On regretfully concluding that your race is just naturally smarter than that other one
William Saletan looks at the data on race and IQ, and is sadly forced to conclude, so he says, that white people are just smarter than those black and brown folks. Yes, he’d so like to be able to believe otherwise.
The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.”
I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t.
Such is always the way with people promoting the idea that the races are just naturally different in IQ. All of us naturally want the races to be equal. So do they. But, while those of us on the liberal side succumb to our warm and fuzzy feelings and believe in equality, they’re the ones brave enough to look the evidence in the face and see the world for what it really is. The possibility that a believe in natural black inferiority in intelligence might have any payoffs for anyone (or at least, anyone but that tiny fringe of racists over there who are not most white people and certainly never you) isn’t acknowledged.
It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.
If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you’re not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn’t just another fact; it’s a threat to their whole value system. As William Jennings Bryan put it during the Scopes trial, evolution meant elevating “supposedly superior intellects,” “eliminating the weak,” “paralyzing the hope of reform,” jeopardizing “the doctrine of brotherhood,” and undermining “the sympathetic activities of a civilized society.”
Darn right, this line of argument makes me angry. It makes me angry that Saletan is misrepresenting the state of the scientific evidence, here, and suggesting that belief that racial differences in IQ scores are heavily determined by the known environmental differences between the races is on the same sort of scientific standing as belief in young earth creationism. When the head of the NIH responds to James Watson’s remarks about race and intelligence with
The comments, which were attributed to Dr. James Watson earlier this week in the London Times, are wrong, from every point of view—not the least of which is that they are completely inconsistent with the body of research literature in this area. Scientific prestige is never a substitute for knowledge. As scientists, we are outraged and saddened when science is used to perpetuate prejudice.
he is apparently, from Saletan’s point of view, the moral equivalent of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes monkey trial. Even Saletan has to admit, the very next day, that there are scientists and studies lined up on the side of environmental causes. So why lead with the suggestion that Rushton and Jensen have won the day, that disagreeing with them is like disbelieving the geological evidence for evolution. To be all controversial and contrarian? As a summary of the actual state of the scientific evidence on intelligence, this creationism analogy is irresponsible.
But the tests on which racial gaps are biggest happen to be the tests on which genes, as measured by comparative sibling performance, exert the biggest influence.
At no point in his series does Saletan ever spell out the evidence for this statement. You have to take his word for it. White people, apparently, have bigger heads than black people, and
The more black and white scores differ on a test, the more performance on that test correlates with head size and “g,” a measure of the test’s emphasis on general intelligence.
Again, no reference. We don’t know who administered the tests in question, under what circumstances, whether the results were published in a peer reviewed journal and where, or anything, really, other than the fact that someone, somewhere, concluded that black people score worse than white people on precisely those tests than correlate best with head size.
On the face of it, this seems an unlikely result, even if we do live in the world where there are real genetic racial differences, on average, in intelligence. Because, even if we do live in that hypothetical world, it can also be plainly seen that we live in the world where black and white people face different environments. So why would racial IQ differences never be more significant in a test that’s known to be heavily influenced by environment? Do black people have such overwhelmingly better childhood environments than white people that environment mitigates their natural stupidity? Color me suspicious. In the absence of actual cites, I suspect cherry picking – someone with a vested interest in believing in racial differences in IQ probably did a literature review and then looked for any evidence of genetic correlation on precisely the tests where black people scored worst.
Scientists have already identified genes that influence brain size and vary by continent. Whether these play a role in racial IQ gaps, nobody knows.
And of course, if a gene can be found that correlates with intelligence and is found more often in Europe, there wouldn’t also, in the whole genetically diverse continent of Africa, be any genes that correlate with intelligence and aren’t so often found in Europe. And there wouldn’t be any way of biasing this kind of search. Such as, say, looking first among white people for genes that correlate with intelligence, and then over in Africa to see whether you can find the same genes.
In fact, there’s a mountain of evidence that differential evolution has left each population with a balance of traits that could be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on circumstances. The list of differences is long and intricate.
And pretty darn suspicious, in the way that Rushton’s conclusions just happen to line up in a way that allows us white people to claim all the traits on which we pride ourselves, and consign to black people all the traits that we view with suspicion. But, no, that wouldn’t be the result we’d actually want to find, would it? There’s the oh so convenient (and conveniently small, and not possessed of power, in the US anyway) model minority of Asian-Americans, who can be used to demonstrate our objectivity. We’re naturally smarter than black and brown people, but Asian-Americans are just a little smarter than us, on average, so, see, we’re being honest!
Possibly, genes for cognitive complexity became so crucial in some places that nature favored them over genes for developmental speed and vision. If so, fitness for today’s world is mostly dumb luck. If we lived in a savannah, kids programmed to mature slowly and grow big brains would be toast. Instead, we live in a world of zoos, supermarkets, pediatricians, pharmaceuticals, and information technology.
Because, you know, white people have had more pharmaceuticals and information technology than black people for thousands of years. The world of the Vikings just inherently required more cognitive complexity than did Timbuktu.
