Not sure where this belongs, so it can go under pseudo-science for now.The debate over racial differences in IQ represents perhaps the greatest scientific controversy of the past half-century. The facts are not in serious dispute: blacks score, on average, significantly lower than whites in IQ tests in the United States, Britain and beyond.
In the Mediascan section, Alan H linked an article by Matthew Syed entitled Let’s not cower from the hard truth about race and IQ. I found this article puzzling for a few reasons.
Firstly, this, the very first line of the article:
Way to overstate the importance of your piece. There is no serious scientific standpoint which holds that IQ is naturally related to skin colour.The debate over racial differences in IQ represents perhaps the greatest scientific controversy of the past half-century.
He then brings up the tired falsehood about liberals/the Left (and note the capitalisation of 'Left' - it makes us seem more threatening if we look like one amorphous entity) being afraid to face up to a given issue. This is a pretty standard debating trick on all sides (everyone loves to be in a minority that 'tells it like it is', right?) and it's usually, if not flat wrong, a gross strawman. I'm confused, though, as to what exactly liberals are accused of 'avoiding'. It certainly isn't the genetic link between IQ and skin colour - because there isn't one.
Is it the results of these IQ tests, then? Syed's strawman about 'cultural relativism' strikes me as pretty odd. Apparently, "It hardly helps the cause of racial equality to argue that, although blacks do worse at IQ tests, they have the kind of intelligence that is useful in preindustrial societies" (now who's ducking the issue, eh?). So, are all black communities over the world have the same average IQs then? Because that is what that statement implies. But this is not the case, no one claims it is the case (white-supremacists maybe aside), so why oversimplify to make a dumb point?
Any fool knows the primary factor in developing IQ is the environment in which a person lives. A child from a 'pre-industrial society' who never gets a real education because of more immediate survival commitments is not likely to have a highly developed IQ. A child from a ghetto community in the West is likely to have a higher-developed IQ, but still not as high as a child from a middle-class community. Oddly enough, Syed makes this point well:
But who's disagreeing there? The only problem is that he over-simplifies - in reality, no two children have the same environments - but given we are talking about averages that's ok.Flynn’s discovery provides a real example of the thought experiment involving the seeds: IQ variation within each generation is largely heritable; IQ variation between generations is exclusively environmental. For the environmental hypothesis to work, we need only show that today’s black Britons face comparable conditions to whites in the mid1950s, something that chimes with common sense and social data. Allied with evidence of how IQ differences disappear when black children are brought up in residential nurseries with white children, the environmental hypothesis becomes convincing.
This will not come as a surprise to geneticists who have long understood that racial categories are social constructs lacking genetically rigorous boundaries. Most genetic variation exists within groups rather than between them and skin colour can be a highly misleading measure of the genetic distance between populations. It would have been astonishing if the diverse peoples who happen to share darker skin all had a genetic IQ inferiority.
Incidentally, Syed brings up another point about average intelligence, fairly self-evident:
Does that argument sound familiar? It wouldn't surprise me if it does, as that's what 'liberals' (and most other people for that matter) have been saying all along. As an ethical dilemma, it hardly compares to capital punishment. See, it's not that people are avoiding the issue. Rather, there is actually very little issue to be had. Improving school performance amongst black kids and kids from poor communities has been on the political agenda for some time now. That's where the crux of the debate lies.Even if the average black had a naturally lower IQ than the average white this would not mean that all blacks had lower IQs than all whites. There would still be a significant overlap such that if a white person and a black person were chosen at random there would be a fair chance that the black would have a higher IQ. This demonstrates that even in a hypothetical society with genetically based racial differences in IQ it is sensible to treat people as individuals rather than as group members.
The article is actually a pretty good summary of why skin colour and intelligence happen to be linked when looking at average IQ scores (as are class and IQ). But it's dressed up in so much trite political point-scoring that it's hard to like.