As we have seen in P.1 the science of modern intelligence tests started with Francis Galton the originator of Eugenics. In 1904, Galton concluded a lecture to the Sociological Society held at London University by saying that academics should eventually accept the tenets of eugenics "as a fact" and then give "serious con­sideration" to the practical development of the field. Eugenics, he said, should enter the "national conscience, like a new religion.” (Francis Galton, "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims," American Journal of Sociology 10 (1904): 5.)

Much improved since the time of Galton, today intelligence tests provide probabilistic predictions. A person with an IQ of 120 is more likely to have a white-collar job, and be successful at it, than someone with a 90 IQ. Poor people, welfare recipients, criminals behind bars, high school dropouts, the unemployed, and single mothers tend, to varying degrees, to have low IQs. High scorers, on the other hand, tend to be healthier and live longer than their low-scoring counterparts. The predictive rates are never great, but they exist.

In terms of understanding what an individual can and can't do, however, it's not clear what IQ scores tell us. What IQ must a student have to be able to learn calculus, for instance? IQ scores do not tell us with any certainty what someone is capable of understanding, although they are used as if they do all the time. The most extreme example is death penalty cases in the United States. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, despite having ruled the opposite about a dozen years earlier, that states could no longer execute the mentally retarded, believing that their lack of intelligence affects how they behave, think, talk, and understand the world around them. The mentally retarded often might know the difference between right and wrong, the Supreme Court acknowledged, but they have "diminished capacities to understand and process information, to communicate, to abstract from mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand the reactions of others. There is no evidence that they are more likely to engage in criminal conduct than others, but there is abundant evidence that they often act on impulse rather than pursuant to a premeditated plan, and that in group settings they are followers rather than leaders."

However, whenever IQ is discussed, race is the six-ton woolly mammoth standing in the corner of the room. It's always there, even if the speakers choose not to acknowledge it. It doesn't have to be this way-in fact, it shouldn't even be an issue-but for some reason, American psychology is obsessed with the subject. In the main, studying different "races'" IQs is not considered a worthwhile scientific endeavor beyond U.S. borders. Given the history discussed in the previous fourteen chapters, as well as the evidence that IQ tests measure knowledge and difficult-to-define abstract problem-solving abilities rather than innate intelligence, it's hard to believe that the study of racial differences is taken seriously. In the early twentieth century, American psychologists such as Henry Goddard used to report on the varying intelligence of European "races" and nationalities arriving on Ellis Island. People eventually viewed these studies as bogus, but for some reason many American psychologists think the study of black-white differences remains scientifically viable (as well as reports, collaterally, on Asian and Jewish populations' intelligence).

Even assuming that one buys into the existence of biologically distinct "races," the roughness of IQ tests ought to lead, at a minimum, to agnosticism on the subject. Until people live in equal conditions in terms of education, income, and health, and there exist far more exact mental measurement tools than IQ tests, there should be a collective shrugging of shoulders. Even then, it's not clear why the subject would be particularly interesting or useful.

Psychologists continue to pursue this nauseating inquiry, however, often becoming defensive when asked why it's important to study, but not coming up with satisfying answers to the question. Academic freedom is important, and if they choose to make a study of the issue, no one should stop them. But the obsession is strange and, at times, harmful. To witness the work and opinions on the subject of race differences, - December 2004 conference in New Orleans was illustrative. There, intelligence researchers from the United States and Europe gathered for the Fifth Annual Conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), which was held in the ballroom up the wide staircase of the Bourbon Hotel. For much of their time the attendees listened to talks about how general intelligence might differ in men and women, blacks, whites, and Asians. Outside the high-ceilinged, chandeliered conference room, beyond the gray curtains covering tall windows and all traces of natural light, revelers engaged in decidedly low-g activity on Bourbon Street. While young ladies from around the country lifted their shirts for plastic beads thrown by men chugging beer from gigantic plastic boots, the mood inside the ballroom was decidedly more somber.