On day 2, Saletan looks at the environmental impact on intelligence, and is forced to concede some points to the other side. But he still holds his ground.
You also have to explain why, on IQ tests, white kids of parents with low incomes and low IQs outscore black kids of parents with high incomes and high IQs. Or why Inuits and Native Americans outscore American blacks.
Another highly counterintuitive claim about IQ which isn’t sufficiently referenced that you can find out what studies are being described, or how “low income” and “low IQ” were defined. It seems counter to what I see in the real world around me, where smart black parents do indeed seem to have smart black children (as can be seen, for example, in the record of a certain Presidential candidate, whose does seem to be the intelligent son of an intelligent, if not exactly involved, father). And, if intelligence is largely genetic, why wouldn’t smart black people be more likely than stupid white people to have genes for intelligence and pass them on? Even in the world where racial differences are largely genetic, it seems unlikely that they’d work this way. Color me extremely skeptical that Saletan is accurately describing these studies.
The current favorite alternative to a genetic explanation is that black kids grow up in a less intellectually supportive culture. This is a testament to how far the race discussion has shifted to the right. Twenty years ago, conservatives were blaming culture, while liberals blamed racism and poverty. Now liberals are blaming culture because the emerging alternative, genetics, is even more repellent.
Twenty-five years ago, I remember listening to my sociology professor, Sandy Dornbusch, as he told me about a study on differences in academic performance, between black and white children, in a particular school. I think it was actually a study in which he had been involved (though I can’t swear to it, all these years later). What Dornbusch had found, he said, was that the teachers in this particular school did treat their black and white students differently. In the nicest possible fashion. They were warm to the black children. They were encouraging. What they weren’t, was demanding. White children were told straight out when their performance wasn’t up to snuff, while black children were given warm and fuzzy feedback regardless.
This is just one study; it isn’t the universal explanation for differences between black and white children in school. I bring it up only to show that race figures in variable ways. There’s the kind of blatant racism that’s reflected in the story in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where a white official describes at her school all of the new academic supplies that are going to the white school (still in a time of segregation), and the brand new sports equipment that’s going to hers. And there’s the soft bigotry of low expectations that Sandy Dornbusch found in that other school. And then there are, yes, cultural differences in things like emphasis on academics, which liberals have never denied, not twenty years ago any more than today. Back when I was in college, just as now, my liberal friends tended to attribute high Jewish scores on IQ tests to Jewish cultural emphasis on study.
What’s denied, by liberals, is that those cultural differences rise in a vacuum, and are disconnected from the routes to success that the world at large makes most readily available to different groups. Cultural differences and racism interact.
Incidentally, when Saletan says that “This is a testament to how far the race discussion has shifted to the right,” he elides over the question of whose race discussion has shifted to the right. That of scientists? The discussion in the popular press? And he ignores the fact that, twenty years ago, conservatives were actually pushing both cultural differences and genetic ones (remember Shockley?), and that this is still the case today.
Take a look, for example, at the words of very conservative Thomas Sowell. On the one hand, he semi-defends The Bell Curve on the issue of whether real racial differences in intelligence exist at all; on the other hand, he does so in a way that clearly indicates that he considers that the differences are a matter of culture and environment.
Nowhere else in the world was such a literature of justification of slavery produced as in the antebellum South, because nowhere else was slavery under such sustained attack. An especially virulent racism arose to try to justify slavery, and this racism lasted long after slavery itself was gone.
That history and its painful consequences are undeniable. But, in a world where whole nations have in effect raised their IQs by 20 points in one generation, it is time for black “leaders” and white “friends” to stop trying to discredit the tests and get on with the job of improving the skills that the tests measure.
A number of black schools, even in rundown ghettos, have already reached or exceeded national norms on tests, so there is no question that it can be done. The question is whether it will in fact be done, on a large enough scale to change the abysmal educational results in too many predominantly black schools.
Sowell in 2002 is making the same points about IQ as Sowell made in 1995 – that racial IQ differences are real, but caused by environment and changeable over time. He hasn’t leapt from the cultural to the genetic side of the fence in response to the supposed weight of new evidence. But let me quote Sowell circa 1995, as he brings forward one of the more telling reasons to be skeptical that racial IQ differences are mostly genetic.
Perhaps the strongest evidence against a genetic basis for intergroup differences in IQ is that the average level of mental test performance has changed very significantly for whole populations over time and, moreover, particular ethnic groups within the population have changed their relative positions during a period when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of these groups.
While The Bell Curve cites the work of James R. Flynn, who found substantial increases in mental test performances from one generation to the next in a number of countries around the world, the authors seem not to acknowledge the devastating implications of that finding for the genetic theory of intergroup differences, or for their own reiteration of long-standing claims that the higher fertility of low-IQ groups implies a declining national IQ level. This latter claim is indeed logically consistent with the assumption that genetics is a major factor in interracial differences in IQ scores. But ultimately this too is an empirical issue–and empirical evidence has likewise refuted the claim that IQ test performance would decline over time.
