than average should perform better on a range of different tests.
Unlike some skeptics, James Flynn didn't just dismiss g as statistical tap dancing. He accepted that something real was being measured, but he came to believe that it should be viewed along another axis: time. You can't just take a snapshot of g at one moment and make sense of it, Flynn says.
You have to track its evolution. He did just that. Suddenly, g became much more than a measure of mental ability. It revealed the rising trend line in intelligence test scores. And that, in turn, suggested that something in the environment - some social or cultural force - was driving the trend.
Significant intellectual breakthroughs -to paraphrase the John Lennon song - are what happen when you're busy making other plans. So it was with Flynn and his effect. He left the US in the early 1960s to teach moral philosophy at the University of Otaga in New Zealand. In the late '70s, he began exploring the intellectual underpinnings of racist ideologies. "And I thought: Oh, I can do a bit about the 10 controversies," he says. "And then I saw that Arthur Jensen, a scholar of high repute, actually thought that blacks on average were genetically inferior - which was quite a shock. I should say that Jensen was beyond reproach - he's certainly not a racist. And so I thought I'd better look into this." This inquiry led to a 1980 book, Race, IQ, and Jensen, that posited an environmental -not genetic - explanation for the black-white 10 gap. After finishing the book, Flynn decided that he would look for evidence that blacks were gaining on whites as their access to education increased, and so he began studying US military records, since every incoming member of the armed forces takes an IQ test.
Sure enough, he found that blacks were making modest gains on whites in intelligence tests, confirming his environmental explanation. But something else in the data caught his eye. Every decade or so, the testing companies would generate new tests and re-normalize them so that the average score was 100. To make sure that the new exams were in sync with previous ones, they'd have a batch of students take both tests. They were simply trying to confirm that someone who tested above average on the new version would perform above average on the old, and in fact the results confirmed that correlation. But the data also brought to light another pattern, one that the testing companies ignored. "Every time kids took the new and the old tests, they did better on the old ones," Flynn says. "I thought: That's weird."
The testing companies had published the comparative data almost as an afterthought. "It didn't seem to strike them as interesting that the kids were always doing better on the earlier test," he says. "But I was new to the area." He sent his data to the Harvard Educational Review, which dismissed the paper for its small sample size. And so Flynn dug up every study that had ever been done in the US where the same subjects took a new and an old version of an IQ test. "And lo and behold, when you examined that huge collection of data, it revealed a 14-point gain between 1932 and 1978." According to Flynn's numbers, if someone testing in the top 18 percent the year FDR was elected were to time-travel to the middle of the Carter administration, he would score at the 50th percentile.
When Flynn finally published his work in 1984, Jensen objected that Flynn's numbers were drawing on tests that reflected educational background. He predicted that the Flynn effect would disappear if one were to look at tests - like the Raven Progressive Matrices - that give a closer approximation of gr, by measuring abstract reasoning and pattern recognition and eliminating language altogether. And so Flynn dutifully collected IQ data from all over the world. All of it showed dramatic increases. "The biggest of all were on Ravens," Flynn reports with a hint of glee still in his voice.
The trend Flynn discovered in the mid-'80s has been investigated extensively, and there's little doubt he's right. In fact, the Flynn effect is accelerating. US test takers gained 17 IQ points between 1947 and 2001. The annual gain from 1947 through 1972 was 0.3110 point, but by the '90s it had crept up to 0.36.
Though the Flynn effect is now widely accepted, its existence has in turn raised new questions. The most fundamental: Why are measures of intelligence going up? The phenomenon would seem to make no sense in light of the evidence that g is largely an inherited trait. We're certainly not evolving that quickly.
The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:
The same person tested twice 87
Identical twins raised together 86
Identical twins raised apart 76
Fraternal twins raised together 55
Biological siblings 47
Parents and children living together 40
Parents and children living apart 31
Adopted children living together 0
Unrelated people living apart 0
After analyzing these shifting ratios of shared genes and the environment for several decades, the consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent. The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.
Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation, one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.
Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: b]Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."[/b]
Dickens and Flynn showed that the environment could affect heritable traits like 10, but one mystery remained: What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
Most cognitive scholars remain genuinely perplexed. "I find it a puzzle and don't have a compelling explanation," wrote Harvard's Steven Pinker in an email exchange. "I suspect that it's either practice at taking tests or perhaps a large number of disparate factors that add up to the linear trend."
Flynn has his theories, though they're still speculative. "For a long time it bothered me that g was going up without an across-the-board increase in other tests," he says. If g measured general intelligence, then a long-term increase should trickle over into other subtests. "And then I realized that society has priorities. Let's say we're too cheap to hire good high school math teachers. So while we may want to improve arithmetical reasoning skills, we just don't. On the other hand, with smaller families, more leisure, and more energy to use leisure for cognitively demanding pursuits, we may improve - without realizing it -on-the-spot problem-solving, like you see with Ravens."
When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.
This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.
Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto.
The ultimate test of the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis may come in the next few years, as the generation raised on hypertext and massively complex game worlds starts taking adult 10 tests. This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren't shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough. Their parents may have enhanced their fluid intelligence by playing Tetris or learning the visual grammar of TV advertising. But that's child's play compared with Pokemon.
================
Steven Johnson, "Dome Improvement," WIRED MAGAZINE, MAY 2005 pp. 102-105
-------------------------------------------------
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man or Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences or any critique of The Bell Curve is liable to dismiss 10 as merely phrenology updated, a pseudoscience fronting for a host of racist and elitist ideologies that dare not speak their names.
These critics attack IQ itself - or, more precisely, what intelligence scholar Arthur Jensen called g, a measure of underlying "general" intelligence. Psychometricians measure g by performing a factor analysis of multiple intelligence tests and extracting a pattern of correlation between the measurements. (IQ is just one yardstick.) Someone with greater general intelligence than average should perform better on a range of different tests.
Unlike some skeptics, James Flynn didn't just dismiss g as statistical tap dancing. He accepted that something real was being measured, but he came to believe that it should be viewed along another axis: time. You can't just take a snapshot of g at one moment and make sense of it, Flynn says.
You have to track its evolution. He did just that. Suddenly, g became much more than a measure of mental ability. It revealed the rising trend line in intelligence test scores. And that, in turn, suggested that something in the environment - some social or cultural force - was driving the trend.
Significant intellectual breakthroughs -to paraphrase the John Lennon song - are what happen when you're busy making other plans. So it was with Flynn and his effect. He left the US in the early 1960s to teach moral philosophy at the University of Otaga in New Zealand. In the late '70s, he began exploring the intellectual underpinnings of racist ideologies. "And I thought: Oh, I can do a bit about the 10 controversies," he says. "And then I saw that Arthur Jensen, a scholar of high repute, actually thought that blacks on average were genetically inferior - which was quite a shock. I should say that Jensen was beyond reproach - he's certainly not a racist. And so I thought I'd better look into this." This inquiry led to a 1980 book, Race, IQ, and Jensen, that posited an environmental -not genetic - explanation for the black-white 10 gap. After finishing the book, Flynn decided that he would look for evidence that blacks were gaining on whites as their access to education increased, and so he began studying US military records, since every incoming member of the armed forces takes an IQ test.
Sure enough, he found that blacks were making modest gains on whites in intelligence tests, confirming his environmental explanation. But something else in the data caught his eye. Every decade or so, the testing companies would generate new tests and re-normalize them so that the average score was 100. To make sure that the new exams were in sync with previous ones, they'd have a batch of students take both tests. They were simply trying to confirm that someone who tested above average on the new version would perform above average on the old, and in fact the results confirmed that correlation. But the data also brought to light another pattern, one that the testing companies ignored. "Every time kids took the new and the old tests, they did better on the old ones," Flynn says. "I thought: That's weird."
The testing companies had published the comparative data almost as an afterthought. "It didn't seem to strike them as interesting that the kids were always doing better on the earlier test," he says. "But I was new to the area." He sent his data to the Harvard Educational Review, which dismissed the paper for its small sample size. And so Flynn dug up every study that had ever been done in the US where the same subjects took a new and an old version of an IQ test. "And lo and behold, when you examined that huge collection of data, it revealed a 14-point gain between 1932 and 1978." According to Flynn's numbers, if someone testing in the top 18 percent the year FDR was elected were to time-travel to the middle of the Carter administration, he would score at the 50th percentile.
When Flynn finally published his work in 1984, Jensen objected that Flynn's numbers were drawing on tests that reflected educational background. He predicted that the Flynn effect would disappear if one were to look at tests - like the Raven Progressive Matrices - that give a closer approximation of gr, by measuring abstract reasoning and pattern recognition and eliminating language altogether. And so Flynn dutifully collected IQ data from all over the world. All of it showed dramatic increases. "The biggest of all were on Ravens," Flynn reports with a hint of glee still in his voice.
The trend Flynn discovered in the mid-'80s has been investigated extensively, and there's little doubt he's right. In fact, the Flynn effect is accelerating. US test takers gained 17 IQ points between 1947 and 2001. The annual gain from 1947 through 1972 was 0.3110 point, but by the '90s it had crept up to 0.36.
Though the Flynn effect is now widely accepted, its existence has in turn raised new questions. The most fundamental: Why are measures of intelligence going up? The phenomenon would seem to make no sense in light of the evidence that g is largely an inherited trait. We're certainly not evolving that quickly.
The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:
The same person tested twice 87
Identical twins raised together 86
Identical twins raised apart 76
Fraternal twins raised together 55
Biological siblings 47
Parents and children living together 40
Parents and children living apart 31
Adopted children living together 0
Unrelated people living apart 0
After analyzing these shifting ratios of shared genes and the environment for several decades, the consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent. The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.
Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation, one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.
Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: b]Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."[/b]
Dickens and Flynn showed that the environment could affect heritable traits like 10, but one mystery remained: What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
Most cognitive scholars remain genuinely perplexed. "I find it a puzzle and don't have a compelling explanation," wrote Harvard's Steven Pinker in an email exchange. "I suspect that it's either practice at taking tests or perhaps a large number of disparate factors that add up to the linear trend."
Flynn has his theories, though they're still speculative. "For a long time it bothered me that g was going up without an across-the-board increase in other tests," he says. If g measured general intelligence, then a long-term increase should trickle over into other subtests. "And then I realized that society has priorities. Let's say we're too cheap to hire good high school math teachers. So while we may want to improve arithmetical reasoning skills, we just don't. On the other hand, with smaller families, more leisure, and more energy to use leisure for cognitively demanding pursuits, we may improve - without realizing it -on-the-spot problem-solving, like you see with Ravens."
When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.
This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.
Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto.
The ultimate test of the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis may come in the next few years, as the generation raised on hypertext and massively complex game worlds starts taking adult 10 tests. This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren't shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough. Their parents may have enhanced their fluid intelligence by playing Tetris or learning the visual grammar of TV advertising. But that's child's play compared with Pokemon.
================
Cranial size "race" studies debunked
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tobias (1970) compared 7 racial and national groups in a study on brain size, in which he reported that the brain size of American blacks was larger than any white group, (which included American, English and French whites) except those from the Swedish sub sample (who had the largest brains of any of the groups measured), and American blacks were also estimated to have some 200 million more neurons than American whites (See Tobias 1970; Weizmann et al. 1990). Gould (1981, 1996) discovered upon recalculating Morton’s skull data that the crania of blacks in his sample were on average larger than those of whites. Morton included in his sample of black skulls more females than he included in the white sample. For example, in his analysis of Hottentotts (black tribe from South Africa) all measured crania were of females; the Englishmen were all mature men. Also, Morton did some early measurements with seed instead of shot. When he discovered that this method gave inconsistent results, he re did the Caucasian values with shot, but not the blacks (See Gould, 1981, 1996). After correcting these errors it was shown that the black sample had larger crania (and presumably, larger brains) than did whites
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
............................
Adoption studies debunk race-mongers:
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eyferth (1961) [ADD UMLAUT TO FURS] examined the IQs of several hundred German children fathered by black American GIs during the post-1945 occupation were compared to those fathered by white GIs. The children fathered by black GIs had an average IQ of 96.5 and the children fathered by white GIs had an average IQ of 97. Inasmuch as the (phenotypic) B/W gap in the military as a whole was close to that in the general population, these data imply that the B/W gap in the U.S. population as a whole is not genetic in origin (Flynn, 1980, pp. 87-88).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An experiment by Tizard and colleagues compared black and white orphans who had all been raised in the same highly enriched institutional environment. At four or five years of age, white children had IQs of 103, black children had IQs of 108, and children of mixed race had IQs of 106."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Compared mean IQ test performance and response styles to cognitive demands of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) among 23 Black children (aged 7-10 yrs) who had been adopted by middle-class White families (i.e., transracially adopted) and 23 age-matched Black children who had been adopted by middle-class Black families (i.e., traditionally adopted). Findings indicate that while the traditionally adopted Ss received normal IQ scores, transracially adopted Ss showed nearly 1 standard deviation Full-Scale Scoring advantage over them. A multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) indicated significant differences in the styles of responding to test demands demonstrated by the 2 groups of Ss, which were conceptualized as contributors to the difference in average test score observed between them. Multivariate analysis of the helping behaviors adopted mothers exhibited when helping their children solve a difficult cognitive task revealed significant differences between Black and White mothers, which were conceptualized as culturally determined. White adopted mothers tended to release tension by joking, grinning, and laughing, while Black adoptive mothers more often released tension in less positive ways such as scowling, coughing, and frowning. White adoptive mothers were more likely than Black adoptive mothers to provide positive evaluations of their children's problem solving efforts. It is concluded that the ethnicity of the rearing environment exerts a significant influence on children's styles of responding to standardized intelligence tests and on their test achievement.".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
............................
Studies on mixed children debunks race-mongers:
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the black-white IQ gap is entirely genetic, children of mixed parentage should have the same average IQ regardless of which parent was black. If mothers are more important than fathers to the intellectual socialization of their children, and if the socialization practices of whites favor the acquisition of skills that result in high IQ scores, children of white mothers and black fathers should score higher than children of black mothers and white fathers. In fact, [(Willerman et al., 1974) children of white mothers and black fathers have a nine point IQ advantage over those with black mothers and white fathers. This result suggests that most, but perhaps not all of the B/W IQ gap is environmental.
Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
Rushton, for his part, has never even mentioned the problem of controlling test conditions so that the results could have any meaning. Instead, he has stressed that human populations long associated with life in the colder parts of the world would have had to face challenging but predictable problems while the subtropical savannas where humans first evolved were less predictable but less challenging (1995:7, 228–31). These are just assertions in the absence of evidence or analysis and count as analogues to the traditions represented by stories describing the expulsion from a hypothetical Garden of Eden. There is no empirical evidence that the North is more predictable than the African savanna or that it is more stimulating to the intellect.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tobias (1970) compared 7 racial and national groups in a study on brain size, in which he reported that the brain size of American blacks was larger than any white group, (which included American, English and French whites) except those from the Swedish sub sample (who had the largest brains of any of the groups measured), and American blacks were also estimated to have some 200 million more neurons than American whites (See Tobias 1970; Weizmann et al. 1990). Gould (1981, 1996) discovered upon recalculating Morton’s skull data that the crania of blacks in his sample were on average larger than those of whites. Morton included in his sample of black skulls more females than he included in the white sample. For example, in his analysis of Hottentotts (black tribe from South Africa) all measured crania were of females; the Englishmen were all mature men. Also, Morton did some early measurements with seed instead of shot. When he discovered that this method gave inconsistent results, he re did the Caucasian values with shot, but not the blacks (See Gould, 1981, 1996). After correcting these errors it was shown that the black sample had larger crania (and presumably, larger brains) than did whites
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
............................
