Women are stupid as well.
“In the humanities, the most abstract field is philosophy—and no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/production/files/murray0905.html
Or–
Women are just more practical than men.
This is key: “on any test designed to measure IQ or academic achievement”
IQ stands for Intelligene Quotient, and was designed to measure how much you have learnt compared to your age.
Try to find a proper definition of intelligence. It’s hard! There are thousands.
I take intelligence to be the capacity to learn to be smart.
But IQ tests don’t say a lot about your capacity for learning to be smart. Even when they are used in their proper context, i.e. to measure development of children, you will measure they’re capacity to learn in their environment, in the specific school they go to, the parents and family they have around them to learn from, the kids they play with.
Give someone an IQ test in adulthood, as happens a lot now, and then make him do that test again a day later - he or she will score higher. Now let me have someone for a day to prepare him for IQ tests in general. I will simply teach for the kinds of patterns they look for on average. He or she will generally score lots higher.
I thought one particular bit of research in the UK was interesting, where they measured performance of children in school. White boys did worst. Asian kids did best. On average, girls do better and more of them get into university in many Western countries.
Sure, more of them still choose the Arts rather than the Sciences, but it’s easy enough to see how that is culturally determined too when comparing data from Eastern Europe to Western Europe for instance: in Eastern Europe more women choose Exact sciences because their foremost concern is money, not personal development.
Also, girls just get different toys from guys, have different stuff marketed to them, and the people they look up are role-models who grew up a generation before them. However much the opportunities change over the decades, cultural role models always take much longer to catch up.
And that holds for skin-color as much as anything else.
Equally important to remember is that individual variation has always been much, much larger than statistical differences between sexes, races and what not. For instance, there was research that suggested that men scored 0.50% better than women on certain spatial tasks, or certain mathematical tasks. Wow. In a group of a 100, that means half a person (if such a thing existed outside of statistics). In the meantime, the brightest girl is typically going to be smarter than 98 of the other kids, including 49 of the boys, and she will be a lot smarter than the dumbest boy.
There is only one area that interests me in terms of possible genetic factors, and that is that ADHD-like afflictions detected in youth seem to stand out among Afro-Americans compared to any other race, and seemingly irrespective of culture. Again, this is not a difference that affects the general population of Afro-Americans as a whole, remember the part about individual differences - just that it seems to occur more often.
Anyway, I made my point. The Bell Curve is a stupid book. 
Just thought two articles I came across this morning might be of interest to participants/readers of this thread:
My WAT (Wild-Assed Theory) is that baseline intelligence is inherited, but can be swung a couple dozen points either way in early childhood while the brain is still developing. Language ability works a similar way, so why not IQ?
Also, IQ seems to be quite ill-defined to me as a measure of raw/uninfluenced intelligence (which falls in the space of the “racial bias” arguments). Does anyone really think that someone who’s been exposed to Western puzzles, coloring books, educational toys, etc., comes to an IQ test with the exact same advantage as someone who has never seen these toys?
There have been several books criticizing the book “The Bell Curve”. I’ve read this one (which includes the Stephen Jay Gould review cited above):
There are others listed on that page.
After seeing how Herrnstein and Murray squeezed, manipulated, and shoehorned data that was taken with incompatible tests, situations, and methods to try and compare them I cannot honestly take them or their conclusions at all seriously. Forget about all the other issues – this is just appallingly bad science.
I’m not sure it’s proper even to call this book “science”, in the sense that the authors went first to the popular press and not to peer review journals. It’s conjecture, and scientific methods can be applied to the hypothesis, but “science” is not something developed in the popular press.
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, & Steel, would disagree with that premise – specifically, that modern technical society selects for intelligence.
See a summary here, especially the first part “Yali’s Question”:
Although the cite does not contain this detail, I recall from the book that Diamond cites two reasons industrialized people are NOT “more intelligent”: firstly, that because of population density, we have been overwhelmingly selected for disease resistance first and foremost, and far less so for other factors; secondly, that we have one crushing educational and developmental disadvantage that does not afflict Stone Age peoples: access to television.
Sailboat
I’m sure I’ve missed this point in the thread, so my apologies to whomever I’m giving short shrift.
Anyway, one cannot compare the observed result of heritable traits between populations and come to a legitimate conclusion based on that fact. Consider a hypothetical country that is suddenly split in two. One half is wealthy and the other half is destitute. A generation later, one will find that the destitute half has a shorter population, on average, than the wealthy half because the wealthy half has better nutrition. To then say that since the heritability of height is, say, 85% and conclude that the wealthier half has taller genes is not a valid conclusion.
Similarly, comparing scores on tests between whites & blacks in America is a pretty dicey proposition. As noted, and IIRC, race played a small part in the book overall; however, I think that to make meaningful comparisons of intelligence, even within a population, one has to control for the variation within the populations. If the variation within the groups are larger than between groups, say poor whites vs. wealthy whites, then it’s sketchy to draw conclusions. Even if we compare dumb whites against smart whites, we don’t know whether parenting or genetics is producing dumber kids for one group vs. the other.
I, of course, have not read it and I’m not pretending to give a valid critique of the book. What I’m just trying to point out are some of the problems that can arise, and since Shagnasty noted there are theoretical and statistical flaws, it seemed appropriate.
There are myriad obvious biases that can seep into a question such as this, especially if they are systematic. Even if we compare wealthy vs. not wealthy in Rochester, Michigan, a nicely well-off suburb of Detroit, the attitudes in the home may be different for education, child rearing, etc. Controlling for these things will be very difficult.
