Let’s take the Fulbe- an ethnic group found from Mauritania to Chad. They are most certainly a pretty solidly defined ethnic group- their facial features are such that you can often pick a Fulani out in a crowd. Historically, they were a bit like the Mongols- a nomadic herding culture that has at times been able to control huge chunks of land. In many places, the empires they set up still have power. During slave times, they were renown slave traders.
Traditionally there are two groups of Fulbe who should be genetically similar but live in very different conditions- the “bush Fulbe” and “town Fulbe.” The bush Fulbe live a nomadic way of life, herding cattle and selling milk across the Sahel. They have maintained their own unique culture and traditions, practicing a mystical version of Islam. While they may have wealth in the form of cattle, they live fairly simple lives, living in grass tents. They are currently subject to a lot of crime, and are being pushed off the land they’ve been using for the last couple hundred years by increasing instability.
The town Fulbe, by contrast, tend to be some of the more successful groups in the area. Because of their Islamic practice, they tend to be a bit more literate than surrounding ethnic groups. They dominate business and even politics in some areas. They tend to look down on the bush Fulbe as little more than animals, living in the savage wilderness.
Then again, in other areas all Fulbe are pretty marginalized. In Cameroon, for example, business and politics was dominated by Bantu ethnic groups. The northern Fulbe dominated areas are vastly poorer than the southern Bantu dominated areas.
If your beliefs were correct, we wouldn’t see such a huge difference between bush and town Fulbe, and we would see more consistent social and economic conditions between Fulbe in different nations.
I’m tickled you have at least gotten to the point of recognizing that genes vary among populations–else the Fulbe would not have distinct physical characteristics.
I hope you don’t think my view is that any population with the same broad gene set should somehow end up with every sub-group within it performing identically, as if a given population is so tightly-defined that everyone in it is an identical twins. I have said repeatedly only that genes are a primary determinant of differences if circumstances are normalized, so that where we find disparate outcomes, the difference is genes.
If, for instance, I took the broad population of Europeans who came to the US and examined differences in outcomes between the successful and the less successful, I would find that the successful tend to be concentrated in cities (where the opportunities are) and tend to be more educated (entertainment industries excepted). I would find a higher IQ among the more successful (again, as a broad average). I would find the smart kid born in appalachia to poor parents did well in school, went to university, and ended up as a doctor. His less smart brother might join the family tradition in the coal mines.
While you want to simplify what I think for the purpose of condemning a position you do not like, this sort of simplification creates a straw man instead of presenting evidence against my core supposition: smarter people do better, in general, at creating and supporting modern societies.
For all I know, a hunter-gatherer society is superior in every way to modern society. I’m not criticizing anyone’s way of life. I am simply suggesting that intelligence is the key driver to creating and supporting the modern world, and where the modern world has failed, look to intelligence (or a diminution of it) as a key component.
Do you think those qualities are being measured, documented and compared accurately in that book of Richard Lynn that you linked to?
The question isn’t (only) that IQ tests are too short in their range of measurements, that’s really another kettle of fish; the question here is if these tests that Lynn is quoting are giving accurate results for what they are suppose to measure.
But you cite Lynn, scoff at even sven and even state
So, before I continue, I’ll need to ask a you few simple questions:
Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the average IQ scores of people from those respective countries?
Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the Intelligence of people from those respective countries?
Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the abilities of Africans to use abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, and logic?
Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the genetic abilities of Africans to use abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, and logic?
If you can’t answer yes to all of these questions you have no friggin reason/excuse for linking to Lynn or his damn book. In (off)case you have answered yes to all of these questions you need to read up on any of the many critiques of Lynn; in particular the ones focusing on his many serious (and systematic) methodological errors.
That’s friggin news to me. I always thought those friggin tests were testing for functional knowledge about their respective subject matters! The MCAT is really an IQ test you say? Wow. I guess there is really no need to study for it, eh? I’ll just walk in and do my darnedest. Since IQ tests accurately measure innate genetic intelligence, and you can’t prepare for them, it’s friggin useless to bother. I’ll just get the mark that I deserve anyway!
I don’t have to do a damn thing. All I have to do is point out all the facts you have (conveniently) omitted when you comprised this race-realist dreamland of yours.
Stephen Jay Gould (like this rest of us) hates the racist misinterpretation and misuse of IQ tests.
You know, you’re right. I’m just amazed at the amount of racists/racialists we get coming to any Africa related thread, just for the sole function to preach, testify and assert that “da bleck iz teh stooopid.” Lets make a pact. In these threads, for every one of the responses we give to “race realists” we must make two informed posts that are both: focused on the OP and completely unrelated to any racialist garbage.