Adoption studies debunk race-mongers:
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eyferth (1961) [ADD UMLAUT TO FURS] examined the IQs of several hundred German children fathered by black American GIs during the post-1945 occupation were compared to those fathered by white GIs. The children fathered by black GIs had an average IQ of 96.5 and the children fathered by white GIs had an average IQ of 97. Inasmuch as the (phenotypic) B/W gap in the military as a whole was close to that in the general population, these data imply that the B/W gap in the U.S. population as a whole is not genetic in origin (Flynn, 1980, pp. 87-88).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An experiment by Tizard and colleagues compared black and white orphans who had all been raised in the same highly enriched institutional environment. At four or five years of age, white children had IQs of 103, black children had IQs of 108, and children of mixed race had IQs of 106."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Compared mean IQ test performance and response styles to cognitive demands of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) among 23 Black children (aged 7-10 yrs) who had been adopted by middle-class White families (i.e., transracially adopted) and 23 age-matched Black children who had been adopted by middle-class Black families (i.e., traditionally adopted). Findings indicate that while the traditionally adopted Ss received normal IQ scores, transracially adopted Ss showed nearly 1 standard deviation Full-Scale Scoring advantage over them. A multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) indicated significant differences in the styles of responding to test demands demonstrated by the 2 groups of Ss, which were conceptualized as contributors to the difference in average test score observed between them. Multivariate analysis of the helping behaviors adopted mothers exhibited when helping their children solve a difficult cognitive task revealed significant differences between Black and White mothers, which were conceptualized as culturally determined. White adopted mothers tended to release tension by joking, grinning, and laughing, while Black adoptive mothers more often released tension in less positive ways such as scowling, coughing, and frowning. White adoptive mothers were more likely than Black adoptive mothers to provide positive evaluations of their children's problem solving efforts. It is concluded that the ethnicity of the rearing environment exerts a significant influence on children's styles of responding to standardized intelligence tests and on their test achievement.".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
............................
Studies on mixed children debunks race-mongers:
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If the black-white IQ gap is entirely genetic, children of mixed parentage should have the same average IQ regardless of which parent was black. If mothers are more important than fathers to the intellectual socialization of their children, and if the socialization practices of whites favor the acquisition of skills that result in high IQ scores, children of white mothers and black fathers should score higher than children of black mothers and white fathers. In fact, [(Willerman et al., 1974) children of white mothers and black fathers have a nine point IQ advantage over those with black mothers and white fathers. This result suggests that most, but perhaps not all of the B/W IQ gap is environmental.
Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
Rushton, for his part, has never even mentioned the problem of controlling test conditions so that the results could have any meaning. Instead, he has stressed that human populations long associated with life in the colder parts of the world would have had to face challenging but predictable problems while the subtropical savannas where humans first evolved were less predictable but less challenging (1995:7, 228–31). These are just assertions in the absence of evidence or analysis and count as analogues to the traditions represented by stories describing the expulsion from a hypothetical Garden of Eden. There is no empirical evidence that the North is more predictable than the African savanna or that it is more stimulating to the intellect.
In brain size "debate" Asiatics shown to be superior to Caucasians according to conservative race scholars
Ironically, conservative race writers undercut 'Aryan' race ranking claims. lThe much quoted J. P. Rushton is a case in point. What happened when Rushton correlated brain size with race and intelligence? Rushton's data put so-called Mongoloids or Asians on top of the rankings, not allegedly pace-setting "Caucasoids". While many point the finger at blacks supposed "pace-setters" have already fallen behind Asians on several counts.
Quote:
[i]
In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a “Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid” hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with “Mongoloids” at the top." [/i]
--Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
Quote:
[i]
In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a “Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid” hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with “Mongoloids” at the top." [/i]
--Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
Magazine article: - Asian academic superiority makes whites flee school districts to escape Asian competition
by Carl Akebua, Boatwright University, West Virginia, 2008
It was reported in the Washington Post- the growing tension between Asian academic excellence and that of white students. Carl Akebua explains why on his blog.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070602343.html?hpid=topnews
[img]http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2008/07/06/PH2008070602347.jpg[/img]
At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy.
At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area this year, more than 2,500 applicants vied for 485 seats. Asian American students got 219, or 45 percent of the total, while white students got 205, or 42 percent. About 38 percent of the school's students were Asian American in the past school year.
T.J., as the school is known, draws students from several Northern Virginia jurisdictions. It ranks among the nation's top public schools in some surveys because of its rigorous curriculum and high-achieving students. Its average combined SAT score in 2007 was 2155, compared with 1639 countywide. More than 150 of its students that year were semifinalists for National Merit scholarships.
A plurality of Asian American students in a high school class would be an anomaly in the Washington region, where fewer than one in 10 residents is Asian American. In Fairfax, which supplies most of the school's students, people of Asian descent account for 16 percent of the population, census data show. That percentage has doubled since 1990 and is the highest in the area.
Among the incoming T.J. freshmen is Yuqing Zhang. Born in China, Yuqing immigrated with his family a decade ago, when his parents came to the United States for graduate school. He began learning math as a toddler from his grandmother and has excelled throughout school. As an eighth-grader at Longfellow Middle School in the Falls Church area, he took geometry and a class that combines high-level algebra and trigonometry. He placed 30th in a national math competition.
Yuqing, 14, said he has heard that T.J. is very competitive but added that he looks forward to focusing on his favorite subjects, math and science. The school is appealing, he said, because it "makes you do the best," and its students "model a good work ethic."
The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of the metropolitan population is of Asian descent. In San Francisco, Asian Americans make up more than 60 percent of the students at selective Lowell High School and about a third of the city's population.
The success of Asian American students reflects the educational commitment found in many immigrant communities, particularly for second-generation students fluent in English and encouraged by upwardly mobile parents who came to the United States for higher education or professional positions.
The demographic imbalance in top public magnet schools has become a sensitive issue, however...
[b]Jenny Tsai, a recent Harvard University graduate, wrote her thesis about what she perceived as a growing sentiment that "too many Asians" were at top magnet schools. She attended the selective Hunter College High School in New York, where she sensed "a certain level of anxiety" as the portion of Asian American students in the entering class grew from less than a third to more than half between 1997 and 2003. Tsai said some students felt a need to justify their admission or their contributions.
"I don't think there was ever a question of who really belonged there until the numbers shifted," she said.
Admissions offices at top private colleges are becoming the front line for debates about equal access as the supply of high-caliber Asian American applicants swells and colleges try to maintain student diversity. Some Asian Americans contend that they face informal quotas and are forced to meet higher standards, similar to hurdles that Jewish Americans faced in the first part of the 20th century. [/b]
=====================
2-- Nor are IQ gaps anything special. The roughly 15 point average gap in black-white IQ is seen among whites, such as between northern Italians and southern Italians, and between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, and between groups like the Irish and the English. In other words, IQ gaps as measured by test scores are nothing unusual within and between groups (Sowell 1995, race and Culture).
3-- In addition, finer breakdown of IQ scores reveals several interesting patterns, undermining the much ballyhooed emphasis on "gaps. Several white sub-groups for example turn in quite unimpressive perfomances."
QUOTE:
[i]There are other groups to whom none of these factors apply--and who still have had test score differences as great as those between black and white children in the Jim Crow South. Japanese and Mexican immigrants began arriving in California at about the same time and initially worked in very similar occupations as agricultural laborers. Yet a study of a school district in which their children attended the same schools and sat side-by-side in the same classrooms found IQ differences as great as those between blacks and whites attending schools on opposite sides of town in the Jim Crow South. International studies have found different groups of illiterates--people with no educational differences because they had no education--with mental test differences larger than those between blacks and whites in the United States. Nor is this necessarily a matter of genetics. During the First World War, black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania scored higher on mental tests than did white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi.5
What is "the" reason? There may not be any such thing as "the" reason. There are so many cultural, social, economic, and other factors interacting that there was never any reason to expect equal results in the first place. That is why plausible simplicities must be subjected to factual scrutiny.
Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high schools in the city--three white and one black. When standardized tests were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than two of the three white academic high schools.6 Today, nearly a century later, even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian. Nor was this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the national average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s.7 Yet its physical plant was inadequate and its average class size was higher than that in the city's white high schools.
--Thomas Sowell. (1998). Race, Culture, and Equality.
4-- The intelligence "g" concept also has a number of limitations and claims of "declining" or "static" non-white intelligence are undermined by the Flynn effect.
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Steven Johnson, "Dome Improvement," WIRED MAGAZINE, MAY 2005 pp. 102-105
-------------------------------------------------
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man or Howard Gardner's work on multiple intelligences or any critique of The Bell Curve is liable to dismiss 10 as merely phrenology updated, a pseudoscience fronting for a host of racist and elitist ideologies that dare not speak their names.
These critics attack IQ itself - or, more precisely, what intelligence scholar Arthur Jensen called g, a measure of underlying "general" intelligence. Psychometricians measure g by performing a factor analysis of multiple intelligence tests and extracting a pattern of correlation between the measurements. (IQ is just one yardstick.) Someone with greater general intelligence than average should perform better on a range of different tests.
Unlike some skeptics, James Flynn didn't just dismiss g as statistical tap dancing. He accepted that something real was being measured, but he came to believe that it should be viewed along another axis: time. You can't just take a snapshot of g at one moment and make sense of it, Flynn says.
You have to track its evolution. He did just that. Suddenly, g became much more than a measure of mental ability. It revealed the rising trend line in intelligence test scores. And that, in turn, suggested that something in the environment - some social or cultural force - was driving the trend.
Significant intellectual breakthroughs -to paraphrase the John Lennon song - are what happen when you're busy making other plans. So it was with Flynn and his effect. He left the US in the early 1960s to teach moral philosophy at the University of Otaga in New Zealand. In the late '70s, he began exploring the intellectual underpinnings of racist ideologies. "And I thought: Oh, I can do a bit about the 10 controversies," he says. "And then I saw that Arthur Jensen, a scholar of high repute, actually thought that blacks on average were genetically inferior - which was quite a shock. I should say that Jensen was beyond reproach - he's certainly not a racist. And so I thought I'd better look into this." This inquiry led to a 1980 book, Race, IQ, and Jensen, that posited an environmental -not genetic - explanation for the black-white 10 gap. After finishing the book, Flynn decided that he would look for evidence that blacks were gaining on whites as their access to education increased, and so he began studying US military records, since every incoming member of the armed forces takes an IQ test.
Sure enough, he found that blacks were making modest gains on whites in intelligence tests, confirming his environmental explanation. But something else in the data caught his eye. Every decade or so, the testing companies would generate new tests and re-normalize them so that the average score was 100. To make sure that the new exams were in sync with previous ones, they'd have a batch of students take both tests. They were simply trying to confirm that someone who tested above average on the new version would perform above average on the old, and in fact the results confirmed that correlation. But the data also brought to light another pattern, one that the testing companies ignored. "Every time kids took the new and the old tests, they did better on the old ones," Flynn says. "I thought: That's weird."
The testing companies had published the comparative data almost as an afterthought. "It didn't seem to strike them as interesting that the kids were always doing better on the earlier test," he says. "But I was new to the area." He sent his data to the Harvard Educational Review, which dismissed the paper for its small sample size. And so Flynn dug up every study that had ever been done in the US where the same subjects took a new and an old version of an IQ test. "And lo and behold, when you examined that huge collection of data, it revealed a 14-point gain between 1932 and 1978." According to Flynn's numbers, if someone testing in the top 18 percent the year FDR was elected were to time-travel to the middle of the Carter administration, he would score at the 50th percentile.
When Flynn finally published his work in 1984, Jensen objected that Flynn's numbers were drawing on tests that reflected educational background. He predicted that the Flynn effect would disappear if one were to look at tests - like the Raven Progressive Matrices - that give a closer approximation of gr, by measuring abstract reasoning and pattern recognition and eliminating language altogether. And so Flynn dutifully collected IQ data from all over the world. All of it showed dramatic increases. "The biggest of all were on Ravens," Flynn reports with a hint of glee still in his voice.
The trend Flynn discovered in the mid-'80s has been investigated extensively, and there's little doubt he's right. In fact, the Flynn effect is accelerating. US test takers gained 17 IQ points between 1947 and 2001. The annual gain from 1947 through 1972 was 0.3110 point, but by the '90s it had crept up to 0.36.
Though the Flynn effect is now widely accepted, its existence has in turn raised new questions. The most fundamental: Why are measures of intelligence going up? The phenomenon would seem to make no sense in light of the evidence that g is largely an inherited trait. We're certainly not evolving that quickly.
The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations. This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:
The same person tested twice 87
Identical twins raised together 86
Identical twins raised apart 76
Fraternal twins raised together 55
Biological siblings 47
Parents and children living together 40
Parents and children living apart 31
Adopted children living together 0
Unrelated people living apart 0
After analyzing these shifting ratios of shared genes and the environment for several decades, the consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent. The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.
Four years ago, Flynn and William Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, proposed another explanation, one made apparent to them by the Flynn effect. Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.
Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."
Dickens and Flynn showed that the environment could affect heritable traits like 10, but one mystery remained: What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
Most cognitive scholars remain genuinely perplexed. "I find it a puzzle and don't have a compelling explanation," wrote Harvard's Steven Pinker in an email exchange. "I suspect that it's either practice at taking tests or perhaps a large number of disparate factors that add up to the linear trend."
Flynn has his theories, though they're still speculative. "For a long time it bothered me that g was going up without an across-the-board increase in other tests," he says. If g measured general intelligence, then a long-term increase should trickle over into other subtests. "And then I realized that society has priorities. Let's say we're too cheap to hire good high school math teachers. So while we may want to improve arithmetical reasoning skills, we just don't. On the other hand, with smaller families, more leisure, and more energy to use leisure for cognitively demanding pursuits, we may improve - without realizing it -on-the-spot problem-solving, like you see with Ravens."
When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.
This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.
5-- According to published data, white performance in numerous places has been unimpressive. Asians, particularly East Asians, routinely outperform whites on IQ tests both individually, and on nationwide rankings. (Lynn, 1996; McShane & Plas, 1984).
But let's for a moment take the race-mongers brain sizes, and take one of race-mongers's favorite author's Rushton. What happened when Rushton correlated brain size with race and intelligence? Their own science guy, put so-called Mongoloids or Asians were on top of the rankings, not allegedly pace-setting "Caucasoids". Indeed the data of conservative race writers and rankers reveals some unpleasant surprises when analyzed:
Quote:
"In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a “Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid” hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with “Mongoloids” at the top."
--Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
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^^ The kicker is that Asians particpate in European measurement systems and demonstrate themselves superior. But even blacks in various eras, head to head have done the same -- from the black soliders in WWI (see above) to the kids at Dunbar High School in DC from the late 1800s to the 1950,s producing academic performances equal to or exceeding that of whites.
Furthermore, white performance is nothing to write home about on various counts. Indeed the average 15 point iq score gap is something routinely occurring with various white US ethnics, who in various eras show the same average gap between their scores and the national average. Nobody talks much abou that however. In short, "gaps" are nothing new in US history.
