JeanLM: Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s assume that you have a statistically significant difference in the average IQs of men and women - say 100 versus 105. What would it lead you to do differently with respect to education than the difference between two individual women or two individual men whose IQs are 100 and 125?
Let’s continue and assume that the average IQs of individuals with and without two parent in the home is 95 without and 100 with both parents? Again what would you do differently in the classroom?
In short, IQ is an individual attribute and there is a much much larger variance among individuals than there is between groups. It makes far more sense to tailor educational practices by IQ rather than by any demographic characteristic.
Are you going to teach Thomas Swell or Clarence Thomas differently because they are African American?
Note that I am not saying there are not biological differences but those differences have to be defined far more precisely and causally linked to biological factors than is currently the case.
Significant group differences may well exist on individual attributes but they are best treated as starting points for research than as an end point if you some how want to change the nature of the group difference.
Absolutely, which is why schools should be race-blind and organized around ability grouping. It is government that whips out the pigment meters and demands that the elimination of racial gaps be the paramount purpose of public education, and never mind that we can't define race properly. Government is the font of racialism in America today.
With regard to gender, men and women score about the same on average on IQ tests. There is considerable evidence, which Murray discusses very carefully, with regard to the familiar argument about a male advantage in visual-spatial tasks and at the extreme level of mathematical ability, and a female advantage in verbal skills. But put that aside. The big differences on gender have to do with psychological traits and interests. There is a great deal of overlap between the sexes. There are outliers of both sexes. The differences have to do with average scores measured across large groups. On most dimensions, the differences between the sexes are relatively small -- though this leads to an important question, discussed in some detail by Murray, of whether these small differences are cumulative in effect when one moves from the measurement of isolated traits to broader patterns of social behavior and choice in complex social situations. That is a difficult thing to sort out, but it is not useful to begin with the current leftist fallacy that men and women are really just the same and that all differences are a matter of social conditioning. That is demonstrably not true, which is Murray's point.
One of Murray's illustrations comes to mind. Take aggressiveness. This is one of the biggest differences in male-female average scores. There is a great deal of overlap on this trait. There are outliers of both sexes. But on average, men are more aggressive. How much more? As a ballpark figure, if you were to pick one man and one woman at random from a large group, what are the odds that the man would test as more aggressive? About 60 percent. That's a big differences, but it also reflects a lot of overlap. There are many aggressive women.
When one moves from the measurement of a singular trait to social behaviors and outcomes, it gets much more complicated. For one thing, social and cultural patterns tend to be organized around modal behaviors. It is a good thing for a society to be complex enough to have multiple male, female, and ungendered roles, so that no one is forced into a straightjacket. But men and women, on average, will exhibit different tendencies and this will affect the cultural expectations and roles.
Another complication of Bell Curve math is that small differences at the mean can produce big differences at the extreme ends of the tails. This is a problem for the advocates of the sameness principle -- the idea that absent discrimination, men and women should have identical outcomes -- IF THE SELECTION IS BEING MADE AT THE EXTREMES. One cannot assume that one extreme is better than the other; this depends on what you are selecting for. The example that Murray uses is caregivers in an assisted living facility for the elderly vs. Navy SEALS. As he notes, in neither case is the most extreme position the best, but even so, you will find significant differences in average male and female aptitude for these roles.
I strongly recommend reading Murray's book. Murray deals at length and very fairly with all of these complications. His critics simply disregard most of what he says and set up a straw man. Most of the critics have never read his work and are simply parroting their talking points. But the originators of the criticism are often operating in conscious bad faith.
The racial differences in IQ are significantly more than 5 points. Sub Saharan Africans average 70 while Northern Europeans average 100. East Asians are 5 points above that.
These diferences are not social or cultural, so we should study them and deal with things like diversity understabding that outcomes in success are related to inteliibence. My brother who was a doctor told me that his class would have been 100% jewish if the admissions stabdards weren’t rigged. He knew this because he dated and married the dean’s secretary.
I say I’m glad my hip was replaces by a second generation Jewish orthopod instead of the affirmative action doctor admitted beside him.
We should recognize individual ability but not ignore racilal differences to say that everyone should participate equally in success, and if they don’t adjust the system tp accomodate tem.