Earl Hunt, a psychologist from the University of Washington, said that the ISIR "is the conservative wing [of intelligence research], if you will." Hunt doesn't mean this in the political sense, but rather that the social scientists-mainly psychologists by and large believe wholeheartedly in g. For many ISIR members, as opposed to most Americans, it's easier to talk about how blacks and whites might differ in intelligence than it is to question the existence of g (and it might have helped that there were no African Americans in the ballroom). ~s a result, intelligence researchers are often wary of writers and journalists because many opinions that often (but that are not required to) flow from believing in g are out of step with mainstream political thought.

Many intelligence researchers believe that studies of twins indicate, for instance, that by adulthood our genes determine 80 percent of our intelligence, as measured by IQ tests. Non-psychologist experts (notably geneticists) often believe the percentage is much less. In contrast to what the psychologists think, however, the interesting issue is not what percentage of IQ is inherited, for surely every human ability is some combination of inherited and learned. The ability to lawn-bowl, for example, is surely some mixture, but how interesting is it to know the exact balance? The important question is what IQ tests measure. Once it becomes clear that IQ tests don't measure intelligence, but knowledge and a hard-to-define abstract problem-solving ability, the issue of resolving the exact percentage of heredity versus environment doesn't shed light on black-white differences in intelligence.

Nevertheless, whatever the IQ balance between nature and nurture is, for many laypeople the very thought that heredity might playa large role sounds fatalistic, and indeed it is, to hear many psychologists talk about it. When extrapolated as an explanation of the traditional fifteen-point difference between average black and white test scores-which has held fairly constant over almost a century-the topic,· and its cancerous fatalism, becomes incendiary. Researchers who attend the ISIR conference are more willing than the average citizen to consider and state publicly that this racial gap may be due at least in part to genetic differences. Not all researchers at the ISIR conference believe this, but they unanimously think that they should be honest about whatever science digs up.

"Look, there is a perfectly legitimate discussion of race as a genetic concept," said Hunt. "People say there is no such thing as race or it isn't a biological concept. If we don't use the term 'race' we would have to invent another term for nonrandom clustering of trait markers." He paused for a moment to let that sink in with his interviewer. It's such an emotional and important subject that he was choosing his words very carefully. "Be careful how I said that and think very carefully what nonrandom clustering means. Genes are not distributed randomly over the human species. There are clusters of genes."

As the lawyers say, this statement is not offered for the truth of the matter asserted, but simply to reveal psychologists' mind-set. There is ample opposition, perhaps overwhelmingly, to the concept of race in population genetics, anthropology, and other fields. Whatever one's conclusion, everyone agrees, even the psychologists, that nobody has isolated human "intelligence genes" (or even "IQ genes") and figured out how they differ among the various ethnicities. We are left with IQ test results alone. One would imagine, since the subject is potentially so damaging, that this reality alone would cause people to beg off, but America's obsession with race has guaranteed that the inquiry into race differences will remain with the tenacity of foot fungus: impossible to eradicate, with occasional flare-ups.

Due to the lack of genetic data, discussions of race differences must rely on metaphor and analogy. Hunt is fair-skinned, bald, and suffers from skin cancer, and he used these facts to illustrate that clusters of genes interact with the environment. His doctor once said to him, "'You're a Celt.'" Celts are more likely than other groups to get skin cancer. "'The Celts were doing just fine,'" his doctor pointed out, "'so long as they stayed in England and Ireland, but when they went out and conquered India they got into trouble."

Hunt's skin color metaphor illustrates the field's just-the-facts ma'am professional pride. But what Hunt doesn't share with some of his colleagues is an unfounded fatalism about race and human potential in general that has been endemic in intelligence research since Francis Galton. In off-the-cuff remarks between presentations, Hunt commented that he thought the average fifteen-point difference between blacks and whites is probably the result of environmental differences. He also said that "g is no excuse" in life. In other words, if someone's IQ isn't so high, he's got to work harder the average fifteen-point difference between blacks and whites is probably the result of environmental differences. He also said that "g is no excuse" in life. In other words, if someone's IQ isn't so high, he's got to work harder implying that, within reason, he can probably get to where he wants to go educationally and professionally. Just half an hour earlier another academic, not such a kindly, gnomic fellow as Hunt, said that he asks his son whether he wants to work so hard in his math classes, because the son's IQ scores reveal that he doesn't have much g. IQ results are often like Rorschach blots, to compare them to another antiquated psychological tool; it's not clear what they mean, but people's interpretation of them reflects more about their perspective than it does about the ink on the page.