Indeed, the Asian advantage ranges from 5 to 10 points, depending on which groups are being tested (East Asians for example) and which tests are being used. 10 points is almost as big as the black-white gap. Indeed as Asians continue to advance, there seems to be a growing feeling of uneasiness among many whites, although it is not played up as much as people pointing the finger at the perennial scapegoat- blacks.
The news article below seems to show anecdotally at least, that the Asian advantage is deepening over whites. Some might argue that the race-mongers sense this and thus continue their desperate search for some group they can rank favorably with- "po" white trash - illiterate, ignorant, shiftless losers, whose only remaining hope is to cling to the badge of a white skin, and to play the race bait game. It would be naive to imagine that many whites are pleased with the developments below, and that they are not quietly putting countermeasures in place, like the "informal" anti-Asian quotas. Just such "informal" quotas have been used in earlier times to limit black numbers in the NBA. Note the research of Jenny Tsai below:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070602343.html?hpid=topnews
At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 7, 2008; Page A01
Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy.
At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area this year, more than 2,500 applicants vied for 485 seats. Asian American students got 219, or 45 percent of the total, while white students got 205, or 42 percent. About 38 percent of the school's students were Asian American in the past school year.
T.J., as the school is known, draws students from several Northern Virginia jurisdictions. It ranks among the nation's top public schools in some surveys because of its rigorous curriculum and high-achieving students. Its average combined SAT score in 2007 was 2155, compared with 1639 countywide. More than 150 of its students that year were semifinalists for National Merit scholarships.
A plurality of Asian American students in a high school class would be an anomaly in the Washington region, where fewer than one in 10 residents is Asian American. In Fairfax, which supplies most of the school's students, people of Asian descent account for 16 percent of the population, census data show. That percentage has doubled since 1990 and is the highest in the area.
Among the incoming T.J. freshmen is Yuqing Zhang. Born in China, Yuqing immigrated with his family a decade ago, when his parents came to the United States for graduate school. He began learning math as a toddler from his grandmother and has excelled throughout school. As an eighth-grader at Longfellow Middle School in the Falls Church area, he took geometry and a class that combines high-level algebra and trigonometry. He placed 30th in a national math competition.
Yuqing, 14, said he has heard that T.J. is very competitive but added that he looks forward to focusing on his favorite subjects, math and science. The school is appealing, he said, because it "makes you do the best," and its students "model a good work ethic."
The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of the metropolitan population is of Asian descent. In San Francisco, Asian Americans make up more than 60 percent of the students at selective Lowell High School and about a third of the city's population.
The success of Asian American students reflects the educational commitment found in many immigrant communities, particularly for second-generation students fluent in English and encouraged by upwardly mobile parents who came to the United States for higher education or professional positions.
The demographic imbalance in top public magnet schools has become a sensitive issue, however...
Jenny Tsai, a recent Harvard University graduate, wrote her thesis about what she perceived as a growing sentiment that "too many Asians" were at top magnet schools. She attended the selective Hunter College High School in New York, where she sensed "a certain level of anxiety" as the portion of Asian American students in the entering class grew from less than a third to more than half between 1997 and 2003. Tsai said some students felt a need to justify their admission or their contributions.
"I don't think there was ever a question of who really belonged there until the numbers shifted," she said.
Admissions offices at top private colleges are becoming the front line for debates about equal access as the supply of high-caliber Asian American applicants swells and colleges try to maintain student diversity. Some Asian Americans contend that they face informal quotas and are forced to meet higher standards, similar to hurdles that Jewish Americans faced in the first part of the 20th century...
continued ..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
According to Tsai's research, which included interviews and surveys, the much touted magnet schools were set up for, and catered mostly to whites. It is only when Asians started beating whites out of admission slots that they became a "problem":
Quote:
"The perception that there are too many Asians exists because the whites do not believe that Asians should be the majority of students in a magnet school, when admission to the school is supposed to be for the whites." pg 61
and when it came down to some things such as choosing school paper editors there seemed to be some "informal affirmative action" in play:
"The Jewish male got picked because he was white, and his whiteness compensated for his lack of experience..
-----
Hmm, sense of entitlement... now where have we heard that before? and the white guy seemed to be picked not in the interests of merit, (he was less experienced) but in the interests of racial 'balance'.. Very strange.. no?
Ironically there even appears to be "white flight" from TOO MUCH competition with Asians:
"The “model minority” stereotype serves as a double-edged sword. Asians
are not viewed to be dangerous or a drain on resources, but it can still be
undesirable for whites to live in an area with a highly concentrated Asian
population. A specific example is a recent Wall Street Journal article that talked
about the “second white flight” from Cupertino, California. White parents were
reluctant to enroll their children at the local Monta Vista High School because the
school was viewed to be too competitive. Some white parents chose to send their
children to the neighboring Homestead High School, despite its lower test scores.
The article quotes the Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling saying: “"It
does help to have a lower Asian population. I don't think our parents are as
uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista." 113 Mr. Rowley, the district
superintendent, admitted that "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct
minority against a majority culture." 114 Mr. Rowley chose not send his own son to
Monta Vista High School. The Asian students were viewed to be the cause of the
heightened pressure and stress at the school. One former student at Monta Vista
High School, George Chen, said: “Monta Vista was viewed as being very stressful
because of all the Asian students, who fought to be in the AP classes…There was
always that perception that the Asian American students were the cause of the
stress as well as the reason why the school wasn’t good in something like
athletics.”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1082148
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]White flight as higher performing Asians muscle in..
According to the assorted racial theorists like Rushton, brain size calculations put the Mongoloids on top of the rankings. Seems that many white people can't stand the heat..[/b]
[img]http://www.pinknews.co.uk/images/gayhitler.jpg[/img]
The New White Flight
Wall Street Journal
November 19, 2005
In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. Why?
By SUEIN HWANG
CUPERTINO, Calif. -- By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges.
But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.
White students are far outnumbered by Asians at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, Calif.
Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.
The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change.
In the 1960s, the term "white flight" emerged to describe the rapid exodus of whites from big cities into the suburbs, a process that often resulted in the economic degradation of the remaining community. Back then, the phenomenon was mostly believed to be sparked by the growth in the population of African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, in some major cities.
But this modern incarnation is different. Across the country, Asian-Americans have by and large been successful and accepted into middle- and upper-class communities. Silicon Valley has kept Cupertino's economy stable, and the town is almost indistinguishable from many of the suburbs around it. The shrinking number of white students hasn't hurt the academic standards of Cupertino's schools -- in fact the opposite is true.
This time the effect is more subtle: Some Asians believe that the resulting lack of diversity creates an atmosphere that is too sheltering for their children, leaving then unprepared for life in a country that is only 4% Asian overall. Moreover, many Asians share some of their white counterpart's concerns. Both groups finger newer Asian immigrants for the schools' intense competitiveness.
Some whites fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations parents are short-changing their own children, giving them the idea that they can't compete with Asian kids. "My parents never let me think that because I'm Caucasian, I'm not going to succeed," says Jessie Hogin, a white Monta Vista graduate.
The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. That sounds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white families to boycott the town altogether.
"It's a stereotype of Asian parents," says Pei-Pei Yow, a Hewlett-Packard Co. manager and Chinese-American community leader who sent two kids to Monta Vista. It's like other familiar biases, she says: "You can't say everybody from the South is a redneck."
Jane Doherty, a retirement-community administrator, chose to send her two boys elsewhere. When her family moved to Cupertino from Indiana over a decade ago, Ms. Doherty says her top priority was moving into a good public-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told her of the town's burgeoning Asian population.
She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Kennedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms. Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids for after-school study. She also attended a Monta Vista parents' night and came away worrying about the school's focus on test scores and the big-name colleges its graduates attend.
"My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," she says. Ms. Doherty says she believes the issue stems more from recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentration of Asian students is really high, and it does flavor the school," she says.
When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." It's also 55% white and 24% Asian. Her younger son, Kevin, followed suit.
Kevin Doherty, 17, says he's happy his mother made the switch. Many of his old friends at Kennedy aren't happy at Monta Vista, he says. "Kids at Bellarmine have a lot of pressure to do well, too, but they want to learn and do something they want to do."
While California has seen the most pronounced cases of suburban segregation, some of the developments in Cupertino are also starting to surface in other parts of the U.S. At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., known flippantly to some locals as "Won Ton," roughly 35% of students are of Asian descent. People who don't know the school tend to make assumptions about its academics, says Principal Michael Doran. "Certain stereotypes come to mind -- 'those people are good at math,' " he says.
In Tenafly, N.J., a well-to-do bedroom community near New York, the local high school says it expects Asian students to make up about 36% of its total in the next five years, compared with 27% today. The district still attracts families of all backgrounds, but Asians are particularly intent that their kids work hard and excel, says Anat Eisenberg, a local Coldwell Banker real-estate agent. "Everybody is caught into this process of driving their kids." Lawrence Mayer, Tenafly High's vice principal, says he's never heard such concerns.
Perched on the western end of the Santa Clara valley, Cupertino was for many years a primarily rural area known for its many fruit orchards. The beginnings of the tech industry brought suburbanization, and Cupertino then became a very white, quintessentially middle-class town of mostly modest ranch homes, populated by engineers and their families. Apple Computer Inc. planted its headquarters there.
As the high-tech industry prospered, so did Cupertino. Today, the orchards are a memory, replaced by numerous shopping malls and subdivisions that are home to Silicon Valley's prosperous upper-middle class. While the architecture in Cupertino is largely the same as in neighboring communities, the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino's top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years.
Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation -- particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants -- as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998.
Some students struggle in Cupertino's high schools who might not elsewhere. Monta Vista's Academic Performance Index, which compares the academic performance of California's schools, reached an all-time high of 924 out of 1,000 this year, making it one of the highest-scoring high schools in Northern California. Grades are so high that a 'B' average puts a student in the bottom third of a class.
"We have great students, which has a lot of upsides," says April Scott, Monta Vista's principal. "The downside is what the kids with a 3.0 GPA think of themselves."
Ms. Scott and her counterpart at Lynbrook know what's said about their schools being too competitive and dominated by Asians. "It's easy to buy into those kinds of comments because they're loaded and powerful," says Ms. Scott, who adds that they paint an inaccurate picture of Monta Vista. Ms. Scott says many athletic programs are thriving and points to the school's many extracurricular activities. She also points out that white students represented 20% of the school's 29 National Merit Semifinalists this year.
Judy Hogin, Jessie's mother and a Cupertino real-estate agent, believes the school was good for her daughter, who is now a freshman at the University of California at San Diego. "I know it's frustrating to some people who have moved away," says Ms. Hogin, who is white. Jessie, she says, "rose to the challenge."
On a recent autumn day at Lynbrook, crowds of students spilled out of classrooms for midmorning break. Against a sea of Asian faces, the few white students were easy to pick out. One boy sat on a wall, his lighter hair and skin making him stand out from dozens of others around him. In another corner, four white male students lounged at a picnic table.
At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers. In one 9th-grade algebra class, Lynbrook's lowest-level math class, the students are an eclectic mix of whites, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups.
"Take a good look," whispered Steve Rowley, superintendent of the Fremont Union High School District, which covers the city of Cupertino as well as portions of other neighboring cities. "This doesn't look like the other classes we're going to."
On the second floor, in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don't take white kids as seriously as Asians.
"Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it," says Arar Han, a Monta Vista graduate who recently co-edited "Asian American X," a book of coming-of-age essays by young Asian-Americans.
Ms. Gatley, the Monta Vista PTA president, is more blunt: "White kids are thought of as the dumb kids," she says.
Cupertino's administrators and faculty, the majority of whom are white, adamantly say there's no discrimination against whites. The administrators say students of all races get along well. In fact, there's little evidence of any overt racial tension between students or between their parents.
Mr. Rowley, the school superintendent, however, concedes that a perception exists that's sometimes called "the white-boy syndrome." He describes it as: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a majority culture."
Mr. Rowley, who is white, enrolled his only son, Eddie, at Lynbrook. When Eddie started freshman geometry, the boy was frustrated to learn that many of the Asian students in his class had already taken the course in summer school, Mr. Rowley recalls. That gave them a big leg up.
To many of Cupertino's Asians, some of the assumptions made by white parents -- that Asians are excessively competitive and single-minded -- play into stereotypes. Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students, says Denise Pope, director of Stressed Out Students, a Stanford University program that has worked with schools in both Palo Alto and Cupertino. But whites don't seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it's not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans.
Some of Cupertino's Asian residents say they don't blame white families for leaving. After all, many of the town's Asians are fretting about the same issues. While acknowledging that the term Asian embraces a wide diversity of countries, cultures and languages, they say there's some truth to the criticisms levied against new immigrant parents, particularly those from countries such as China and India, who often put a lot of academic pressure on their children.
Some parents and students say these various forces are creating an unhealthy cultural isolation in the schools. Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn't send his kids to his alma mater. "It was a sheltered little world that didn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like," says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, "college wasn't an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment."
Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children's emotional development. Ms. Wei, who is co-president of Monta Vista's PTA with Ms. Gatley, says her activism stems from the suicide of her daughter, Diana. Ms. Wei says life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn't prepare the young woman for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later.
"We emphasize academics so much and protect our kids, I feel there's something lacking in our education," Ms. Wei says.
Cupertino schools are trying to address some of these issues. Monta Vista recently completed a series of seminars focused on such issues as helping parents communicate better with their kids, and Lynbrook last year revised its homework guidelines with the goal of eliminating excessive and unproductive assignments.
The moves haven't stemmed the flow of whites out of the schools. Four years ago, Lynn Rosener, a software consultant, transferred her elder son from Monta Vista to Homestead High, a Cupertino school with slightly lower test scores. At the new school, the white student body is declining at a slower rate than at Monta Vista and currently stands at 52% of the total. Friday-night football is a tradition, with big half-time shows and usually 1,000 people packing the stands. The school offers boys' volleyball, a sport at which Ms. Rosener's son was particularly talented. Monta Vista doesn't.
"It does help to have a lower Asian population," says Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling. "I don't think our parents are as uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista."
Write to Suein Hwang at suein.hwang@wsj.com
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[img]http://www.topnews.in/light/files/bruce_lee.jpg[/img]
"In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a “Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid” hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s [b]Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with “Mongoloids” at the top." [/b]
--Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
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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 0.3 points 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 WISC IV—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.
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"In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a “Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid” hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with “Mongoloids” at the top."
--Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
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^^ The kicker is that Asians particpate in European measurement systems and demonstrate themselves superior. But even blacks in various eras, head to head have done the same -- from the black soliders in WWI (see above) to the kids at Dunbar High School in DC from the late 1800s to the 1950,s producing academic performances equal to or exceeding that of whites.
Furthermore, white performance is nothing to write home about on various counts. Indeed the average 15 point iq score gap is something routinely occurring with various white US ethnics, who in various eras show the same average gap between their scores and the national average. Nobody talks much abou that however. In short, "gaps" are nothing new in US history.
Indeed, the Asian advantage ranges from 5 to 10 points, depending on which groups are being tested (East Asians for example) and which tests are being used. 10 points is almost as big as the black-white gap. Indeed as Asians continue to advance, there seems to be a growing feeling of uneasiness among many whites, although it is not played up as much as people pointing the finger at the perennial scapegoat- blacks.