This will keep these threads from being hijacked into “race realist” debates. Deal?
I don’t care what the particular absolute numbers are for those countries. I do believe that IQ is the best measurement we have today that reflects the type of world economy we have today. Also, Africans may well have some type of unquantifiable “intelligence” that’s not captured in IQ. If so, that’s irrelevant (today) because we apparently don’t have a global society that places value on those characteristics. I don’t make the rules of this planet – just reporting the facts. The African tribesman may actually be the Übermensch SuperRace and we as society are too stupid to realize it because we happen to create a society that’s fixated on making iPhones & TVs that require computer chip engineering and a monetary system that requires mathematics of calculus. We have a broken planet that doesn’t fit their talents. All that is possible.
I believe IQ is mostly driven by genetics but I also emphasize that it is not unchangeable destiny. However, I don’t believe schools will solve it. I have no idea why we can accept that pregnant mothers that consume too much alcohol will produce babies with learning disabilities or even mental retardation and yet we believe schools and other social institutions are more important to the intellectual development of a people than nutrition? That makes no sense. (With the alcoholic pregnant mothers example, I’m not saying Africans have learning disabilities – I’m trying to emphasize that we’ve already accepted some link between biological factors and intelligence without controversy. Why can’t this link be extended to frame a possible solution?)
To clarify, the “IQ test” of the MCAT is embedded within it. There’s verbal reasoning in it. There’s also chemistry terminology to memorize, yes, but there’s also quantitative reasoning with the chemical elements. The LSAT has a major logic portion in it. The designers of all those standardized tests constantly tweak and normalize their test against IQ measurements. They do not want “stupid” people passing their tests.
Yes, each particular test (LSAT for lawyers, MCAT for doctors, etc) tests specialized areas that one must thoroughly memorize and study for but they are designed to be difficult enough to pass the intelligent students and filter out the idiots. Pure memorization doesn’t work.
On the other hands, a driver’s license test (multiple-choice reading road signs) can be passed with just memorization. A driver’s license test is not a disguised IQ test.
As I tried to explain to MrDibble, even if we outlawed IQ tests, society would spontaneously re-create their own “IQ tests” on an adhoc informal basis. They just wouldn’t be formally labeled IQ tests. We’d call them other things such as the “Microsoft Employment Screening Exam” or the “New York Prep School Aptitude Test”
So, all I hear are the “misuse” of IQ tests. What’s the “correct” use of them?
Firstly, I’m not asking that they be outlawed, just ridiculed in every scientific and public forum. Secondly, I don’t agree that they will spontaneously be recreated. I think the swing will be, in fact, towards skills-based and knowledge-based testing.
Filler pages in the Reader’s Digest? That’s about the only use of them that stands scrutiny.
You care enough to cite Lynn, use him in examples, muse on the futility of improving access to education in African nations, proclaim “Schools don’t raise IQ” and then scoff at even sven’s clear examples of cultural differences/African multilingualism (even equating it to the “rain man” learning a dictionary); so don’t try to give a disingenuous claim of indifference about his book/results/claims now pal. These were my questions:
Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the average IQ scores of people from those respective countries?
Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the **Intelligence **of people from those respective countries?
That’s not it. It’s not that Africans have some sort of ultra-secret intelligence that isn’t being measured. It’s that IQ tests are not accurately measuring intelligence. I’ll restate my last post
I’ll also say this again:
3. Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the abilities of Africans to use abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, and logic?
4. Do you believe that the IQ scores that Lynn has cobbled together (and bizarrely fiddled with) are correct measurements of the genetic abilities of Africans to use abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, and logic?
Oh, yes. “just reporting the facts,” eh? Well Lynn/you seem to be selectivity reporting facts. Yes, in fact, when facts are reported in such a **selective **way they tend to appear deterministic and outright racist. Thank God, humble indifference and neutrality has been clearly stated, I might have thought that a bankrupt race-realist agenda was being pushed to idiotically absurd heights.
Mostly? I asked you specifically about Lynn’s data/book. Do you think that those “national IQ scores” are a genetic representation of Africans ability to use abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, and logic?
Perhaps then you should drop the race-realist shtick and look at it with a clear mind.
a) Requirements for proper intellectual development: good nutrition, non-alcoholic mothers, other environmental factors etc.
b) Requirements for a high IQ test score: Good schools/other social institutions, and proper intellectual development.