I would imagine that “discrediting” the book is nearly as impossible as “proving” the book, because of such problems. It is unfortunate that it raised such anger and ire, because if some groups are systematically at risk, then it would be very valuable to understand this and take the proper steps to address the problem. I mean, when a Klansman says that blacks are genetically stupider than whites, shouldn’t the proper response be, “Thats why we need to pump more money into schools with lots of black students, dipshit!” If it weren’t for the hood, I bet his expression would be priceless.
Wrong. The Klansman would say it’s a waste of resources to pump money into black schools, because they will never amount to anything. It’s the genes you see, money can’t make a person’s skull bigger or their brains work better.
I understand this is a political hot button issue but in fairness, I’ve linked a statement signed by a number scientists in support of Herrnstein and Murray. The statement covers twenty-five points related to positions reached in The Bell Curve. These 50 or so signatories are described as “experts in intelligence and allied fields.”
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/support-bell-curve.html
In addition, for those who want a different perspective from that presented up to this point in this thread, here is a paper from the American Psychological Association.
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/iku.html
And here is an article from Scientific American on this subject.
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfred.html
Don’t worry, you would hand him his ass on a platter if you wanted to. If you stick to arguing the point of whether the difference is real, you are missing a lot of opportunity to smash his case. You don’t have to concede it, you can just take a different tack for the time being. If you turn the difference, if it is indeed real, into something that bolsters your position (i.e., undermines his), you’ve taken even more from his case. And because you’re hitting him from out of the blue, you’ve got that advantage working for you.
[QUOTE=Nixon1937
And here is an article from Scientific American on this subject. [/quote]
Here’s a little more information about Linda S. Gottfredson’s thoughts on IQ, Race and what we should expect people of lower IQ to be able to do…whoops, they happened to be mostly black…
That is a pretty good article.
I would like to point out something for those that may not click on the link. There is a common misconception that intelligence experts just sit around and come up with questions that they think show how smart someone is when they design IQ or tests like SAT and ACT. That is not how it works at all. These tests are designed using a sophisticated technique called factor analysis that show which questions are effective at differentiating the aptitude of the people in a sample. Individual questions are tested for sex and race bias using these statistics. Human judgement does not enter in to what questions are included on the final test.
People often critisize the G factor of intelligence. This is a theoretical factor that basically means that a person smart in one area will tend to be smart in another area and vice versa. What most people fail to understand is that G is a mathematical property that shows up when you analyze test scores of a large number of people. It was not created outside of the data and is a very real statistical property of sets of almost all intelligence test data.
The Scientific American article above can explain it in detail but I thought that I should mention it because most people don’t understand these points well at all.
whoops!
I still find the Skeels-Skodak experiment to be particularly compelling. From here:
The brain is just too damn plastic for genetic claims to be meaningfully applied to actual population differences, IMO.
Don’t confuse a statement that “Blacks as a group have lower IQs than Whites” with the statement that “there are more Blacks with low IQs than Whites”. Blacks make up only about 13% of the US population, while Whites are about 75%. That means there are about 5x as many Whites as Blacks, so depending on the exact distribution, there might be MORE low IQ folks who are White. Also note, per your cite:
I believe that there is a strong tendancy to think that anyone who talks about IQ and race is at best a closet racist. That’s just silly. Even if they are interpretting the data incorrectly (as I think they are), it does not follow that they are racists.
John 99% of that article is the black/difference in IQ and why racial parity is unrealistic…she tosses you one bone and you wave away the jist of her premise, that blacks are burdened with lower g and therefore will never attain the statue of whites.
She does say that right?
Yes. But if you actually do believe that differenes in IQ are genetic, that IQ is a good (perhpas the best) predicter of achievenment, and that the lower IQ scores for Blacks are “real”, then that conclusion is not unreasonable. And you’ve misrepresented her conclusion anyway. She does not say that “Blacks will not attain the status [I assume you mean status, not statue] of whites”. Many Blacks will in fact achieve a higher status than many Whites. What she is saying is that groups will not achieve parity as groups.
I quoted that one part simply because it’s the solution being offered, and it is explicitly a non-racial solution.
I never said it was unreasonable for HER or even racist, what I am saying is let’s not ignore that these supporters of the Bell Curve, have their own agendas based on the premise that Africans as a groupare genetically burdened with lower g, than the rest of the population and can only achieve so much, so it’s a waste of resources to try ‘correct’ for past sins against them…as a group.
Had the article been about lower g and the general population, your quote would have some weight. The article was based entirely on the premise that blacks have lower g, than whites and anyone else, and what that means for racial equality.
The ‘solution’ that’s being offered is to stop looking for racial parity, as it just gives those blacks as a group false hope and wastes time, since they as a group lack the ability.
That last line IMO, is way to deflect the race-based conclusions and agenda she has and it’s clearly worked in your case. You don’t agree, that’s fine. If you have a quote in that article that states that individual blacks will be able to attain the same genetic/educational/whatever status of whites, I’d like to see it. It looks to me what she’s saying is with help we can help those blacks as a group live up to their, shall we say, "limited’ potential AND other low g’ers (who are the exception to their racial group) as well.
I meant stature, but status is fine too.
“These supporters”? Which supporters? All supporters? Please be specific. I’m sure some people can use this data to advance a racist agenda. But that, in and of itself, is not a reason to object to the data.
There is absolutely nothing in the quote that says: “it just gives those blacks as a group false hope”. You made that up. Can you see why I’m having trouble believing that you are viewing this objectively?
No she doesn’t say that individual Blacks might achieve a higher status than individual Whites. That’s because she’s focussed on the bottom of the distribution, not the top. Does she say anything at all about the top of the distribution?
She may well have a “race based agenda”, but I don’t see that this article supports that conclusion in any way. If you have other material that supports that conclusion, I’m open.