The news article below seems to show anecdotally at least, that the Asian advantage is deepening over whites. Some might argue that the race-mongers sense this and thus continue their desperate search for some group they can rank favorably with- "po" white trash - illiterate, ignorant, shiftless losers, whose only remaining hope is to cling to the badge of a white skin, and to play the race bait game. It would be naive to imagine that many whites are pleased with the developments below, and that they are not quietly putting countermeasures in place, like the "informal" anti-Asian quotas. Just such "informal" quotas have been used in earlier times to limit black numbers in the NBA. Note the research of Jenny Tsai below:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/06/AR2008070602343.html?hpid=topnews
At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality
By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 7, 2008; Page A01
Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy.
At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in the Alexandria area this year, more than 2,500 applicants vied for 485 seats. Asian American students got 219, or 45 percent of the total, while white students got 205, or 42 percent. About 38 percent of the school's students were Asian American in the past school year.
T.J., as the school is known, draws students from several Northern Virginia jurisdictions. It ranks among the nation's top public schools in some surveys because of its rigorous curriculum and high-achieving students. Its average combined SAT score in 2007 was 2155, compared with 1639 countywide. More than 150 of its students that year were semifinalists for National Merit scholarships.
A plurality of Asian American students in a high school class would be an anomaly in the Washington region, where fewer than one in 10 residents is Asian American. In Fairfax, which supplies most of the school's students, people of Asian descent account for 16 percent of the population, census data show. That percentage has doubled since 1990 and is the highest in the area.
Among the incoming T.J. freshmen is Yuqing Zhang. Born in China, Yuqing immigrated with his family a decade ago, when his parents came to the United States for graduate school. He began learning math as a toddler from his grandmother and has excelled throughout school. As an eighth-grader at Longfellow Middle School in the Falls Church area, he took geometry and a class that combines high-level algebra and trigonometry. He placed 30th in a national math competition.
Yuqing, 14, said he has heard that T.J. is very competitive but added that he looks forward to focusing on his favorite subjects, math and science. The school is appealing, he said, because it "makes you do the best," and its students "model a good work ethic."
The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of the metropolitan population is of Asian descent. In San Francisco, Asian Americans make up more than 60 percent of the students at selective Lowell High School and about a third of the city's population.
The success of Asian American students reflects the educational commitment found in many immigrant communities, particularly for second-generation students fluent in English and encouraged by upwardly mobile parents who came to the United States for higher education or professional positions.
The demographic imbalance in top public magnet schools has become a sensitive issue, however...
Jenny Tsai, a recent Harvard University graduate, wrote her thesis about what she perceived as a growing sentiment that "too many Asians" were at top magnet schools. She attended the selective Hunter College High School in New York, where she sensed "a certain level of anxiety" as the portion of Asian American students in the entering class grew from less than a third to more than half between 1997 and 2003. Tsai said some students felt a need to justify their admission or their contributions.
"I don't think there was ever a question of who really belonged there until the numbers shifted," she said.
Admissions offices at top private colleges are becoming the front line for debates about equal access as the supply of high-caliber Asian American applicants swells and colleges try to maintain student diversity. Some Asian Americans contend that they face informal quotas and are forced to meet higher standards, similar to hurdles that Jewish Americans faced in the first part of the 20th century...
continued ..
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According to Tsai's research, which included interviews and surveys, the much touted magnet schools were set up for, and catered mostly to whites. It is only when Asians started beating whites out of admission slots that they became a "problem":
Quote:
"The perception that there are too many Asians exists because the whites do not believe that Asians should be the majority of students in a magnet school, when admission to the school is supposed to be for the whites." pg 61
and when it came down to some things such as choosing school paper editors there seemed to be some "informal affirmative action" in play:
"The Jewish male got picked because he was white, and his whiteness compensated for his lack of experience..
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Hmm, sense of entitlement... now where have we heard that before? and the white guy seemed to be picked not in the interests of merit, (he was less experienced) but in the interests of racial 'balance'.. Very strange.. no?
Ironically there even appears to be "white flight" from TOO MUCH competition with Asians:
"The “model minority” stereotype serves as a double-edged sword. Asians
are not viewed to be dangerous or a drain on resources, but it can still be
undesirable for whites to live in an area with a highly concentrated Asian
population. A specific example is a recent Wall Street Journal article that talked
about the “second white flight” from Cupertino, California. White parents were
reluctant to enroll their children at the local Monta Vista High School because the
school was viewed to be too competitive. Some white parents chose to send their
children to the neighboring Homestead High School, despite its lower test scores.
The article quotes the Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling saying: “"It
does help to have a lower Asian population. I don't think our parents are as
uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista." 113 Mr. Rowley, the district
superintendent, admitted that "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct
minority against a majority culture." 114 Mr. Rowley chose not send his own son to
Monta Vista High School. The Asian students were viewed to be the cause of the
heightened pressure and stress at the school. One former student at Monta Vista
High School, George Chen, said: “Monta Vista was viewed as being very stressful
because of all the Asian students, who fought to be in the AP classes…There was
always that perception that the Asian American students were the cause of the
stress as well as the reason why the school wasn’t good in something like
athletics.”
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1082148
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[b]White flight as higher performing Asians muscle in..
According to the assorted racial theorists like Rushton, brain size calculations put the Mongoloids on top of the rankings. Seems that many white people can't stand the heat..[/b]
[img]http://www.pinknews.co.uk/images/gayhitler.jpg[/img]
The New White Flight
Wall Street Journal
November 19, 2005
In Silicon Valley, two high schools with outstanding academic reputations are losing white students as Asian students move in. Why?
By SUEIN HWANG
CUPERTINO, Calif. -- By most measures, Monta Vista High here and Lynbrook High, in nearby San Jose, are among the nation's top public high schools. Both boast stellar test scores, an array of advanced-placement classes and a track record of sending graduates from the affluent suburbs of Silicon Valley to prestigious colleges.
But locally, they're also known for something else: white flight. Over the past 10 years, the proportion of white students at Lynbrook has fallen by nearly half, to 25% of the student body. At Monta Vista, white students make up less than one-third of the population, down from 45% -- this in a town that's half white. Some white Cupertino parents are instead sending their children to private schools or moving them to other, whiter public schools. More commonly, young white families in Silicon Valley say they are avoiding Cupertino altogether.
White students are far outnumbered by Asians at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, Calif.
Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.
The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.
Cathy Gatley, co-president of Monta Vista High School's parent-teacher association, recently dissuaded a family with a young child from moving to Cupertino because there are so few young white kids left in the public schools. "This may not sound good," she confides, "but their child may be the only Caucasian kid in the class." All of Ms. Gatley's four children have attended or are currently attending Monta Vista. One son, Andrew, 17 years old, took the high-school exit exam last summer and left the school to avoid the academic pressure. He is currently working in a pet-supply store. Ms. Gatley, who is white, says she probably wouldn't have moved to Cupertino if she had anticipated how much it would change.
In the 1960s, the term "white flight" emerged to describe the rapid exodus of whites from big cities into the suburbs, a process that often resulted in the economic degradation of the remaining community. Back then, the phenomenon was mostly believed to be sparked by the growth in the population of African-Americans, and to a lesser degree Hispanics, in some major cities.
But this modern incarnation is different. Across the country, Asian-Americans have by and large been successful and accepted into middle- and upper-class communities. Silicon Valley has kept Cupertino's economy stable, and the town is almost indistinguishable from many of the suburbs around it. The shrinking number of white students hasn't hurt the academic standards of Cupertino's schools -- in fact the opposite is true.
This time the effect is more subtle: Some Asians believe that the resulting lack of diversity creates an atmosphere that is too sheltering for their children, leaving then unprepared for life in a country that is only 4% Asian overall. Moreover, many Asians share some of their white counterpart's concerns. Both groups finger newer Asian immigrants for the schools' intense competitiveness.
Some whites fear that by avoiding schools with large Asian populations parents are short-changing their own children, giving them the idea that they can't compete with Asian kids. "My parents never let me think that because I'm Caucasian, I'm not going to succeed," says Jessie Hogin, a white Monta Vista graduate.
The white exodus clearly involves race-based presumptions, not all of which are positive. One example: Asian parents are too competitive. That sounds like racism to many of Cupertino's Asian residents, who resent the fact that their growing numbers and success are causing many white families to boycott the town altogether.
"It's a stereotype of Asian parents," says Pei-Pei Yow, a Hewlett-Packard Co. manager and Chinese-American community leader who sent two kids to Monta Vista. It's like other familiar biases, she says: "You can't say everybody from the South is a redneck."
Jane Doherty, a retirement-community administrator, chose to send her two boys elsewhere. When her family moved to Cupertino from Indiana over a decade ago, Ms. Doherty says her top priority was moving into a good public-school district. She paid no heed to a real-estate agent who told her of the town's burgeoning Asian population.
She says she began to reconsider after her elder son, Matthew, entered Kennedy, the middle school that feeds Monta Vista. As he played soccer, Ms. Doherty watched a line of cars across the street deposit Asian kids for after-school study. She also attended a Monta Vista parents' night and came away worrying about the school's focus on test scores and the big-name colleges its graduates attend.
"My sense is that at Monta Vista you're competing against the child beside you," she says. Ms. Doherty says she believes the issue stems more from recent immigrants than Asians as a whole. "Obviously, the concentration of Asian students is really high, and it does flavor the school," she says.
When Matthew, now a student at Notre Dame, finished middle school eight years ago, Ms. Doherty decided to send him to Bellarmine College Preparatory, a Jesuit school that she says has a culture that "values the whole child." It's also 55% white and 24% Asian. Her younger son, Kevin, followed suit.
Kevin Doherty, 17, says he's happy his mother made the switch. Many of his old friends at Kennedy aren't happy at Monta Vista, he says. "Kids at Bellarmine have a lot of pressure to do well, too, but they want to learn and do something they want to do."
While California has seen the most pronounced cases of suburban segregation, some of the developments in Cupertino are also starting to surface in other parts of the U.S. At Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., known flippantly to some locals as "Won Ton," roughly 35% of students are of Asian descent. People who don't know the school tend to make assumptions about its academics, says Principal Michael Doran. "Certain stereotypes come to mind -- 'those people are good at math,' " he says.
In Tenafly, N.J., a well-to-do bedroom community near New York, the local high school says it expects Asian students to make up about 36% of its total in the next five years, compared with 27% today. The district still attracts families of all backgrounds, but Asians are particularly intent that their kids work hard and excel, says Anat Eisenberg, a local Coldwell Banker real-estate agent. "Everybody is caught into this process of driving their kids." Lawrence Mayer, Tenafly High's vice principal, says he's never heard such concerns.
Perched on the western end of the Santa Clara valley, Cupertino was for many years a primarily rural area known for its many fruit orchards. The beginnings of the tech industry brought suburbanization, and Cupertino then became a very white, quintessentially middle-class town of mostly modest ranch homes, populated by engineers and their families. Apple Computer Inc. planted its headquarters there.
As the high-tech industry prospered, so did Cupertino. Today, the orchards are a memory, replaced by numerous shopping malls and subdivisions that are home to Silicon Valley's prosperous upper-middle class. While the architecture in Cupertino is largely the same as in neighboring communities, the town of about 50,000 people now boasts Indian restaurants, tutoring centers and Asian grocers. Parents say Cupertino's top schools have become more academically intense over the past 10 years.
Asian immigrants have surged into the town, granting it a reputation -- particularly among recent Chinese and South Asian immigrants -- as a Bay Area locale of choice. Cupertino is now 41% Asian, up from 24% in 1998.
Some students struggle in Cupertino's high schools who might not elsewhere. Monta Vista's Academic Performance Index, which compares the academic performance of California's schools, reached an all-time high of 924 out of 1,000 this year, making it one of the highest-scoring high schools in Northern California. Grades are so high that a 'B' average puts a student in the bottom third of a class.
"We have great students, which has a lot of upsides," says April Scott, Monta Vista's principal. "The downside is what the kids with a 3.0 GPA think of themselves."
Ms. Scott and her counterpart at Lynbrook know what's said about their schools being too competitive and dominated by Asians. "It's easy to buy into those kinds of comments because they're loaded and powerful," says Ms. Scott, who adds that they paint an inaccurate picture of Monta Vista. Ms. Scott says many athletic programs are thriving and points to the school's many extracurricular activities. She also points out that white students represented 20% of the school's 29 National Merit Semifinalists this year.
Judy Hogin, Jessie's mother and a Cupertino real-estate agent, believes the school was good for her daughter, who is now a freshman at the University of California at San Diego. "I know it's frustrating to some people who have moved away," says Ms. Hogin, who is white. Jessie, she says, "rose to the challenge."
On a recent autumn day at Lynbrook, crowds of students spilled out of classrooms for midmorning break. Against a sea of Asian faces, the few white students were easy to pick out. One boy sat on a wall, his lighter hair and skin making him stand out from dozens of others around him. In another corner, four white male students lounged at a picnic table.
At Cupertino's top schools, administrators, parents and students say white students end up in the stereotyped role often applied to other minority groups: the underachievers. In one 9th-grade algebra class, Lynbrook's lowest-level math class, the students are an eclectic mix of whites, Asians and other racial and ethnic groups.
"Take a good look," whispered Steve Rowley, superintendent of the Fremont Union High School District, which covers the city of Cupertino as well as portions of other neighboring cities. "This doesn't look like the other classes we're going to."
On the second floor, in advanced-placement chemistry, only a couple of the 32 students are white and the rest are Asian. Some white parents, and even some students, say they suspect teachers don't take white kids as seriously as Asians.
"Many of my Asian friends were convinced that if you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it," says Arar Han, a Monta Vista graduate who recently co-edited "Asian American X," a book of coming-of-age essays by young Asian-Americans.
Ms. Gatley, the Monta Vista PTA president, is more blunt: "White kids are thought of as the dumb kids," she says.
Cupertino's administrators and faculty, the majority of whom are white, adamantly say there's no discrimination against whites. The administrators say students of all races get along well. In fact, there's little evidence of any overt racial tension between students or between their parents.
Mr. Rowley, the school superintendent, however, concedes that a perception exists that's sometimes called "the white-boy syndrome." He describes it as: "Kids who are white feel themselves a distinct minority against a majority culture."
Mr. Rowley, who is white, enrolled his only son, Eddie, at Lynbrook. When Eddie started freshman geometry, the boy was frustrated to learn that many of the Asian students in his class had already taken the course in summer school, Mr. Rowley recalls. That gave them a big leg up.
To many of Cupertino's Asians, some of the assumptions made by white parents -- that Asians are excessively competitive and single-minded -- play into stereotypes. Top schools in nearby, whiter Palo Alto, which also have very high test scores, also feature heavy course loads, long hours of homework and overly stressed students, says Denise Pope, director of Stressed Out Students, a Stanford University program that has worked with schools in both Palo Alto and Cupertino. But whites don't seem to be avoiding those institutions, or making the same negative generalizations, Asian families note, suggesting that it's not academic competition that makes white parents uncomfortable but academic competition with Asian-Americans.
Some of Cupertino's Asian residents say they don't blame white families for leaving. After all, many of the town's Asians are fretting about the same issues. While acknowledging that the term Asian embraces a wide diversity of countries, cultures and languages, they say there's some truth to the criticisms levied against new immigrant parents, particularly those from countries such as China and India, who often put a lot of academic pressure on their children.
Some parents and students say these various forces are creating an unhealthy cultural isolation in the schools. Monta Vista graduate Mark Seto says he wouldn't send his kids to his alma mater. "It was a sheltered little world that didn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what the rest of the country is like," says Mr. Seto, a Chinese-American who recently graduated from Yale University. As a result, he says, "college wasn't an academic adjustment. It was a cultural adjustment."
