IQ and the Wealth of Nations

Am I crazy? Strange question to ask I know, but I feel I must ask it because I am just not getting something. To explain, I just finished reading this Wikipedia article

and it seems that the article claims some things that blow my mind

  1. low GDP of poor countries is directly related to low IQ
  2. low IQ is genetic
  3. Ethiopians (like most Africans) have an IQ of about 63 (below retarded).
  4. These guys have a large following of people who agree with them.

I was sniffing around Wikipedia a little more and discovered that these guys are involved in a larger debate on Race and intelligence.

This guy claims a few other things:

  1. Race is real
  2. Blacks are genetically predetermined to be stupid, violent, fuck like crazy, and die quick.
  3. This is all due to the fact that blacks are evolutionary lower then Whites/Asians

Guys please tell me that this is all a joke; that these guys are not University Professors; no one really believes that I am a violent psychopath/mad dog who rapes everything in sight. This is not real, is it?

It’s real that claims have been made, however, this doesn’t mean the claims themselves are valid. Besides, it’s Wikipedia. If you want to know what the authors were really saying, you should read their book.

At the very least, I see a possible correlation with poverty in the national IQ table, rather than race.

It’s not a a joke, but it’s been heavily debunked. Try this thread.

Wow, thanks. It is good to see some people trying to debunk this theory. I thought that I was the only sane person who noticed these clear flaws, but it seems that they are others who see it too.

It’s just that when I kept reading about it in Wikipedia I was wondering why this topic on Race IQ and Black mental inferiority is so developed with many people (even professors) for it with very little people pointing out how it could be incorrect.

I have talked to many Ethiopians and none of them seemed to be retarded but that is what these guys were saying of all Africans. Do these guys have a large following, why are they educators?

Please notice that while your second link, (Rushton on Wikipedia), is currently locked while the arguments get hashed out, the majority of the arguments are in regard to which particular debunkers of Rushton should be included in that particular article.

Rushton is an academic because that is what academics do. He did some level of yeoman work in studies of biology and in the teaching of classes until he achieved tenure, then began using the his academic position (both its status and its protection) to put forth his own ideas.
THIS IS A GOOD THING.
Rushton is a crank, but his ideas should be debated thoroughly in the open forum of scientific debate and demolished for their own errors. There should not be any effort by any government (or by his own university) to silence him. (If his work is discovered to be based on fraud or any sort of malfeasance, that would be a different matter, but as long as he can publish his silliness and other scientists can refute his claims, we have a better chance to disseminate real information.)

Agreed, kind sir. Talk, being cheap, is still good.

The question is not about racism per se, but racism in academia, which is a very different issue. Any idiot can be racist, but smart people being racist is more worrying.

Many people do point out flaws in the theory, as you have learned. But in answer to the other part of your question, this race-and-IQ psuedoscience exists for several reasons:

  1. On the face of it, it makes sense. African-Americans do present an IQ bell curve one standard deviation to the left of that for white Americans. That much is well established, and not at all controversial. The interpretation that attributes this difference to genetics is controversial; the psychological community is fairly certain it is due, rather, to environmental factors. You can read about that in The Bell Curve Wars. For that matter, the genetic component of personal intelligence, the importance/relevance of IQ as a measure of personal intellectual ability, and indeed the very existence of a single general intelligence factor g, are also controversial – see here and here.

  2. Racial pseudoscience persists because it has a long history behind it. See The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould.

  3. Racial pseudoscience persists because racism persists, and it gives white supremacists/separatists/nationalists something apparently rational to back up their culture- and emotion-based rhetoric.

  4. Racial pseudoscience persists, and gets funding, for the same reason anthropogenic-climate-change skepticism persists and gets funding: It supports certain economic and political interests, including the interests of parties who have no real interest in the scientific question as such. E.g., the basis conclusion of The Bell Curve, in terms of implications for public policy, is that money spent on programs to better the lot of African-Americans is wasted, because it runs up against their inalterable genetic limitations, therefore such should be abolished. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how neatly that comforting assumption dovetails with the agenda of most branches of the whole post-Goldwater American conservative movement, including those branches that are not essentially racist but are committed to low taxes and minimal government, and/or doctrinally hostile to any form of social engineering.