This IQ fatalism often extends dangerously beyond unhealthy advice to family members. In America, the biggest Rorschach blot moment comes when people discuss this average fifteen-point differential between African Americans and whites-the mean black score being lower, of course. For some the fifteen points indicate that on average blacks are genetically not as smart as whites; for others the point spread means that the tests are biased in favor of whites, or that it reflects differences in each group's environment. To say the least, the different positions lead to heated debates, in large part because nobody comes to these discussions without personal biases, assumptions, or ideological predispositions. And yet at the same time, the discourse is limited to the language of science, lending it the veneer of objectivity. Given that there is ternal debate even within psychology regarding what IQ tests measure, as well as admissions all around that no direct tests of biological mental ability exist, in order to take a stand one way or another on the reasons behind the point spread one must make intellectual leaps and inferences. Even Hans Eysenck, one of the most famous hereditarians of the twentieth century, conceded that science has no test of pure genetic ability: "There is no direct biological test of possible biological differentiation," he wrote, "all the evidence must be circumstantial."

Circumstantial evidence is awfully appealing, however, if one tends to agree with it. Strangely, there appears to be little prudent agnosticism among academic psychologists, or at least among the most vocal ones on the issue of black-white differences. Perhaps the most famous lines about race in the field of intelligence were penned by Arthur Jensen, a professor emeritus of educational psychology at Berkeley. (Now in his eighties, Jensen sat in the front row of the 2004 ISIR conference.) Back in 1969, just four years after the first Head Start program and fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, Jensen caused a brouhaha when he wrote, "Compensatory education has been tried and apparently it has failed." That blacks still lagged behind whites in academic performance and IQ scores led him to state that "we are left with various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference."

Tortured writing, yes, as well as a remarkable statement that led to uproar throughout the nation. The idea that education policy dismantling programs such as Head Start-might be influenced by ultimately inconclusive, IQ-fatalistic positions is sickening. While the environmental differences between Anacostia and Walt Whitman high schools don't prove that their average SAT score differences aren't due to genetics, they do make the hereditarian position an uphill battle.

There are intelligence researchers who look at the same black-" white point spread and conclude that the differences are due to the environment. Joseph Fagan, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, who spoke at the 2004 ISIR Conference, is one of them. When it comes to taking IQ tests, he believes, African Americans are like foreigners in that they grow up speaking a language other than standard English.

"Blacks and whites differ in IQ by 15 points total, there is no debate about that," Fagan said, perhaps the only statement on intelligence and race everyone in the room would agree upon. Fagan's own studies corroborate this finding. In the early 2000s, he gave three groups of students (whites; blacks; and foreign, nonnative English-speaking whites) an IQ test of vocabulary called the Peabody Revised. Sure enough, native English-speaking whites scored the best-sixteen points higher than the African Americans and eighteen points higher than the non-native speakers, keeping roughly to the historical trend.

IQ tests involve word knowledge, Fagan argued, and he wanted to know whether the linguistic playing field could be leveled among his three groups. Fagan first sought to determine whether the black students "spoke another language" (other than standard English) by giving all three groups a test of "black" English. On this test, African Americans answered 85 to 90 percent of the questions correctly while whites, both native and non-native English speakers, could only answer 40 percent of the questions correctly. From this, Fagan inferred that whites speak standard English while African Americans have to speak both standard English and black English, hampering their traditional IQ scores, just like non-native white English speakers' scores are affected.

Fagan then leveled the playing field by providing his subjects with a list of obscure and old words to study-words he presumed they didn't know already, such as "venter," which means belly-and then gave them a vocabulary test. On average, whites, blacks, and non-native English speakers performed the same. Of course, there was still a range of scores, but it couldn't be explained by race or native language. What explained why some people scored better than others, then? Fagan believed that at least part of the answer must be individuals' ability to process information.