Hung Wei, a Chinese-American living in Cupertino, has become an active campaigner in the community, encouraging Asian parents to be more aware of their children's emotional development. Ms. Wei, who is co-president of Monta Vista's PTA with Ms. Gatley, says her activism stems from the suicide of her daughter, Diana. Ms. Wei says life in Cupertino and at Monta Vista didn't prepare the young woman for life at New York University. Diana moved there in 2004 and jumped to her death from a Manhattan building two months later.
"We emphasize academics so much and protect our kids, I feel there's something lacking in our education," Ms. Wei says.
Cupertino schools are trying to address some of these issues. Monta Vista recently completed a series of seminars focused on such issues as helping parents communicate better with their kids, and Lynbrook last year revised its homework guidelines with the goal of eliminating excessive and unproductive assignments.
The moves haven't stemmed the flow of whites out of the schools. Four years ago, Lynn Rosener, a software consultant, transferred her elder son from Monta Vista to Homestead High, a Cupertino school with slightly lower test scores. At the new school, the white student body is declining at a slower rate than at Monta Vista and currently stands at 52% of the total. Friday-night football is a tradition, with big half-time shows and usually 1,000 people packing the stands. The school offers boys' volleyball, a sport at which Ms. Rosener's son was particularly talented. Monta Vista doesn't.
"It does help to have a lower Asian population," says Homestead PTA President Mary Anne Norling. "I don't think our parents are as uptight as if my kids went to Monta Vista."
Write to Suein Hwang at suein.hwang@wsj.com
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"In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a “Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid” hierarchy of intelligence. This continued through most of the 20th century but was challenged by a nonhierarchical view originating with Boas. Beginning in the 1980s [b]Rushton correlated cranial and IQ measurements and presented a hierarchy with “Mongoloids” at the top." [/b]
--Leonard Lieberman. How “Caucasoids” Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank: From Morton to Rushton. Current Anthropology Volume 42, Number 1, February 2001
===================
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 0.3 points 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 WISC IV—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.
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How Heritability Misleads about Race
Ned Block
Department of Philosophy
NYU
According to The Bell Curve, Black Americans are genetically inferior to Whites. That's not the only point in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book. They also argue that there is something called "general intelligence" which is measured by IQ tests, socially important, and 60 percent "heritable" within whites. (I'll explain heritability below.) But the claim about genetic inferiority is my target here. It has been subject to wide-ranging criticism since the book was first published last year. Those criticisms, however, have missed its deepest flaws. Indeed, the Herrnstein/Murray argument depends on conceptual confusions that have been tacitly accepted to some degree by many of the book's sharpest critics.
Let's first be clear about the conclusion itself. In a recent article on "The Real Bell Curve," Charles Murray grumbles about critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who read the book as saying that racial differences in IQ are mostly genetic. Murray answers by quoting from the book:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanations have won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate (311).
In this passage, Herrnstein and Murray are "resolutely agnostic" about whether bad environment or genetic endowment is more responsible for the lower IQs of Blacks. But they indicate no agnosticism at all about whether part of the IQ difference between Blacks and Whites is genetic; and given their way of thinking about the matter, this means that they are not at all agnostic about some Black genetic inferiority.
The Simple Argument
The Herrnstein-Murray argument for genetic IQ differences is based on two facts: IQ is 60 percent heritable within the White population; and there is a stable, 15-point difference between averages IQs of Whites and Blacks. With IQ largely genetic in Whites, it is natural to conclude - according to Herrnstein and Murray - that the Black-White difference, too, is at least partly genetic. Their argument has more to it; they raise issues about the pattern and the magnitude of the differences that I will get to later. But the most important flaws in the more complex version are fully visible in the simple argument.
Herrnstein's and Murray's argument depends on thinking of the 15-point IQ difference as divisible into a genetic chunk and an environmental chunk. This picture suggests the following three alternatives:
Extreme Environmentalism: Blacks are genetically on a par with whites, so the IQ gap is all environmental.
Extreme Geneticism: Blacks are environmentally on a par with whites, so the IQ gap is all genetic.
The Reasonable View: Blacks are worse off both genetically and environmentally: some of the gap is genetic, some environmental.
Extreme Environmentalism is thought to be excluded by the 60 percent heritability of IQ. Extreme Geneticism is excluded by well-known environmental effects on IQ together with differences between Black and White environments acknowledged by Herrnstein and Murray. So we are left with The Reasonable View - which postulates some Black genetic inferiority.
Notice, however, that the statement of alternatives blots out a crucial possibility: that Blacks are much worse off than Whites environmentally and better off genetically. Allowing this option, we get a different set of alternatives: genetically, Blacks are worse off - or better off - or equal to Whites. I don't say that it is likely that blacks are better off genetically than whites, but it is possible, and--a very important point--what you consider possible affects what you think is an extremist position. Moreover, the critics of Herrnstein and Murray have tended to trip over this possibility. For example, in a New York Times op-ed critique that describes The Bell Curve as "bogus" and "nothing but a racial epithet," Bob Herbert insists that "the overwhelming consensus of experts in the field is that environmental conditions account for most of the disparity when the test results of large groups are compared." In effect, he uses known environmental effects on IQ to argue for a low degree of Black genetic inferiority: in effect, he accepts a version of The Reasonable View. Even Stephen Jay Gould, in his otherwise excellent article in The New Yorker, missteps here. Apparently accepting The Bell Curve's way of conceiving the issue, he complains that Herrnstein and Murray wrongly minimize the large environmental malleability of IQ. He says that they turn "every straw on their side into an oak, while mentioning but downplaying the strong circumstantial case for substantial malleability and little average genetic difference." Gould does not do enough to guard against the natural interpretation of "little average genetic difference" in the context of discussion of The Bell Curve as little average genetic inferiority of blacks. Several critics in The New Republic (October 31, 1994), in turn, wonder about the size of the "genetic component of the black-white difference," thereby buying into the same way of thinking.
If you accept The Bell Curve's way of putting the options, then the idea that environmental differences between blacks and whites are big enough to account for 15 IQ points looks like extremism. But given the actual alternatives - that blacks are genetically on a par with whites, or worse off, or better off - zero genetic difference doesn't seem extremist at all.
But isn't the idea of Black genetic superiority in IQ a desperate and pathetic attempt to exploit a mere logical possibility? Consider a parallel case. Toe number is genetic in sloths and humans, and humans are observed to have five toes whereas (diurnal) sloths are observed to have three. Is there any real possibility that the genetic toe difference between humans and sloths goes in the opposite direction from the observed toe-number gap? It could be that the three-toed sloth evolved six toes, but we observe only three because of a thalidomide-like chemical which has polluted their food during the years in which we have observed them. But this possibility is only worth mentioning as an example of something extremely unlikely. This example suggests a principle that, though never articulated, underlies all of Herrnstein's and Murray's thinking on genes and IQ:
Fundamental Principle: if a characteristic is largely genetic and there is an observed difference in that characteristic between two groups, then there is very likely a genetic difference between the two groups that goes in the same direction as the observed difference.
Applying this principle to the case of IQ: given the substantial heritability of IQ, if East Asians are superior in measured IQ, then, according to the Fundamental Principle, they are highly likely to be genetically superior; and if Blacks are inferior in measured IQ, then they are highly likely to be genetically inferior in IQ.
But while the Fundamental Principle seems intuitively plausible, it is either irrelevant to the Herrnstein-Murray argument, or simply false. To see the problem, we need first to understand that the term "genetic" has two senses. In the next section, I describe those senses in some detail: to put the point schematically for now, "genetic" can mean either genetically determined or heritable. Once that distinction is in place, the problems for the Principle follow. Again, to put the point schematically for now: if "genetic" is used to mean genetically determined, then IQ is not genetic, and the Principle is therefore irrelevant. If "genetic" is used to mean heritable, then IQ is genetic but the Principle is false. In neither case, however, does the Principle support the Bell Curve's claim about genetic differences in IQ.
Two Senses of "Genetic"
To understand The Bell Curve's fallacy, we need to distinguish two concepts: the ordinary idea of genetic determination and the scientific concept of heritability, on which all Herrnstein's and Murray's data rely. Genetic determination is a matter of what causes a characteristic: number of toes is genetically determined because our genes cause us to have five toes. Heritability, by contrast, is a matter of what causes differences in a characteristic: heritability of number of toes is a matter of the extent to which genetic differences cause variation in number of toes (that some cats have five toes, and some have six). Heritability is, therefore, defined as a fraction: it is the ratio of genetically caused variation to total variation (including both environmental and genetic variation). Genetic determination, by contrast, is an informal and intuitive notion which lacks quantitative definition, and depends on the idea of a normal environment. A characteristic could be said to be genetically determined if it is coded in and caused by the genes and bound to develop in a normal environment. Consequently, whereas genetic determination in a single person makes sense - my brown hair color is genetically determined - heritability makes sense only relative to a population in which individuals differ from one another - you can't ask "What's the heritability of my IQ?"
For example, the number of fingers on a human hand or toes on a human foot is genetically determined: the genes code for five fingers and toes in almost everyone, and five fingers and toes develop in any normal environment. But the heritability of number of fingers and toes in humans is almost certainly very low. That's because most of the variation in numbers of toes is environmentally caused, often by problems in fetal development. For example, when pregnant women took thalidomide some years ago, many babies had fewer than five fingers and toes. And if we look at numbers of fingers and toes in adults, we find many missing digits as a result of accidents. But genetic coding for six toes is rare in humans (though apparently not in cats). So genetically caused variation appears to be small compared to environmentally caused variation. If someone asks, then, whether numbers of toes is genetic or not, the right answer is: "it depends what you mean by genetic." The number of toes is genetically determined, but heritability is low because genes are not responsible for much of the variation.
Conversely, a characteristic can be highly heritable even if it is not genetically determined. Some years ago when only women wore earrings, the heritability of having an earring was high because differences in whether a person had an earring were "due" to a genetic (chromosomal) difference. Now that earrings are less gender-specific, the heritability of having an earring has no doubt decreased. But neither then nor now was having earrings genetically determined in anything like the manner of having five fingers. The heritability literature is full of cases like this: high measured heritabilities for characteristics whose genetic determination is doubtful. For example, the same methodology that yields 60 percent heritability for IQ also yields 50 percent heritability of academic performance and 40 percent heritability of occupational status. Obviously, occupational status is not genetically determined: genes do not code for working in a printed circuit factory.
More significantly, a child's environment is often a heritable characteristic, strange as this may seem. If degree of musical talent is highly heritable and if variation in the number of the child's music lessons depends on variation in musical talent, then the number of music lessons that a child gets may be heritable, too, despite not being genetically determined. In fact, recent studies of heritabilities of various features of childrens' environments show substantial heritabilities for many environmental features - for example, the "warmth" of the parents' behavior toward the child. Even number of hours of TV watched and number and variety of a childs' toys shows some heritability. If this seems unintelligible, think of it this way: variation in these environmental properties is in part due to variation in heritable characteristics of the child, and so the environmental characteristics themselves are heritable. Readers of The Bell Curve often suppose that a heritable characteristic is one that is passed down in the genes, but this identification is importantly flawed. The number and variety of a child's toys is not passed down in the genes. Heritability is a matter of the causation of differences, not what is "passed down".
The Case of IQ
I have given examples of traits that are genetically determined but not heritable and, conversely, traits that are heritable but not genetically determined. Do these weird examples have any relevance to the case of IQ? Maybe there is a range of normal cases, of which IQ is an example, for which the oddities that I've pointed to are just irrelevant.
Not so! In fact IQ is a great example of a trait that is highly heritable but not genetically determined. Recall that what makes toe number genetically determined is that having five toes is coded in and caused by the genes so as to develop in any normal environment. By contrast, IQ is enormously affected by normal environmental variation, and in ways that are not well understood. As Herrnstein and Murray concede, children from very low socio-economic status backgrounds who are adopted into high socio-economic status backgrounds have IQs dramatically higher than their parents. The point is underscored by what Herrnstein and Murray call the "Flynn Effect:" IQ has been rising about 3 points every 10 years worldwide. Since World War II, IQ in many countries has gone up 15 points, about the same as the gap separating Blacks and Whites in this country. And in some countries, the rise has been even more dramatic. For example, average IQ in Holland rose 21 points between 1952 and 1982. In a species in which toe number reacted in this way with environment (imagine a centipede-like creature which added toes as it ate more) I doubt that we would think of number of toes as genetically determined.
It is worth emphasizing the solidity of the data about the large IQ increases in Holland. The 21 point increase reported by Flynn is based on comprehensive testing of all Dutch 18 year olds who pass a medical exam (and there has been no change in the pass rate). The test used is Raven's Progressive Matrices, a widely respected "nonverbal test that is an especially good measure of g" (273). Even Richard Lynn, the arch-Jensenist who is the source of much of The Bell Curve's data on race concedes this point. He says "The magnitude of the increase has generally been found to be about three IQ points per decade, making fifteen points over a fifty year period. There have, however, been some larger gains among 18 year-old conscripts in The Netherlands and Belgium amounting to seven IQ points per decade." Lynn also mentions that similar results have been found in France. Herrnstein and Murray concede that "In some countries, the upward drift since World War II has been as much as a point a year for some spans of years" (308). In an area where the facts are often contested, it is notable that this set of facts seems to be accepted by both sides.
One very important conclusion from the Flynn data is that no one understands very much about how environmental variation differentially affects IQ. The cause of the large increases in Holland is simply unknown. Even Herrnstein and Murray concede that "relatively little [of the environmental variation in IQ] can be traced to the shared environments created by families. It is, rather, a set of environmental influences mostly unknown at present, that are experienced by individuals as individuals" (108; emphasis added). Indeed, the crucial factor that has enabled the research that Herrnstein and Murray report to exist at all is the fact that one can measure the heritability of a characteristic without having much of an idea of what the characteristic is. To calculate the heritability of IQ, we do not need to know what IQ tests measure; we need only be able to measure IQ - whatever it is - in various circumstances.
A few additional observations about heritability and IQ will underscore the need for great caution in drawing any inferences about the sources of differences in IQ. A common method for measuring heritability relies on comparisons of the correlations of IQ among one-egg twins raised by their biological parents compared with two-egg twins raised by their biological parents. Suppose your neighbor is one of triplets. One of them is your neighbor's one -egg twin, the other is his two egg (fraternal) twin. Suppose that you can predict the IQ of the one egg twin very reliably from the IQ of your neighbor, but your prediction of the IQ of the two egg twin will be much less reliable. This difference would be an indication of high heritability of IQ because one-egg twins share all their genes whereas two-egg twins normally share half their genes.
Heritability studies of IQ within White populations in the US and northern Europe have tended to yield moderately high heritabilities: Herrnstein's and Murray's 60 percent is a reasonable figure. But it is important to note that no one would do one of these heritability studies in a mixed Black/White population. The reason is straightforward: if you place a pair of Black one-egg twins in different environments "at random," you automatically fail to randomize environments. The Black twins will bring part of their environment with them; they are both Black and will be treated as Black.