You cite Lynn and (coyly) fail to acknowledge that with massively different environments, comparing IQ tests scores become utterly meaningless as a comparison of intelligence. It’s a closer test of intelligence for one, but for the other it’s more of a test of familiarity of standardized testing (or whatever). Just like if only one person understood English it’s useless to compare their (English administered) IQ scores as the test stops being an accurate IQ test and becomes a “who understood English better” test. This is not rocket science.
Your “I don’t believe schools will solve it”/race-realist bull involves a lot “racially dominated” faulty logic and outright omittions.
You use faulty logic, a factually absent hypothesis, intellectually disgraced citations, and racially tinged examples. Perhaps these have something to do with it?
So you can study the subject matter, but not the reasoning? Why, then, does studying the reasoning (physically working out the practice problems) help? Take, for example, any math class; why isn’t learning the facts enough? Why do we need to continually practice solving the example problems to get high marks? Perhaps its that we are learning how to efficiently display our reasoning skills? Do you think this might be relevant in IQ testing also? Or shall we just omit this fact and start making some unfounded, racially dominated, genetic claims involving “phantom genes” and non-existent, racial-determined, populations (da blecks!)?
Its surprising that people are even cognitively willing to choose the latter option, let alone expect that I’ll friggin play “make-believe” with them…
The rest of your post is a bunch of smoke screens and diversions. I’ll wait until you address my questions regarding Lynn’s book before responding further.
I thought I already answered the question. Yes, I believe the Lynn scores (the rough ranges but not the absolute numbers) represent the Africans abilities in those tested areas. I believe Lynn’s data has inaccuracies. (Every data collection has inaccuracies.) Do I believe the inaccuracies are so bad that they hide the fact that Nigerians actually have higher IQ than the Swedish? No.
I’ll also remind you that I brought Lynn’s data into the discussion specifically for discussions of correlation to economic development. You are the one trying to turn it into some type of race defense.
Ha! When I was in my early 20s and idealistic, I thought EVERYBODY was a blank slate and ANYBODY could be taught ANYTHING. Little Johnny could be taught Quantum Physics… if only he had… the RIGHT TEACHER.
Now that my old belief of nurture environmentalism has been shattered, I actually believe my mind is more clear on the matter now. You disagree. That’s fine.
Nutrition, yes. No alcohol yes. Other factors that can affect biology of the brain, yes.
Schools and social institutions… nope.
No study has shown that adopted children are affected more by the IQ (and/or environment) of their adopted parents than their birth parents. Not one.
Sigh. Math education. A subject near and dear to my heart with wasted hours looking at cognitive research in this area.
Anyways… students continually practice solving those math problems so they can memorize the monkey steps down to pass a quiz. It’s almost muscle memory. It’s not really the same aspect that’s measured on IQ tests. You can test the IQ of young children even before they take high school classes of algebra and calculus. Retesting IQ after high school will not change the score by much even though the student “learned” more math.
The fact that you try to reference math education tells me that you’re not familiar with what an IQ test actually is. Maybe this is why you believe IQ scores can be changed by schools.
Interestingly, in the US, children of blacks from wealthy families and children of blacks from educated parents underscore white children from poor and undereducated parents on the SAT. In view of such studies, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue the disparate outcomes are from disparate opportunity.* While the SAT is not an IQ test per se, it is certainly the case that smart kids do better on it than less smart kids, and that IQ generally correlates with standardized testing. In any case, the SAT is certainly a measure of the capacity to absorb and retain and regurgitate information, and to that extent it is measuring a real difference in that cognitive capacity.
You are correct to complain that IQ tests aren’t perfect, but to the argument at hand, none of them ever show anything but the same rank order for asians, whites and blacks, as an average group performance.
One of the things that has frustrated modern educators is the inability to close gaps on scores even when all other factors are equalized.
And of course, across the entire world, in every political system and every nation–whether majority or minority; colononialized or never colonialized; enslaved or never enslaved; immigrants or natives…–it doesn’t matter. The same groups end up more successful and the same groups end up less successful.
And since, after having been given open opportunity, many US blacks have succeeded so remarkably, it becomes a bit difficult to simply blame “racism” for everything; all the more so since large groups of underperforming whites remain underperforming.
In the end, it’s not the IQ tests and the standardized tests. It’s the plain, everyday evidence that groups, on average, perform disparately, and that individuals find no barrier to success if they are so enabled genetically.
*"But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board’s 2005 data on the SAT:
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."* The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test for example, and there are many many other cites.