To test this information-processing hypothesis, Fagan asked subjects in another experiment to rate a series of pictures of faces they had never seen before for attractiveness. He wasn't actually interested in which faces they thought were attractive, he just wanted to see, without letting on, how well the subjects could remember the faces later in the day, and whether there were black-white differences in this ability. Mter rating the faces, the subjects took the Peabody IQ test, and then Fagan tested how well they could pick the pictures they had seen previously out of a lineup of new faces. On average blacks, whites, and non-native speakers could recognize faces equally well. Just as important, a subject's ability to remember a novel face also predicted IQ score on the Peabody, supporting Fagan's hypothesis that information processing is more important than race or native language.

"Aside from the social importance of the finding," Fagan said, his studies also indicate that IQ has "multiple determinants . . . . One is information processing ability and the second is the information provided by the culture for processing."

Fagan was very careful how he couched his results. "Let me say something very quickly," Fagan was sure to add at the end of his presentation. "I'm not saying there are multiple intelligences. That's not what I'm saying." Multiple intelligences would not have gone over well with the ISIR crowd. What he was saying was that "you can take all sorts of standard tests, give new information and ... erase the black-white differences."

Other researchers have found that once test creators move away from the traditional verbal-nonverbal IQ test model, black-white differences look substantially different. They have discovered that blacks and whites of similar background ("e.g., age, sex, parent education, community setting, and region") score much closer together on some nonverbal tests. On Jack Naglieri's Cognitive Assessment System, for example, blacks were shown tq have an average score of 95.3 while whites had a 98.8. On Naglieri's Nonverbal Performance Test, however, blacks outscored whites on average, 99.3 to 95.1. Psychologist Robert Sternberg, at Yale, has similarly found that he can reduce differences among ethnic groups on the SAT and GMAT (the business school entrance exam) by devising questions that augment those exams' narrow content.

During the question-and-answer time after Joseph Fagan's talk at the ISIR conference, only one or two hands went up, and people asked small, technical questions. Fagan's argument that IQ tests measure knowledge and cultural differences, like much of intelligence research, has been around a while, so people probably thought it was unsurprising. His paper was, however, a direct rebuttal to the work of Arthur Jensen, the retired DC Berkeley professor who sat, sometimes with a small smile on his face, throughout Fagan's talk but said not a word. In the past he has told an interviewer that "insufficient familiarity with standard English and the use of 'Black English' was a popular claim in the 1960s and '70s." In contrast to the evidence presented in Naglieri's CAS and Nonverbal Performance Test, Jensen said, "Black-White IQ differences are as large or larger on a variety of non-verbal tests that make no use of alphanumeric symbols as on verbal tests."

He further argues that cultural explanations (differences in diet, education, horne environment, and many others) for the lower average African American scores are not sufficient to explain the consistent differences between blacks and whites. But why should there be a burden to prove that the differences are environmental rather than biological? Given that tools acute enough to answer these questions do not exist, surely the wisest position is to operate as if groups of people are innately equal. Individuals, not groups, can then succeed or fail in any given endeavor as they may.

Cloak themselves in science as they may, when psychologists make claims such as "Compensatory education has been tried and apparently it has failed," they are entering the realm of policy. Ever since Francis Galton in the Victorian era, intelligence researchers have been addicted to making sweeping pronouncements .. about policy and the structure of society-who's at the top, who's at the bottom, and why-a subject well beyond their ken. The issue has existed since Galton first drew up bell curve charts putatively showing that Africans' average innate abilities were lower than Europeans'. Today in America, Galton's intellectual heirs argue that civil rights era legislation should be dismantled because IQ is largely hereditary. As one author put it in the early 1990s, "Failure has plagued the many programs based on 'reverse discrimination' set in place since the 1950s, and scientific research now reveals the reason why this is the case: differences in intelligence are around 70% dependent upon heredity, with other human qualities being rated variably between 50% up to as much as 90 to 95% dependent on heredity. This being the case, the failure of remedial programs based solely on environmental adjustment is easily understandable."