Moreover, heritability - unlike genetic determination - can be very different in different populations. For example, the heritability of IQ could be decreased if half the population were chosen at random to receive IQ lowering brain damage: by damaging the brains of some people, you make the environmentally caused variation larger. Or suppose we could make a million clones of Newt Gingrich, raising them in very different environments so there would be some variation in IQ, all environmentally caused. Heritability in that population would be zero because the ratio of genetic variation to total variation is zero if the genetic variation is zero. To take a real example, the heritability of IQ increases throughout childhood into adulthood. One study gives heritability figures of under 20 percent in infancy, about 30 percent in childhood, 50 percent in adolescence, and a bit higher in adult life. Studies of older twins in Sweden report an 80 percent heritability figure for adults by age 50 as compared to a 50 percent heritability for children. One possible reason for the rise in heritability is that although the genetic variation remains the same, environmental variation decreases with age. Children have very different environments; some parents don't speak to their children, others are ever verbally probing and jousting. Adults in industrialized countries, by contrast, are to a greater degree immersed in the same culture (e.g., the same TV programs). With more uniform environments, the heritability goes up. I hope these points remove the temptation (exhibited in The Bell Curve) to think of the heritability of IQ as a constant (like the speed of light). Heritability is a population statistic just like birth rate or number of TVs and can be expected to change with changing circumstances. There is no reason to expect the heritability of IQ in India to be close to the heritability of IQ in Korea.
These issues are pathetically misunderstood by Charles Murray. In a CNN interview reported in The New Republic (January 2, 1995), Murray declared "When I - when we - say 60 percent heritability, it's not 60 percent of the variation. It is 60 percent of the IQ in any given person." Later, he repeated that for the average person, "60 percent of the intelligence comes from heredity" and added that this was true of the "human species," missing the point that heritability makes no sense for an individual and that heritability statistics are population-relative. In a letter to the editor in which Murray complains about being quoted out of context (January 30, 1995), Murray quotes more of what he had said: ". . . your IQ may have been determined overwhelmingly by genes or it may have been - yours personally - or overwhelmingly by environment. That can vary a lot from individual to individual. In the human species as a whole, you have a large genetic component." The Bell Curve itself does not make these embarrassing mistakes. Herrnstein, the late co-author, was a professional on these topics. But the upshot of part of this essay is that the book's main argument depends for some of its persuasive force on a more subtle conflation of heritability and genetic determination. And Murray's confusion serves to underscore just how difficult these concepts can be, even for someone so numerate as Murray.
What's the upshot of the distinction between genetic determination and heritability for the argument of The Bell Curve? Recall the sloth example: Toe number is genetic in sloths and in humans; there is a difference in toe number; so the toe-number difference is genetic. This is a good argument: it strains the imagination to suppose that the genetic toe difference between sloths and humans goes in the opposite direction from the observed toe difference. It is ludicrous to suppose that our genes code for two, despite the five we see at the beach. So in this sense the Herrnstein and Murray argument works for the concept of genetic determination. But the data on genes and IQ are about heritability, not genetic determination.
Is IQ genetically determined as well as heritable? No! As I already pointed out, IQ is very reactive to changes in environments in the normal range. Recall the example of the large rise in Holland. Further, the claim that IQ is genetically determined is not the kind of quantitative claim on which Herrnstein and Murray would want to base their claims about genes and race.
If "genetic" means genetically determined, then, IQ is not genetic in whites or anyone else (and in any case the issue is not quantitative), so the Fundamental Principle is irrelevant. If "genetic" means heritable, however, then IQ is largely genetic (among Whites in the US at least). But in next section I will show that in this sense of "genetic," the argument does not work because the Principle is false.
Heritability and Race Differences
In a 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review, Arthur Jensen started off the current controversy by arguing from heritability within Whites to genetic differences between Whites and Blacks. Richard Lewontin responded a year later with a graphic illustration of why this is a mistake. Suppose you buy a bag of seed corn from a hardware store. This is not some sort of fancy cloned corn, but ordinary genetically varied corn of the sort that farmers planted long before there was a science of genetics. Grow one handful of it in a carefully controlled environment in which the seeds get uniform illumination and uniform nutrient solution. The corn plants will vary in height, and because the environment is uniform, the heritability of height will be 100 percent. Now take another handful of corn from the same bag, and grow it in a similarly uniform environment but with a uniformly poor nutrient solution. Again, the plants will vary in height, but all will be stunted. Once more the heritability of height is 100 percent. Despite the 100 percent heritabilities of height within each group, the difference in height between the groups is entirely environmentally caused. So we can have total heritability within groups, substantial variation between groups, but no genetic difference between the groups.
Image of two plants, one with normal nutrients and another with deficient nutrients
The application to race is obvious: heritability is high within Whites. But as Lewontin's example shows, high heritability within groups licenses no conclusion about how to explain differences between groups. - none, in particular, about genetic explanations of the differences. Nor does it dictate the direction of any genetic difference between groups. The stunted corn could have been genetically taller, with the genetic advantage outweighed by the environmental deprivation.
In Lewontin's example, it is assumed that there is no genetic difference between the two groups of corn. But suppose we knew nothing about two groups of people except that they differed by 15 points in IQ and that IQ had some heritability in both, and we had to guess the causes. For all I've said so far, it would make sense to guess that the lower scoring group was disadvantaged both genetically and environmentally. In the next section, I'll show that even this weak principle is wrong. However, the principle has no application to the racial question because we know lots more than nothing: we know that the environment can have huge effects on IQ (e. g., the Flynn Effect of 3 points per decade and the 21 point increase in Holland), and that Blacks are environmentally disadvantaged in a way that has been shown to count. But without being able to measure the effect of being treated as sub-normal, and of an historical legacy of slavery and discrimination, how do we know whether its average effect is sufficient to lower black IQ 15 points, or less than that - or more than that? Given the social importance of this issue, guessing is not appropriate.
Herrnstein and Murray have heard appeals to the legacy of slavery and discrimination. And they have a response which appeals both to the pattern of racial differences and their magnitude.
First, the pattern. They remind us that the Black/White IQ difference is smallest at the lowest socioeconomic levels. And this leads them to ask: "Why, if the Black/White difference is entirely environmental, should the advantage of the 'white' environment compared to the 'black' be greater among the better-off and better- educated blacks and whites? We have not been able to think of a plausible reason. An appeal to the effects of racism to explain ethnic differences also requires explaining why environments poisoned by discrimination and racism for some other groups - against the Chinese or the Jews in some regions of America, for example - have left them with higher scores than the national average" (299).
But these facts are not hard to understand. Blacks and Whites are to some extent separate cultural groups, and there is no reason to think that a measure like socio-economic status means the same thing for every culture. Herrnstein and Murray mention the work of John Ogbu, an anthropologist who has distinguished a number of types of oppressed minorities. A key category is that of "caste-like" minorities who are regarded by themselves and others as inferior, and who, if they are immigrants, are not voluntary immigrants. This category includes the Harijans in India, the Buraku and Koreans in Japan, and the Maori in New Zealand. He distinguishes them from groups like Chinese and Jews who are voluntary immigrants and have a culture of self-respect. If higher socio-economic status Blacks still are to some extent part of a caste-like minority, then they will be at an environmental disadvantage relative to higher socio-economic status Whites. But low status Blacks and Whites are more likely to share a caste background. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., points out (New Republic, October 31, 1994), affirmative action has had the effect of quadrupling the size of the Black middle class since 1967. Most middle class Blacks have arrived in the middle classes relatively recently, many of them under less than ideal conditions for the development of self-respect. It would be surprising if children of these newly middle-class Blacks were to have fully escaped their caste background in so short a time.
Ogbu notes that where IQ tests have been given, "the children of these caste-like minorities score about 10-15 points . . . lower than dominant group children." He notes further that differences remain "when minority and dominant group members are of similar socioeconomic background." But when "members of a caste-like minority group emigrate to another society, the twin problem of low IQ test scores and low academic achievement appears to disappear. Data suggest that the Buraku who have emigrated to this country do "at least as well at school and the work place" as other Japanese.
As to the magnitude: Herrnstein and Murray calculate that "the average environment of blacks would have to be at the sixth percentile of the distribution of environments among whites. . . for the racial differences to be entirely environmental." And they believe that "differences of this magnitude and pattern are implausible" (299). That is, 94 percent of whites would have to have an environment that is better for the development of IQ than the environment of the average Black - if the 15 point difference is to be explained environmentally. Herrnstein and Murray think this is implausible because when you look at environmental measures - for example, parental income, school quality - you do not find that 94 percent of Whites have a better environment than the average Black. But this calculation ignores the effect of being in Ogbu's category of a caste-like minority. Compare the Dutch 18-year-olds of 1982 with their fathers' cohort, the 18-year- olds of 1952. The difference is entirely environmental despite the probable substantial heritability within each group. Using the same procedures as Herrnstein and Murray, Flynn calculates that 99 percent of the 1982 group had to have a better environment for the development of IQ than the average member of the 1952 group. Given differences of this magnitude among people of a uniform culture who are separated by only a single generation, is it really so implausible that 94 percent of Whites have an environment better than a Black at the 50th percentile?
Environmental differences, then, including the sort that affect Black Americans, are known to have large effects on IQ. Moreover, we currently have no way to quantify these effects. So we should draw no conclusion about the probability of any Black genetic IQ advantage or disadvantage. As applied to the case of IQ, then, the Fundamental Principle is false: the combination of high heritability within the White population, and persistent Black-White differences, does not support a case for genetic differences.
Indirect Heritability
Earlier, I commented that if we knew nothing at all about two groups except that they differed by 15 points in IQ and that IQ is heritable in both, and we had to guess the causes, it might seem sensible to guess that the lower scoring group was disadvantaged both genetically and environmentally. I have been emphasizing that in the case of Black-White IQ differences, we know much more than "nothing at all." I want now to show that even if we knew nothing, any such guess would be misguided, for reasons that go to the heart of the notion of heritability.
Let's start with an example. Consider a culture in which red-haired children are beaten over the head regularly, but all other children are treated well. This effect will increase the measured heritability of IQ because red-haired identical twins will tend to resemble one another in IQ (because they will both have low IQs) no matter what the social class of the family in which they are raised. The effect of a red-hair gene on red hair is a "direct" genetic effect because the gene affects the color via an internal biochemical process. By contrast, a gene affects a characteristic indirectly by producing a direct effect which interacts with the environment so as to affect the characteristic. In the hypothetical example, the red hair genes affect IQ indirectly. In the case of IQ, no one has any idea how to separate out direct from indirect genetic effects because no one has much of an idea how genes and environment affect IQ. For that reason, we don't know whether or to what extent the roughly 60 percent heritability of IQ found in White populations is indirect heritability as opposed to direct heritability.
The methodology used to measure heritability obscures this ignorance by counting differences in characteristics as caused by genetic differences if there is a genetic difference, even if there is also an environmental difference, thus distorting the ways in which we normally think about causation. For instance, the heritability methodology focuses on the difference between the red hair genes and genes for other hair colors, not on the fact that red-haired children - unlike blond children - are beaten.
Earlier I said that wearing earrings used to be highly heritable because differences were "due" to the XY/XX difference. I put quotes around "due" because it is a by-product of the methodology for measuring heritability to adopt a tacit convention that genes are taken to dominate environment. When virtually only women were wearing earrings, variation in earrings was as much social as genetic, but counted as highly heritable. If there is a genetic difference in the causal chains that lead to different characteristics, the difference counts as genetically caused even if the environmental differences are just as important. If we adopted the opposite convention - concluding from any environmental difference in two causal chains that the difference are environmentally caused - then we could not use current methodology for measuring heritability, because we have no general method of detecting indirect genetic effects using current techniques. Heritabilities using the two different conventions would be radically different if there are substantial indirect genetic effects.
Recall the examples mentioned earlier about the measured heritabilities of such quantities as number of hours of watching TV. No one should suppose that there is variation in genes for watching TV; this is a case of indirect effects. Consider further the fact that no one would do a heritability study on a mixed Black/White population. I mentioned earlier that if you place a pair of Black one-egg twins in different homes, you automatically fail to randomize environments, because the Black twins will bring part of their environment with them; they are both Black and will be treated as Black. This is an indirect genetic effect par excellence. Implicitly, everyone in this field recognizes that, yet more subtle possibilities of indirect effects are typically ignored.
Recall that heritability is defined as a fraction: variation due to genetic differences divided by total variation. The measure of variation that is always used (though alternatives are available) is a statistical quantity known as variance. One factor that raises variance is a positive correlation between genetic and environmental variables. Suppose that children whose genes give them an advantage in musical talent tend to have parents who provide them with an environment conducive to developing that talent - music lessons, concerts, a great CD collection, musical discussion over dinner, etc. Suppose further that other children who have a genetic disadvantage also have an environment that stultifies their musical talents. The correlation between genes and environment will move children towards the extremes of the distribution, increasing the variance in musical skills.
Variance due to gene/environment correlation (gene/environment "covariance") should not be counted in the genetic component of the variance, and there are a variety of methods of separating out such variance. It is common in behavior genetics to distinguish among a number of different types of covariance. The kind just mentioned in which parents provide genes for musical talent and an environment that develops it is called "passive" covariance because it doesn't depend on what the child does. Reactive covariance is a matter of the environment reacting to the child's qualities, as when a school gives extra music classes to children who exhibit musical talent. With active covariance, the child creates a gene-environment correlation, as when a musically talented child practices musical themes in the imagination or pays attention to the musical environment. Passive covariance can be controlled in heritability calculations by attention to adoption studies in which the double-advantage/double disadvantage does not exist. But reactive and active covariance cannot be measured without specific hypotheses about how the environment affects IQ. And as I observed, little is known - as all parties to the disagreements about genetics and IQ agree - about how the environment affects IQ. So distinguishing reactive and active covariance is on the whole beyond the reach of the empirical methods of our era's "behavior genetics," for those methods do not include an understanding of what IQ is - whether it is information-processing capacity, or whether it has more to do with how information-processing capacity is deployed, e.g. whether it is mainly attention - or how the environment affects it.
These points about covariance assume that there are genes for IQ and that these genes may affect the environment so as to produce effects on IQ that are correlated with the ones that the genes themselves produce. But this way of presenting the issue seriously underestimates its significance. For as the red hair example illustrates, indirect genetic effects needn't work through anything that should be thought of as "IQ genes."
Because we don't know much about how variation in environment differentially affects IQ, we can only guess about how variation in genes differentially affects IQ indirectly, via the environment. Suppose that a child's perceived attractiveness and self-confidence strongly affects how adults interact with children in a way that largely accounts for the variation in IQ. Of course, adults could give some children more attention than others without producing IQ differences, but differences might result from variations in adult attention. Suppose further that personal attractiveness and self-confidence are highly heritable. Then we would have an indirect effect par excellence, and such an effect could, for all we know, largely account for the heritability of IQ. Without an understanding of how the environment affects IQ, we simply have no way of determining how much of the variance in IQ is indirect genetic variance of this sort. Of course, if we knew that some specific adult behavior that is triggered by some specific heritable property of children was responsible for a large component of IQ variation, then we could measure that behavior. But there is no theory of intelligence or IQ that would allow us to have any synoptic grip on such factors.
The upshot is that there may be a large component of heritability due to indirect genetic effects, including (but not limited to) gene-environment correlation, that is outside the boundaries of what can be measured given the mainly atheoretical approach available today. Where does the "gene-environment covariance" show up in heritability calculations? Answer: active and reactive effects that we don't know how to measure inevitably are included in the genetic component. This is often regarded by behavior geneticists as perfectly OK. In practice, if researchers were to actually identify an "un-meritocratic" effect such as the red-hair indirect effect mentioned earlier, they would undoubtedly count the variance produced by the effect as covariance rather than genetic variance. But we have no idea how much of the 60 percent of the variance in IQ that is said to be genetic is of this sort. So in practice, covariance due to indirect effects that people know how to measure - at least if it is flagrantly non-meritocratic - is not counted in the heritability; but other indirect effects are counted as genetic. So what counts as genetic variance (inflating heritability) is a matter of value judgments and of what effects we know about. Surely this makes heritability a lousy scientific concept.