I don’t think they are referring to you as an individual, but to broad averages among large genetic pools. Even if such differences are found to be a result of genetic inheritence, it would be foolish to extend them, a priori, to an individual because any large pool has a wide variation from one end of a spectrum to another.

The instinctive response to take it personally is understandable but irrelevant to the debate.

If you are just looking for reassurance that it’s all gibberish, read the extensive body of literature on the topic and pick the debunking side as your champions of what to believe. We may not be that far off from a more robust answer than we have now. The more we learn about the relationship between genes and human traits, the closer we’ll come to deciding the debate of nature v nurture.

There isn’t some kind of fairness guarantee that nature has been equitable so perhaps we can spend the time between now and the settlement of this issue working toward a world where nobody gives a rat’s butt about what your genetic pool is.

BrainGlutton, you have obviously not read The Bell Curve very closely. One of the first points made on the subject of race is that the biracial children of German women and African-American GIs during WWII show no IQ difference from that of all other German children of the same time–ergo the difference in IQ is NOT largely genetic.

You know, they do sell smaller brushes at your local hardware store.

Here is my thread from the past debating The Bell Curve.

An assumption that races differ in intelligence doesn’t “dovetail” at all with libertarian conservatism. An inherently limited race would be an argument for government intervention, as the only way to alleviate its condition.

That one looks perfect to me. Just the right size.

To deny that there are physical racial differences is pretty difficult, the Dinkas tend to be about 7’ tall and a pygmy is … well a pygmy.

Denying that there is an inherited element to IQ does not stand up that well, two super thick parents are empirically unlikely to produce a genius. Mind you bright people can have thick kids :slight_smile:

It is quite possible that there are multiple bell curves that don’t quite match, but the bulk of the population is probably in the overlapping area so it does not matter that much.

Also, IQ is affected by environment, you can teach a thick person to read, but it takes a very smart person to teach themselves how to read.

There is also the element of self selection, an Ethiopian who gets over to the USA is likely to be a pretty smart cookie with quite some initiative. It is possible that thicker people tend to stay at home and work the family goat farm.

I’m sure one can find backwoods areas in the USA where the maximum IQ is lower than 100.

What I’m saying is, that even if those guys are right, it is not really significant.

That’s a pretty big ergo…what if the genetic predisposition is a dominant trait? It’s not likely to be simple Mendelian inheritence, in any case, and it’s definitely not simply that progeny IQ is an average of parental IQ.

I bring this up not to debate the genetic inheritence of intelligence, but as an example of selecting out those arguments which favor what you hope is true and giving them prominence. In due time, not so far off, the genetic contribution to intelligence will become settled and we can move on beyond arguing about it.

An interesting point, it might be that IQ, like haemophilia travels down the female line.

It would be a sensible evolved survival mechanism.

At the risk of getting all semantic, here, the word used by anthropologists and similar folk who would describe Dinkas and pygmies would be “population,” not “race.” On the one hand, we can use whatever word we’d like, but the word “race,” (beginning with the four of Linnaeus, proceeding through the five of Blumenbach, wandering out to the sixty of some more recent ethnographers, and settling into the Three of common current language), has always meant the division of human polulations into a very few very large groups. Under the “three race” division used by Rushton and his ilk, Dinka and pygmies are in the same race–Negroid.

One of the problems that affects all similar discussions is a lack of concrete definition for what a race might be and who gets to be included in it. (Rushton, of course, prefers “race” to the more accurately descriptive “population,” because he needs to make as broad-brushed a claim as he can in order to drag in all the disparate (and generally unrelated) data points he needs to make his odd claims.)

Given that IQ is measured on a sliding scale rather than at discrete points, it is as you say overwhelmingly likely that any genetic component of it is controlled by multiple genes–very few things are as simple as dominant/recessive on a single gene. What this would mean is that there should have been some noticeable difference in the IQs of the German/AA children–but apparently there wasn’t.

And in any case, it still gets The Bell Curve off the hook for the nasty aspersions so often cast against it, which was my aim.

Whenever anyone start pontificating about IQ, it’s good to keep in mind that there is no single definition of IQ. There are several different theories about what IQ means, and a host of instruments of varying validity and reliability that measure different constructs of IQ. If someone gave me an IQ test normed to an Ethiopian population, based on an Ethiopian construct of intelligence, I’d probably come off as a gibbering idiot.