It's not just "scientific research now" that informs some psychologists about the futility of charity, welfare, or affirmative action. Intelligence experts have always relied on the science of the day to argue for cutting social programs. Compare the quotation in the previous paragraph to what Lewis Terman wrote in 1916: "It hardly needs to be emphasized that when charity organizations help the feeble-minded to float along in a social and industrial world, and to produce and rear children after their kind, a doubtful service is rendered. A little psychological research would aid the united charities of any city to direct their expenditures into more profitable channels than would otherwise be possible." The terminology has changed but the message is the same.

When hereditarians take ideological positions, they shouldn't be surprised when people of different political persuasions attack their ideas, but many hereditarians feel particularly battered and abused by the Marxist and left-wing critics of the 1960s and 1970s. They also view modern-day political correctness as anathema to the spirit of free inquiry. Ever since the 1980s, however, the political pendulum has started to swing back in their favor, making them feel akin to the Irish monks who spent the Dark Ages copying the Bible in caves on barren, rocky, westerly isles. While the invaders were tearing down stone churches and aqueducts (in the mode:n case, erecting social and economic programs on the misguided belief that we're all genetically equal), they managed to keep the flame of civilization alive through their research. But, they feel, often at great personal cost.

Intelligence researchers with a hereditarian bent have been treated poorly over the years, which only contributes to their wound-licking state of mind. Their tenured faculty jobs have been threatened and even on occasion their physical persons, simply for stating professional beliefs, which is, after all, what they're paid to do. In the late 1960s, Arthur Jensen's last name was turned into an "ism" synonymous with racism: "Jensenism." The University of California had to provide him with a bodyguard after he had received numerous death threats and after radical students interfered with his classes and speeches.
At the ISIR Conference in 2004, however, there was no need for security at the Bourbon Hotel. Only a few journalists who cover the intelligence beat showed up, and there were no protesters in sight, either. The youth of this generation-at least the ones around the hotel-seemed more focused on inebriation and bartering beads for breasts. Times have changed.

While intelligence researchers find it's safer to occupy the towns again, some ISIR members are still hesitant to talk to journalists, whom they believe often don't understand science or bury it in politically correct reporting. They've also been purposefully burned by reporters in the past. Linda Gottfredson, a controversial sociologist in the Department of Education at the University of Delaware who has had her share of flack, gave large amounts of time to a GQ journalist in 1994, even inviting him home to eat dinner with her family. The magazine sent out a photographer to shoot her and, after the photos were developed, asked her to pick the best one. She did, but she was shocked with the results when the article came out. Retelling the story during a break in the conference, the acrid memory of the article was still evident in her face. She blanched and said GQ made her look like "some kind of devil" in the photograph.
In the article's picture of Gottfredson, her shimmering, fuzzy sepia head floats bodiless, like the image of a wicked witch eerily conjured up in the lake of a fantasy novel. Her tight smile looks menacing, her nose and two moles accentuated, and her gray, full-bodied hair looks like the Heat Mizer from the children's TV Christmas special. All the other photos in the article were edited in the same way, including that of another researcher from Toronto, Canada, who also was in attendance. Taken together, the photos had a rogues' gallery, Khmer Rouge war criminals look about them.

Such treatment makes intelligence researchers wary. The ISIR keynote speaker, Ian Deary, from Edinborough University, only grants interviews by e-mail so he can have complete control over his quotes. And a psychologist from Virginia who became progressively more aggressive during an interview about employment and race said, "You can quote me as saying, I wear a I Hate the Red States T-shirt." In short, the academics are tired of being personally attacked rather than having their ideas addressed.

The problem is, that IQ testing and intelligence research have scientifically justified some remarkably god-awful policies in the past hundred years; in the case of the Nazis, nothing short of murder. So when psychologists start talking about social policies and the structure of society, they should tread wearily in light of their field's sketchy past. Moreover, some ISIR members just come across as wacky, giving a handy hook to journalists who might be looking for it. It's still possible to meet people who use the terms "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" at ISIR meetings. One researcher there argues that "Orientals" have higher IQs than whites and blacks today because during the Ice Age, Asian weather selected for the smartest, who could survive more often than their stupid counterparts by hunting big animals, creating fire, and making tools. Another professor presented a paper showing that the various skin colors of the world actually predict IQ better than race (the lighter the epidermis, the higher the score), rather oddly basing his research solely on a 1966 Italian -language geography textbook. The field of intelligence research contains more cranks than most.