In effect, the field has adopted as an axiom that heritability of IQ can be measured by current methods. Without this assumption, the right conclusion would be that since we cannot separate indirect genetic effects (including certain kinds of gene/environment covariance) from pure genetic variance, no heritability estimate can be made. Why does the field adopt this axiom? I cannot help thinking that part of the explanation is that behavior genetics is a young field, struggling for acceptance and funding, and heritability is a flag that attracts attention to it. Let us return to the speculation mentioned above that the 60 percent heritability of IQ (within Whites) is entirely indirect and due to differential treatment of children on the basis of heritable characteristics. Then the direct heritability of IQ would be zero and we would have no reason to think that anything that could be called genes for IQ (e.g., genes for information-processing capacity) vary in the White population, and no reason to look for genetic differences to explain the 15-point difference between Blacks and Whites. Instead, we would have reason to look for differences in the ways adults interact with children to explain the Black-White IQ difference. So indirect heritability suggests an environmental hypothesis about the measured Black-White IQ difference, one that could perhaps be the object of social policy. Are there reasons to expect indirect genetic effects in the Black-White difference? I mentioned the obvious example of genes for skin color above. But there may be less obvious indirect effects as well. There are many more low birth weight Black babies than White babies. Nothing known appears to rule out a genetic explanation. If blacks are more likely to have genes for low birth weight babies, perhaps the effect could be neutralized by diet or by drug intervention in pregnancy. Certainly, no one should think of genes for low birth weight as "IQ genes".
The points I've just made about indirect heritability show why, as I said at the beginning of this section, any inferences from heritability statistics to genetic disadvantage would be misguided. Such inferences seem plausible if we assume that the heritability of IQ within Whites reflects differences in IQ caused by differences in IQ genes. But the points about indirect heritability show that we don't know whether any of the variation within Whites is due to variation in IQ genes. If we have no real grip on the kinds of causal mechanisms that produce the 60 percent heritability within Whites, we can have no confidence in any extrapolation to Blacks.
Let's call a person's genome (his total set of genes) genetically inferior with respect to IQ if that genome yields low IQ in any normal environment. But what is to count as a normal environment? In the example discussed earlier, genes for red hair yield low IQ within environments that are normal in the environment of the hypothetical society, but in environments that we would consider normal, the red hair genes are irrelevant to IQ. What if the heritabilities observed for IQ are a result of indirect effects that can be changed by changing social practice? Then phrases like "genetically inferior in IQ" and "genetic disadvantage in IQ" will only apply to genomes such as that of Down's Syndrome that yield low IQ no matter what the social practices.
The point about indirect heritability also casts doubt on Herrnstein's and Murray's ideas about genetic social stratification among Whites. If the 60 percent heritability does not reflect IQ genes, then there is no reason to suppose that social classes differ at all in IQ genes. Herrnstein and Murray worry about pollution of the gene pool by immigrants and by large numbers of children of low IQ parents. But if the heritability of IQ is mainly indirect, their emphasis on genes is misdirected. If we lived in a culture that damaged the brains of red-haired children, it would be perverse to complain about genetic pollution when large numbers of red-haired immigrants arrived. Instead, we should try to change the social practices that deprive those with certain genes of an equal chance.
[b]Bond (1924) early last century pointed out that the average IQ scores of African Americans from several northern states were higher than those for whites from many southern states[/b] (Bond, 1924a, p. 63). He argued that African Americans who migrated to the North must have left their "duller and less accomplished White fellows in the South." Indeed, at that time upward of 85% of African Americans resided in the South, as most still do, to do this day. Bond also believed that IQ test scores reflected social and educational training. [b]Inline with this belief, Jenkins's (1936) reported the results of IQ tests given to Black and White children in Illinois, and found that the proportion of students with scores over 130 was the same among Black and White children when environmental influences were comparable.[/b] A study involving Caribbean children would essentially replicate these findings. For example, this study found that when raised in the same enriched institutional environments as white children; black children demonstrated superior IQ test scores. [b]The IQ’s of the children in this particular orphanage were: Blacks 108, Mixed 106, and Whites 103[/b] (Tizard et al, 1972).
[b]In the United States, when matched for IQ with Whites, American Blacks have been shown to demonstrate superior “Working Memory[/b] ” (Nijenhuis et al., 2004). This is an interesting finding, as African Americans are typically taught by less qualified teachers (e.g. non-certified teachers and teachers with limited experience) than their white counterparts, and are provided with less challenging school work (Hallinan 1994; Diamond et al., 2004; Uhlenberg and Brown 2004).
Serpell et al. (2006) took 162 low-income African American and white fourth graders and assigned them, randomly, to ethnically homogeneous groups of three to work on a motion acceleration task, using computer simulation or physical tools; or to a control group that did not participate in the learning activities. It was shown that both African American and White students performed equally well on the test of initial learning, with both groups scoring significantly higher than the control group. However, this study also found that African American’s transfer outcomes were superior to those of their White counterparts (Serpell et al., 2006). The study demonstrated, empirically, that not only do [b]African American children learn as well as white children, but that they may also exceed white children in their ability to transfer learned abilities to real tasks; further highlighting the need for better education for this group.[/b]
Barnes (1972) noted that the Stanford-Binet, and the Wisc IQ tests are examples of “Culture specific tests,” and that the culture in this instance is what is referred to as “white middle class” culture. Lyman (1970) designed a cross cultural test called the “American Cross Culture Ethnic Nomenclature Test”, or “ACCENT.” The instrument contained 20 black biased and 20 white biased items. In one experiment this test was administered to 110 undergraduates (91 whites and 19 blacks). It was found that the black participants out performed the white participants, with blacks obtaining a mean of 15.3 on the black items and 11.1 on the white items, while white subjects obtained a mean of 12.7 on the white items and 8.3 on the black items. [b]The results indicate that when blacks and whites are tested cross-culturally that blacks may outperform whites.[/b]
Africa isn't in the condition it is in because of Low IQ's.
[b]Research has shown that IQ test scores tend to correlate negatively with scores of practical intelligence[/b] (Sternberg, 2001, 2004). Practical intelligence can be described as a person’s ability to apply learned skills and knowledge to everyday, real life tasks; or how to handle challenging situations. There is currently a lot of evidence demonstrating IQ tests to be unable to gauge a person’s overall potential or aptitude for learning (see Bradshaw, 2001; Siegel, 1989; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002a). What this means essentially is that a person who scores unusually high on an IQ test may not be an especially great learner (Sternberg, 2001). In fact, high scoring individuals may actually be demonstrating deficits in other areas; particularly in areas involving adaptive behavior or “practical intelligence” (See Sternberg, 2001). [/QB][/QUOTE]
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Article
All Brains Are the Same Color
By RICHARD E. NISBETT
Published: December 9, 2007
Ann Arbor, Mich.
JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”
Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?
The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument — Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate — have made the same mistake.
In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).
Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect. There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.
Why rely on such misleading and indirect findings when we have much more direct evidence about the basis for the I.Q. gap? About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).
During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.
Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups.
The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q.
A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.
Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what factors shape differences in I.Q. scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just as well as the whites.
Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to recognize similarities and better facility with analogies — when solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.
What do we know about the effects of environment?
That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.
In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.
Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.
Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.”
By RICHARD E. NISBETT
Published: December 9, 2007
Ann Arbor, Mich.
JAMES WATSON, the 1962 Nobel laureate, recently asserted that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and its citizens because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”
Dr. Watson’s remarks created a huge stir because they implied that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and the controversy resulted in his resignation as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But was he right? Is there a genetic difference between blacks and whites that condemns blacks in perpetuity to be less intelligent?
The first notable public airing of the scientific question came in a 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review by Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Jensen maintained that a 15-point difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites was mostly due to a genetic difference between the races that could never be erased. But his argument gave a misleading account of the evidence. And others who later made the same argument — Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in “The Bell Curve,” in 1994, for example, and just recently, William Saletan in a series of articles on Slate — have made the same mistake.
In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic.
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
In any case, the degree of heritability of a characteristic tells us nothing about how much the environment can affect it. Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).
Nearly all the evidence suggesting a genetic basis for the I.Q. differential is indirect. There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.
Why rely on such misleading and indirect findings when we have much more direct evidence about the basis for the I.Q. gap? About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).
During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.
Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups.
The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q.
A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.
Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what factors shape differences in I.Q. scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just as well as the whites.
Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to recognize similarities and better facility with analogies — when solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.
What do we know about the effects of environment?
That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.
In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks.
Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.
Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.”
============================================================
Asians show superior intellect and academic performance compared to whites some writers argue. Other writers tout the superiority of "Asian values"
According to Bell Curve authors:
[i]
".. they conclude that East Asians (e.g., Chinese and Japanese), whether in the United States or in Asia, score higher on intelligence and achievement tests than do white Americans (the authors don't include European statistics, although they are available). The difference in overall cognitive ability between races is measured at as much as ten points on average (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, 269). This new finding suggests that the usual descending order of intelligence by race of Caucasian, Mongolian, Negro was adjusted in the late twentieth century, with Asians surpassing white Americans for the first time. Hernstein and Murray answer yes to the question they pose to the reader, 'Do Asians have higher IQs than whites?" The authors do not explain this remarkable biological advance for a trait they hold to be 40 to 80 percent inherited." [/i]
-- Race and racism: an introduction.
By Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (2005). pg 162.
-----------------------------
[IMG]http://images.inmagine.com/img/blendimages/bld124/bld124319.jpg[/IMG]
MORE DATA ON ASIANS
They have three to five times their proportionate share of college faculty, architects, scientists, teachers, engineers, and physicians. They are overrepresented among winners of National Merit Scholarships, U.S. Presidential Scholarships, Arts Recognition and Talent Search scholars, and Westinghouse Science Talent Search scholars. They are overrepresented at American's most prestigious universities (Flynn 1991), constituting roughly 50% of the freshmen at the University of California at Berkeley and 10% to 30% of students in many other elite universities (Arenson 2007). They score higher on the SAT and ACT, especially in math. In published "school report cards" mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, they perform much better than other minority groups. They generally excel in quantitative skills and outnumber whites in engineering and computer science disciplines (Hune and Chan 1997). Conservative scholars such as Richard Lynn show Asians achieving higher test scores than whites and estimate the IQs of Asians in their native countries to be higher than that of whites (Lynn 1991). The Asian superiority was especially pronounced in math (Stevenson and Lee 1990). The Asian advantage seems to prevail even in adoption situations. An adoption study of Korean children adopted by whites in Belgium (average adoption age 1.15), compared the tests of the Asian children with those of native whites, using the French version of the well known WISC test. The Asian children obtained a mean IQ of 119- some 19 points ahead of native whites. This was later norm-corrected to about 110 points, still ahead of native whites. (Sternberg 2000). In the 19930s the black-white IQ gap was estimated at some 15 points. This had narrowed to approximately 8 points by the late 1990s (Dickens & Flynn 2006). This 8-point gap is comparable to the 6-point gap between whites and Asians based on Lynn's data cited above.
Asian American students have also been found to spend significantly more time on homework (Steinberg 1996) and parents have higher educational expectations for their children than White Americans did (Mau, 1997). Golden (2006) revealed that colleges held Asian-American students to a higher standard than whites. Golden concluded that some Asian-American students who would have been admitted if they were of any other ethnicity got rejected -- often for reasons based on stereotype -- to make room for "more desirable" students. Consequently, Asian-American students face by far the lowest admissions rate of any ethnic group (17.6%, compared with 23.8% for whites, 33.7% for blacks, and 26.8% for Hispanics) (Shea 2006), despite the fact that they constitute great numbers of students in some prestigious universities. Asians also seem to have less mental health problems than whites. A 2007 analysis of 379 National Institute of Mental Health-funded psychiatric clinical trial studies published between 1995 and 2004 found that Asian Americans made up only 0.6% of the patients studied -- the lowest representation of any ethnic group (Morain 2007).
Asian students are a remarkable 2.5 times more likely than their white classmates to qualify fir admission for the prestigious the University of California system, They make up 10 percent of the state's population, but almost half of the student body at the state's two flagship schools, Berkeley and UCLA. Of the top bracket in the basic SAT I, Asians made up 25% in Math and 11% in verbal, even though only 4.2% of the eligible students. In the more specialized SAT II tests, Asian scores were again spectacular, triple their share of top scores in writing and history, five times their proportional share in biology and about 8 times theit share in boh SAT II math tests, in chemistry and in physics. (Thernstrom S. (2004) No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. p- 88-110).The same pattern shows in higher income Asians. Asian parents who had earned graduate degrees outperformed white students from comparable homes by 42% on SAT scores. In verbal scores, whites from higher income levels do better, although this is reversed at income levels 60,000 or above where Asians seize advantage. Thernstrom 2004 and other researchers attribute this to the fact that many Asia students grow up in homes in which English is not the main language, and suggests that Asians would outperform white even on verbal tests if English was the first language of Asian test takers. He shows that over a third of second generation Asians ranked in the top quartile nationally on national NELS tests.
In highly selective institutions of higher education the Asian presence is striking. Only 4% of the US population is Asian, Asians made up 27% of the 2000-2001 freshman class at MIT, 25% at Stanford, 24% at Cal tech, 18% at Columbia, 17% at Harvard and 12% at Duke or Princeton. Asians are far more likely to graduate from college. In 2000, a majority (54%) of Asians ages 25-29 had a bachelor's degree or more compared to just 34% of whites. [quote]
".. they conclude that East Asians (e.g., Chinese and Japanese), whether in the United States or in Asia, score higher on intelligence and achievement tests than do white Americans (the authors don't include European statistics, although they are available). The difference in overall cognitive ability between races is measured at as much as ten points on average (Herrnstein and Murray 1994, 269). This new finding suggests that the usual descending order of intelligence by race of Caucasian, Mongolian, Negro was adjusted in the late twentieth century, with Asians surpassing white Americans for the first time. Hernstein and Murray answer yes to the question they pose to the reader, 'Do Asians have higher IQs than whites?" The authors do not explain this remarkable biological advance for a trait they hold to be 40 to 80 percent inherited." [/i]
-- Race and racism: an introduction.
By Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (2005). pg 162.
-----------------------------
[IMG]http://images.inmagine.com/img/blendimages/bld124/bld124319.jpg[/IMG]
MORE DATA ON ASIANS
They have three to five times their proportionate share of college faculty, architects, scientists, teachers, engineers, and physicians. They are overrepresented among winners of National Merit Scholarships, U.S. Presidential Scholarships, Arts Recognition and Talent Search scholars, and Westinghouse Science Talent Search scholars. They are overrepresented at American's most prestigious universities (Flynn 1991), constituting roughly 50% of the freshmen at the University of California at Berkeley and 10% to 30% of students in many other elite universities (Arenson 2007). They score higher on the SAT and ACT, especially in math. In published "school report cards" mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, they perform much better than other minority groups. They generally excel in quantitative skills and outnumber whites in engineering and computer science disciplines (Hune and Chan 1997). Conservative scholars such as Richard Lynn show Asians achieving higher test scores than whites and estimate the IQs of Asians in their native countries to be higher than that of whites (Lynn 1991). The Asian superiority was especially pronounced in math (Stevenson and Lee 1990). The Asian advantage seems to prevail even in adoption situations. An adoption study of Korean children adopted by whites in Belgium (average adoption age 1.15), compared the tests of the Asian children with those of native whites, using the French version of the well known WISC test. The Asian children obtained a mean IQ of 119- some 19 points ahead of native whites. This was later norm-corrected to about 110 points, still ahead of native whites. (Sternberg 2000). In the 19930s the black-white IQ gap was estimated at some 15 points. This had narrowed to approximately 8 points by the late 1990s (Dickens & Flynn 2006). This 8-point gap is comparable to the 6-point gap between whites and Asians based on Lynn's data cited above.