…and, of course, income levels are really good indicators for the kind of cultural and social factors we say are the real determiners of performance in IQ tests. Only, not so much.
Well, of course smugly reassuring one another is one way of approaching the debate.
The other way is to make a specific counter-argument to the points I made: Neither superior parental level of education nor superior parental wealth are sufficient to equalize SAT scores betweens blacks and whites/asians. Poor whites and whites from under-educated parents outscore wealthy blacks children and black children of educated parents on the SAT.
So the notion (presented by Orcenio, and to which I was replying) that observed differences are due to “massively different environments” does not seem to hold up under scrutiny despite its popularity as an explanation.
Perhaps you would like to propose an explanation alternate to genes, supported by cites. You wanted cites; I’ve given them repeatedly on this board, and they are simply ignored or replied to with the sort of vapid smugness you demonstrate in the above two replies.
Your turn to find a cite supporting genetic equality among these populations.
Your own cite then goes on to list a bunch of cultural factors for poor black performance. I note IQ is conspicuously absent.
All I see is a cite for *wealthier *black parents. Where’s the cite for parental level of education, again? Anyway, I think a disproportionate number of higher-earning blacks will be in fields like entertainment or sports where education isn’t as essential as skill, vs whites, where I think the wealthier segment will skew towards business and the like.
Not that it matters to my antithesis, which is that it is cultural/social factors that account for the differences in both test scores and incomes. Which your own cite agrees with.
My first reply directly addressed your cite. The second wasn’t directed at you.
I’m not even sure what “genetic equality” means. My assertion is twofold: a) the entire “Intelligence of Nations” study is badly flawed and unscientific, and cites have been provided for this - hell, the initial Wiki cite already was adequate in showing that the study was pants.
b) other factors, including geographical, cultural and historical, are an adequate explanation for the differences in development between nations. If you’d like cites for that, you can start with Diamond and get back to me when you’ve refuted him.
The score difference cite I gave you is from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, as you may have noticed.
It does propose that one possible explanation for the fact that wealthy blacks underscore poor whites is the rigor of preparatory classes taken; it does not propose that school systems available to wealthy blacks are inferior to those available to poor whites, and of course that is not the case. In any given high school in the nation–certainly 100% of high schools in Illinois (and I’ve given that cite before) asians and whites as a group always outscore blacks even within the exact same school. To the best of my knowledge there is not a single exception to this in the entire nation.
Pleading underpreparedness for those who are wealthy as compared to those who are poor grasps at a straw.
by Mr Dibble:
“All I see is a cite for wealthier black parents. Where’s the cite for parental level of education, again?”
Here’s a cite to show that children of highly educated (graduate level) black parents barely even outscore white children of parents who did not even complete high school. I believe the graphs you are looking for are figures 5 and 6.
I have many, many more; as I’ve mentioned, this is such a repeatable pattern in every school system in the world it becomes difficult to find reasons other than disparate innate ability. But I await your cites.
It is possible, I suppose, to accept that some sort of vague “cultural” reasons might underlie these performance gaps. Perhaps blacks, as a group, are culturally predisposed to not learn, or not take advantage of educational opportunities even if they are wealthy enough to have unlimited opportunity. Perhaps well-educated black parents have a culture of advising their children to underperform in school, take mediocre-track courses, and be satisfied with lousy grades and poor learning. But I remain unconvinced of this, particularly given their successes elsewhere.
It may be helpful to look at non African examples, as it is clearly an emotive topic.
If I’m reading this discussion correctly then Chief Pedant and others are claiming that ethnicity is a determinant of IQ which is responsible for economic growth? The counter argument is that broader structural constraints are responsible for the economic underdevelopment of particular countries.
For those that attribute responsibility to ethnicity I would ask how do you account for:
Economic difference between North and South Korea?
The stagnation of the Indian economy during the colonial era (it fell from 23% of the world economy to approx 3%).
The poor economic development of Romania, Bulgaria and Albania?
Why is the GDP of Singapore far higher than that of Indonesia?
Congo is one of the poorest and most devastated of all African countries, do you think that its treatment by Belgium has any responsibility for this?
I would argue that these are all examples of internal and external structural forces that explain massive differences in wealth and economic growth. And I believe that none of them are down to ethnic factors, cultural in some cases but not related to IQ.
Given that there are numerous examples of this throughout history it seems that singling out Africans as particularly ‘low IQ’ now is unnecessary. The Irish at one point were thought to be completely uneducable and suitable only for manual labour, they seemed to turn out OK.