Academics should have wide latitude to debate and research, and not be dragged around behind the proverbial pickup truck for their ideas, but society better be frightfully confident of their positions if it's going to make policy based on them. Just because intelligence researchers are supposed to be scientists doesn't mean they are any better than the rest of us at coming up with sound policies for our countries. In fact, they might be worse.

In real life, Linda Gottfredson, who was pictured unfairly in GQ, is not an evil witch. She tilts her head to one side during conversation and listens intently. She's a nice-looking woman who wore flats, stockings, and long, one-color dresses, either red or blue, to the conference. Her Heat Mizer hair turns out simply to be full-bodied. And for some reason, quite refreshingly, she's still trusting enough to talk to journalists. But although Gottfredson's thoughtful and open, we shouldn't necessarily start drafting or repealing laws after talking to her. Gottfredson came to intelligence research through the sociology of personnel selection. Early in her career she believed in multiple intelligences, but she "kept rummaging around" for aptitudes that could be useful to assess in personnel decisions-aptitudes that would predict who would be a good worker and who wouldn't. By the mid-1980s she discovered psychologists' g and thought it sounded promising. It wasn't long before she began to think about the connections among IQ, employment, race, and crime.

By 1985, Gottfredson was arguing that society's occupational ladder has evolved over time along the lines of people's intelligence. That is, people are brain surgeons because they are smarter than truck drivers are-and that genetics placed a scalpel in the surgeon's hands and a wheel in the driver's. In other words, she believes as Cyril Burt thought in the mid-twentieth century that many people's IQs have sorted them into their natural positions. Society's structure "wasn't ordained by God," she said, "it grew" from differences in intelligence.

Believing that IQ tests measure, in large part, an innate ability called intelligence can lead to positions that exist only through the looking glass. Gottfredson argues that because African Americans on average score 15 points lower than whites do, one in six blacks (the number who score below 75) are at risk for being genetically unable "to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies."

By about 1980, however, the average black IQ score in America was the same as or higher than the white average in the 1930s, due to the inevitable rise of scores in every population. Are blacks today biologically smarter than whites in the 1930s, but not as innately smart as whites today? Human evolution doesn't happen that quickly.

The theory of general intelligence is the very foundation of mainstream intelligence testing over the past century, but even the most ardent proponents of g will admit that it has not been unquestionably established. Take, for example, a quote from near the beginning of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. "The evidence for a general factor in intelligence was pervasive but circumstantial, based on statistical analysis rather than direct observation. Its reality therefore was, and remains, arguable." Once that admission was disposed of quickly in two sentences up front in the book, however, the authors went on to discuss, for 845 pages, policy based entirely on the assumption that g exists, that it is measurable, and that it is innately and unevenly distributed among different socioeconomic classes and ethnicities. Until there is proof beyond statistical relationships of g's existence and measurability, society should not treat IQ tests as if they can meaningfully rank people along a continuum of innate intelligence. For the same reason, all inferences based on IQ test results about race differences are dangerously unfounded.

The argument here is not that IQ tests are never useful; knowing that one job applicant has more general knowledge than another can be helpful. IQ tests can predict, with varying and debated degrees, that high scorers on average will perform better than low ones in certain settings. The problem is, though, that IQ tests' power to describe individuals' abilities is very rough, so when they are used in education, employment, or elsewhere, the tests incorrecdy predict many peoples' future behavior. While the cutoff for enlisting in the U.S. military is an IQ of 80, there are undoubtedly people with IQs of 79 who would make terrific soldiers.

The answer to this problem is to figure out when institutional concerns are greater than individuals' interests. Surely, in the main, having an efficient military outweighs individual career concerns. And more broadly, why should we deprive employers of a tool that will improve their hiring and human resource decisions? Unless a test is patently harmful, there is no reason why businesses should be barred from using an imperfect tool until something better comes along. On the other hand, schools and the legal system should worry more about understanding each individual than considering educational and judicial efficiency. It's not clear from a score of 70, 80, or 110 what a person can and cannot learn or do, despite what psychologists and other experts have led us to believe over the past hundred years.

 

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