Asian American students have also been found to spend significantly more time on homework (Steinberg 1996) and parents have higher educational expectations for their children than White Americans did (Mau, 1997). Golden (2006) revealed that colleges held Asian-American students to a higher standard than whites. Golden concluded that some Asian-American students who would have been admitted if they were of any other ethnicity got rejected -- often for reasons based on stereotype -- to make room for "more desirable" students. Consequently, Asian-American students face by far the lowest admissions rate of any ethnic group (17.6%, compared with 23.8% for whites, 33.7% for blacks, and 26.8% for Hispanics) (Shea 2006), despite the fact that they constitute great numbers of students in some prestigious universities. Asians also seem to have less mental health problems than whites. A 2007 analysis of 379 National Institute of Mental Health-funded psychiatric clinical trial studies published between 1995 and 2004 found that Asian Americans made up only 0.6% of the patients studied -- the lowest representation of any ethnic group (Morain 2007).
Asian students are a remarkable 2.5 times more likely than their white classmates to qualify fir admission for the prestigious the University of California system, They make up 10 percent of the state's population, but almost half of the student body at the state's two flagship schools, Berkeley and UCLA. Of the top bracket in the basic SAT I, Asians made up 25% in Math and 11% in verbal, even though only 4.2% of the eligible students. In the more specialized SAT II tests, Asian scores were again spectacular, triple their share of top scores in writing and history, five times their proportional share in biology and about 8 times theit share in boh SAT II math tests, in chemistry and in physics. (Thernstrom S. (2004) No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. p- 88-110).The same pattern shows in higher income Asians. Asian parents who had earned graduate degrees outperformed white students from comparable homes by 42% on SAT scores. In verbal scores, whites from higher income levels do better, although this is reversed at income levels 60,000 or above where Asians seize advantage. Thernstrom 2004 and other researchers attribute this to the fact that many Asia students grow up in homes in which English is not the main language, and suggests that Asians would outperform white even on verbal tests if English was the first language of Asian test takers. He shows that over a third of second generation Asians ranked in the top quartile nationally on national NELS tests.
In highly selective institutions of higher education the Asian presence is striking. Only 4% of the US population is Asian, Asians made up 27% of the 2000-2001 freshman class at MIT, 25% at Stanford, 24% at Cal tech, 18% at Columbia, 17% at Harvard and 12% at Duke or Princeton. Asians are far more likely to graduate from college. In 2000, a majority (54%) of Asians ages 25-29 had a bachelor's degree or more compared to just 34% of whites. [quote]
[i]"The 20-point Asian-white graduation rate gap is even larger than the 16-point black-white gap." [/i](Thernstrom p. 85).
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More data on Asians
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_inte...%28test_data%29East Asian IQ is the highest at 107. Actually closer to 110 once you adjust for the fact that Asians stay younger longer.
http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/
Color blindness rarer in East Asians.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/1...journalCode=dsu
Male pattern baldness. Rarest in East Asians, white rate same as Southeast Asian rate.
http://www.dhs.ca.gov/chs/OHIR/reports/lea...zheimer2004.pdf
Alzheimer's, rarest in Asians/Hispanics, but "Asian" is a broad group. Probably rarest in East Asians.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5103a1.htm#tab1
Cancer death rates, Asians have the lowest death rates. East Asians probably have the absolute lowest once again.
http://www.dhs.ca.gov/hisp/chs/OHIR/report...etables1995.pdf
Asians have the longest lives. East Asians absolute highest (average 90 years for Korean women)
http://www.sph.umich.edu/hmp/Slides.pdf
Lowest obesity rates. East Asians probably have the lowest, again, assumed from comparisons between Korea/Japan/China and SE Asia + Pacific Islands. Also least vulnerable to death by diabetes.
http://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa_05/dlinks/0517dB.htm
Diabetes in Women. Asian rate lowest.
http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats/minorities.htm
http://www.hhs.state.ne.us/std/race_gon15year.htm
http://www.hhs.state.ne.us/std/race_syp15year.htm
STD rates. Lowest in Asians, esp. East Asians. Because they don't fu-k around as much; don't start doing it. :P
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/meares...s/isb308084.pdf
Crime rates by race. Asians lowest rate. 1.2% incarceration but 4% of population; East Asians absolute lowest.
http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfa...ties/index.html
Illegal drug use. Asian rate lowest. East Asian probably absolute lowest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
The East Asian populations has a high percentage of absolute pitch people, about six times the white population. [22] [23] [24] Some suggest that the high incidence of absolute pitch evolved from the tonal languages the Asian speak. However, Korean and Japanese languages are not tonal but have a high incidence of absolute pitch, and a high incidence among East Asian Americans who speak only English, some suggest that East Asians have a genetic advantage for absolute pitch. [23]
http://lancaster.ne.gov/City/health/data/e...00/marriage.pdf
Lowest divorce rates in Asians.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/hsts_2005/hs_...subtab_id=Tab_1
Highest GPAs.
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005003.pdf
Highest PISA scores. (Check pages 87-90)
http://www.kidsdata.org/topictables.jsp?t=...=2&ra=3_132
Teen pregnancy. Asians lowest.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_126.asp
Highest SAT Scores in Asians. Asian SAT scores are also improving the fastest. However the average for Chinese women is 1291, vs. 1068 for whites.
http://www.asianweek.com/2001_07_13/news07_satscores.htm
http://www.mass.gov/dph/fch/birthdefects/s...eport_00_01.pdf
Page 3: The prevalence of birth defects varied by maternal race...
The rate per 10,000 live births was 137.7 for non-Hispanic whites... and 101.58 for Asian/Pacific Islanders.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?c...pt=AbstractPlus
Down syndrome 6x more common from white mothers among women aged 35 and above as compared to pacific islanders(hawaiians).
Hilarious considering down syndrome was named after the phenomenon of the "superior" caucasian race being lowered to the "inferior" "mongoloid" race.
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LINKS TO OTHER POSTS:
Significant EEOC Race-Color Cases- Covering Private and Federal Sectors
https://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2019/01/blog-post.html
Racial discrimination is alive and kicking in employment, housing and credit markets
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/racial-discrimination-is-alive-and.html
Sowell 3- new data shows backward tropical evolution? Wealth and Poverty- An International Perspective in Trump era
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-3-new-data-shows-backward.html
Sowell 2- Wealth, Poverty and Politics- International Perspective - Trump era to bring these issues into sharper focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-2-wealth-poverty-and-politics.html
Sowell- Liberal intellectuals and hard questions about race differences- Trump era may force them to focus?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2017/07/sowell-liberal-intellectuals-and-hard.html
Trump properties discriminated against black tenants lawsuit finds
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-properties-discriminated-against.html
Stealing credibility- Dinesh D'souza has prison epiphany- after hanging with the homies- Hallelujah Hilary!
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/05/straining-credibility-dinesh-dsouza-has.html
Go with the flow 3- more DNA and cranial studies show ancient African migration to, or African presence in ancient Europe
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/04/go-with-flow-3-more-dna-and-cranial.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2016/04/go-with-flow-3-more-dna-and-cranial.html
Go with the flow 2- African gene flow into Europe in various eras
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/11/go-with-flow-2-african-gene-flow-into.html
DNA studies show African movement to Europe from very ancient times
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/dna-studies-show-african-movement-to.html
Guilt3- Why the "white privilege industry" is not all there
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt3-why-white-privilege-industry-is.html
Guilt2- Media collaborates with guilt mongers - or how to play the white victim card
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/09/guilt2-media-collaborates-with-guilt.html
How Obama plays on white guilt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-obama-plays-upon-white-guilt-hilary.html
Blacks oppose free speech- more ramshackle "research" from "the East"..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/08/blacks-oppose-free-speech-ramshackle.html
Hands off the Confederate flag
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/hands-off-confederate-flag.html
Despite much more wealth than blacks, whites collect about the same rate of welfare and are treated more generously
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/06/despite-much-more-wealth-than-blacks.html
African "boat people" ushering in European demographic decline
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/05/african-boat-people-ushering-in.html
The forgotten Holocaust- King Leopold's "Congo Free State" - 10 million victims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-forgotten-holocaust-10-million-in.html
Are violent minorities taking over California and the West?
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/04/are-violent-minorities-taking-over.html
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson meets and Greeks
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/presidential-hopeful-ben-carson-meet.html
Contra "ISIS" partisans, there have been some beneficial effects of Christianity
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/03/contra-isis-partisans-there-are-some.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
The social construction of race, compared to biology- Graves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-social-construction-of-race_8.html
Why HBD or hereditarianism lacks credibility
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-hbd-or-hereditarianism-lacks.html
Leading Scientists criticize hereditarian claims
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/leading-scientists-criticize.html
Thai me down - Thais fall behind genetically related southern Chinese, Tibetans below genetically related East Asians like Koreans and other Chinese
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/thai-me-up-thai-me-down.html
Time for liberals to respect "the south" ... in a way of speaking.. the south of Egypt that is..
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/08/time-for-liberals-to-respect-south-in.html
Irony 2: touted High IQ "G-men" cannot reproduce themselves
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/irony-2-higher-iqs-correlated-with_25.html
Unz and Sowell: Unz debunking Lynn's IQ and Wealth of Nations. Sowell debunking the Bell Curve
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/07/unz-and-sowell-unz-debunking-lynns-iq.html
Irony 1: touted High IQ types are more homosexual, more atheist, and more liberal (HAL)
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/irony-high-iqs-produce-more-atheists.html
Elite white universities discriminate against Asians using reverse "affirmative action"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/06/elite-white-universities-discriminate.html
Deteriorating state of white America
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/deteriorating-state-of-white-america.html
Racial Cartels (The Affirmative Action Propaganda machine- part 2
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-affirmative-action-propaganda.html
Hereditarian's/HBD's "Great Black Hope"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html
Exploding nonsense: the 10,000 Year Explosion
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/03/exploding-nonsense-review-of-cochran_8.html
We need "rational racism"? Proponent Dinesh D;Souza becomes his own test case
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-need-rational-racism-proponent.html
The Affirmative Action Propaganda Machine- part 1
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-affirmatve-action-propaganda.html
Two rules for being "really" black- no white wimmen, no Republican
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-be-really-black-you-cant-have-white.html
The Axial age reconsidered - or latitude not attitide
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-axial-age-reconsidered.html
Cannibal seasonings: dark meat on white
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/12/i.html
"Affirmative Action" in the form of court remedies has been around a long time- since the 1930s- benefiting white union workers against discrimination by employers
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/09/affirmative-action-as-term-appears-in.html
Mugged by reality 1: White quotas, special preferences and government jobs
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/mugged-by-reality-1-white-quotas.html
Lightweight enforcement of EEO laws contradicts claims of "flood" of minorities "taking jobs"
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post.html
Railroaded 3: white violence and intimidation imposed quotas
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-3-white-violence-and.html
Railroaded 2: how white quotas and special preferences blockade black progress...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-2-thow-white-quotas-and.html
Railroaded 1: How white affirmative action and white special preferences destroyed black railroad employment...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/06/railroaded-how-white-affirmative-action.html
Affirmative action: primary beneficiaries are white women...
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/04/quick-regime-kill-hopes-in-libya.html
7 reasons certain libertarians and right-wingers are wrong about the Civil Right Act
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2012/05/7-reasons-libertarians-may-be-wrong.html
Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2011/07/social-philosophy-of-thomas-sowell.html
Bogus "biodiversity" theories of Kanazawa, Ruston, Lynn debunked
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_1818.html
In the Blood- debunking "HBD" and Neo-Nazi appropriation of ancient Egypt
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_29.html
early
Europeans and middle Easterners looked like Africans. Peoples returning
or "backflowing" to Africa would already be looking like Africans
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_1754.html
Ancient Egypt: one of the world's most advanced civilizations- created by tropical peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post_06.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2013/03/playing-greek-defence-review-of-thornton.html
Quotations from mainstream academic research on the Nile Valley peoples
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2010/04/blog-post_9251.html
Assorted "Role models" debunked- hypocritical heriditarianism
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.htmll
http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/hbd-debunked-debunking-hypocritical.htmll
Evolution, brain size, and the national IQ of peoples ... -
Jelte Wicherts 2010
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wichertsPAIDrejoinder.pdf
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Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of
intelligence - WIcherts, Borsboom and Dolan 2010
Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010) 91-96
http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010.pdf
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Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? by
JM Wicherts - ?2004
--Dolan, Wicherts et
al 2004. Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 32 (2004)
509-537
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2004.pdf
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LYNN AND VANHAVEN'S IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS DEBUNKED
---------------- -------
www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/mcbrearty/Pdf/McB%20&%20Brooks%202000%20TRTW.pdf
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Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley
Montagu... By Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman
http://books.google.com/books?id=5DLrgG_MflgC&pg=PA190&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=1#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
--------------------------------
Race and intelligence: separating science from myth. By Jefferson
M. Fish. Routledge 2002. See Templeton's detailed article referenced above also
inside the book
http://books.google.com/books?id=t9OdPPLIgMAC&pg=PA64&dq=r-+k-+selection+races&cd=7#v=onepage&q=r-%20k-%20selection%20races&f=false
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http://www.ogiek.org/indepth/what-they-mean.htm
---------------- -------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
For summary see: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-02-18/
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http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
-----------------------------------------------------------
--S OY Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human
variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/pdf/ng1455.pdf
--S.O.Y. Keita and Rick Kittles. (1997) *The Persistence ofRacial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence. AJPA, 99:3
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/pageDocuments/WAURRSZQOE.pdf
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HBD RACE EVOLUTION CLAIMS DEBUNKED BY GENETICISTS
Alan Templeton. "The Genetic and Evolutionary
significnce oF Human Races." pp 31-56. IN: J. FiSh (2002) Race and
Intelligence: Separating scinnce from myth.
http://img560.imageshack.us/img560/239/templeton1humanracesinf.jpg
http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2731/templeton2humanracesinf.jpg
HBD RACE AND INTELLIGENCE CLAIMS DEBUNKED
J. FiSh (2002) Race
and Intelligence: Separating science from myth.
------------------------------------------
MORE HBD DEBUNKING
-------------------------------- ---------------------
Oubre, A (2011) Race Genes and Ability: Rethinking Ethnic
Differences, vol 1 and 2. BTI Press
----------------------------------------------
Krimsky, S, Sloan.K (2011) Race and the Genetic Revolution:
Science, Myth, and Culture
-------------------------------
Wicherts and Johnson, 2009. Group differences in the
heritability of items and test scores
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2009/04/24/rspb.2009.0238.full
--Joseph Graves, 2006. What We Know and What We Don’t Know:
Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Graves/
J. Kahn (2013) How a Drug Becomes "Ethnic" - Yale
Journal of Health Policy, Law and Ethics, v4:1
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=yjhple
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http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PageProofs-Graves_race.pdf
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