Posted on 08/26/2005 6:49:50 PM PDT by dennisw
When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.
The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected.
It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve’s scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience. At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience.
The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media’s fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public’s misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.
Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders’ assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.
One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.
When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.
Hence this essay. Most of the following discussion describes reasons for believing that some group differences are intractable. I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.
I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:
1. The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.
2. Covering both sex differences and race differences in a single, non-technical article, I had to leave out much in the print edition of this article. This online version is fully annotated and includes extensive supplementary material.
3. The concepts of “inferiority” and “superiority” are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from “low” to “high,” but the results cannot be combined into a score running from “bad” to “good.” What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God’s chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group’s strengths.1
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The technical literature documenting sex differences and their biological basis grew surreptitiously during feminism’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s. By the 1990’s, it had become so extensive that the bibliography in David Geary’s pioneering Male, Female (1998) ran to 53 pages.2 Currently, the best short account of the state of knowledge is Steven Pinker’s chapter on gender in The Blank Slate (2002).3 ........
FULL ARTICLE AT---->>>>
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html
I once had drinks with Charles Murray at the Amsterdam Cafe at 119th street and Amsterdam in NYC. It was right before the Bell Curve came out. As I recall, he ordered a double bourbon with a beer chaser. Anyway, he told a great story about how he became a semi-libertarian.
He had been a hippie, and was in the peace corps. He went to a remote area of Thailand, where society functioned very well, and he noticed that it did so without any government. It was that experience that led him to discount the view that government tentacles are neccessary to constantly try to improve society.
Interesting. Thanks for posting. I'm a capable, self assured female. However, I have observed a lot of the differences in male and female capability in spatial types of math - and in figuring out which way is North . . .
So, although not politically correct to say so - as poor Mr. Summers found out - well, duh!!!
No glass renders a man so true as his speech.
An excellent article. Needless to say, government and academia will ignore it. But I like what he says in the first footnote. Men and women, blacks and whites and Asians, are different, but that doesn't mean that one group is better than another. An elephant is stronger than a man, but few men would want to be elephants. Each group has strengths, each has weaknesses--along a bell curve, of course.
A very memorable quote from an article that is overflowing with them...
Yes.
Thank you for the posting.
And were all the various stages of prehistoric man equal to all the current variations?
Or would you suggest that evolution has reached its pinnacle for all these groups - Asian, African, White, Cro-Magnon - and therefore all are equal?
As warm and touch-feely as that sounds, it just doesn't make a bit of sense.
We already knew all of that, but it's nice to hear a certified academic and a liberal (in the CLASSICAL sense) say it.
I once read an article that examined the difference between males and females to follow directions to a destination. It said to never tell a female to go North on a certain road or turn West, etc. Apparently many females do not know cardinal directions when outside.
Ping!
Great story!
While I tend to think of IQ as respectable pseudoscience, I think this point is essentially correct. For example, why have women reached parity in fields like medicine and law, but not science?
ping
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I read "BC" years ago and the one study that I could not get out of my mind involved sets of identical twins, blacks and whites, raised in different households, one rich (or better off), one poor. In each case the black-white differences remained, and the ratios between them remained. Until there is some scientific evidence that this is flawed, Houston, we have a problem.
One thing I would like to add: while group differences in traits, abilities and behaviors are good for predicting same in groups, they cannot be used to predict these factors in individuals based on their belonging to groups. Individuals go against type all the time, it's just that they're not in the majority within their group for the against-type trait they exhibit.
A simple platform flows from the article: Stop the lying.
Maybe something will come of this.
I just finished "In the Name of Eugenics" this week. An interesting book.
Thanks, great article
Until you provide us with a citation, and explain just what those genetic differences are, then Houston, we have a bigot.
I have Murray's "In Search of Happiness and Good Government" -- is ability to objectively analyze complex issues is stunning.
Check this out: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray.
The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet. ~Damon Runyon
Bookmark
I gave you the citation: Murray and Hernnstein cite extensive studies of fraternal twins of different races, where one was raised in a (say) rich white household and one in a poor white household; and blacks where one was raised in a rich black household and one in a poor household. The ratio between the richer/poorer twins stayed about the same in each race, but the IQ difference between blacks and whites---either "richer-raised" or "poorer-raised" stayed the same. That ain't bigotry. That's science that someone better explain, and not brush under a rug.
I agree. That does not account for a lot of other factors that go into success (as Murray and Hernnstein argue), such as, in our example, that the grandmother may be smarter than the high school kid (at that point, or more experienced) and find a way to cheat so as to win the race; or bribe someone to give you the victory. These are extreme examples, but it makes Murray's point that there is a lot more to success in life than IQ. IQ is a prominent predictor, but not the only predictor.
Now, as an academic, I take solace (largely from my own experience as a not-too-brilliant professor, compared to my colleagues) that hard work, tenacity, a skill with people, good "luck," timing, and (personal opinion) God's blessings are worth FAR more than IQ. I went to grad school (with low GREs) with a woman who came in with near-perfect GREs. She washed out in a year! Obviously, despite her high IQ, she did not have other traits or characteristics that made for success--the ability to "jump through hoops," or get along with an advisor, or who knows what?
I don't think it is racist to say that 99% of the NBA is black, or that Asians have the highest average ("spectrum") of IQs in the world. All that IQ didn't help Japan beat us in WW II---indeed, we still built better weapons than they did.
I think these are good points - but one thing I do notice as well is that in many science graduate programs, most of the women in them are foreign-born. Culture may play a role as well.
later read-whole-article and pingout.
My problem with the whole concept of IQ is what is purporting to measure. As a measurement device it's unlike any accepted metrology. It has no accepted standard and it's unclear what the precision or accuracy of a particular test is. If I have a meterstick, I can compare it with a NIST reference for example. The people at NIST can compare their standard with the internationally accepted definition of the meter. I can also state what the precision of measurement and uncertainty of a measurement made with that meterstick is. I don't know of any method of doing that with an IQ test. As such, it seems to me to be more like the Scientologist's e-meter - it measures something but not necessarily what is purporting to measure.
mark
The American Psychological Association begs to disagree with you.
The link is to a reproduction of the APA 1996 report prepared in response to the controversy that arose over Murray's (and Herrnstein's) "The Bell Curve." Read the report before you make any more statements about a subject you obviously know nothing about (but are willing to make crass ideological statements about anyway...).
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PH, does this translate into: "Your position on the bell curve is less than the lowest quartile" ??? :)
I'm way down at the bottom. Which makes my accomplishments all the more remarkable.
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