Even before Professor Flynn’s studies, mental test results from American soldiers tested in World War II showed that their performances on these tests were higher than the performances of American soldiers in World War I by the equivalent of about 12 IQ points. Perhaps the most dramatic changes were those in the mental test performances of Jews in the United States. The results of World War I mental tests conducted among American soldiers born in Russia–the great majority of whom were Jews–showed such low scores as to cause Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to declare that these results “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.” Within a decade, however, Jews in the United States were scoring above the national average on mental tests, and the data in The Bell Curve indicate that they are now far above the national average in IQ.
Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to “folklore” that “Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence. ” It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results–during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews.
Lots more here, and FWIW, Sowell both does a better job than Saletan at summarizing just which IQ tests show the greatest disparities, and brings forth another interesting point suggestive of non-genetic causes for the IQ disparity.
A remarkable phenomenon commented on in the Moynihan report of thirty years ago goes unnoticed in The Bell Curve–the prevalence of females among blacks who score high on mental tests. Others who have done studies of high- IQ blacks have found several times as many females as males above the 120 IQ level. Since black males and black females have the same genetic inheritance, this substantial disparity must have some other roots, especially since it is not found in studies of high-IQ individuals in the general society, such as the famous Terman studies, which followed high-IQ children into adulthood and later life….
Nothing Saletan says persuades me that Sowell’s 1995 critique of The Bell Curve doesn’t hold just as strongly today.
In fact, Saletan does acknowledge that shift in racial IQ difference over time place a significant dent in the case for black people being just naturally dumber than white people.
The best argument against genetics isn’t in these studies. It’s in data that show shrinkage of the black-white IQ gap over time.
Indeed, shrinkage of the black-white IQ gap over time, in combination with past dramatic improvement in the IQ scores of Jews and immigrant groups like Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans, places a significant dent in the case for the gap being genetic. Saletan tries to get around this by some hand waving comparison of the narrowing in IQ scores to the Iraq troops surge, an argument which, as Robert Farley points out at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, makes no sense.
Having failed to make his case that belief that white and black people just might, given the same environment, have an equal genetic predisposition to be smart is the moral equivalent of creationism, William Saletan turns on day 3 to the much easier question of how you can continue to hold to a general belief in equal human dignity even if you live in a world in which different races have different average levels of intelligence. It’s not hard to predict what this argument will be, and Saletan doesn’t disappoint. All God’s critters got a place in the choir, IQ isn’t everything, stupid people may have compensating advantages, and, in any case, race isn’t that useful a predictor of an actual person’s intelligence. Some of this is actually worth remembering, if you’re in the camp that actually believes that black people are just naturally dumb, and are tempted to use this to evaluate, say, an actual job applicant, with an actual degree from a particular university and a known work history. You are, indeed, better off throwing out whatever you may know about statistical differences in populations as a whole, since you have much more useful information at hand.
1. Individual IQ can’t be predicted from race. According to the data, at least 15 percent to 20 percent of black Americans exceed the average IQ of white Americans. If you think it’s safe to guess that a white job applicant is smarter than a black one, consider this: The most important job in the world is president of the United States. Over the last seven years, the most important judgment relevant to that job was whether to authorize, endorse, or oppose the use of force in Iraq. Among the dozen viable candidates who have applied for the job, one is black. Guess which one got it right?
2. Subgroup IQ can’t be predicted from race. Go back and look at the German study I mentioned yesterday. Kids fathered by black soldiers scored the same as kids fathered by white soldiers. The explanation offered by hereditarians was that blacks in the military were screened for IQ, thereby wiping out the racial IQ gap.
Think about that explanation. It undermines the claim, attributed to James Watson by the Times of London, that “people who have to deal with black employees” find equality untrue. (The Times purports to have Watson’s interview on tape but hasn’t published the whole quote or responded to requests for it.) If employment screens out lower IQs, you can’t infer squat about black employees.
I think, though, that Saletan misses what would be the real problem with reaching the conclusion that racial differences in IQ are genetic. It’s this. We know that the deck is stacked. We know that white people have more of all kinds of stuff – money, income, power, education – than black people. And we know that, even now, lots of white people have one level or another of bias against black people. If black and white people have basically the same natural abilities, then at least we know what the world ought to look like – one in which we have more or less equivalent results. We can still argue about what factors are holding black people back – poor schools, lack of marriage culture, discrimination in the work force, uneven enforcement of drug laws? But we know that, in an equal world, we ought to see more or less equal incomes, rates of college graduation, etc.
If black people are born, on average, stupider than white people, then we don’t know where racism leaves off and where natural differences start. And we do, even in that hypothetical world, know that black people with equivalent abilities get evaluated differently – in other words, even in that world where black people are just naturally dumber, unjust racism would still exist. So, too, would the temptation, if you’re in the privileged group, to ignore evidence of your own privilege – that’s just human nature.
I don’t see any way around this problem. Fortunately, the evidence of shifting population IQs over time (both the narrowing gap between black and white IQ and the actual shift in the relative standing of Jews) says that I don’t have to.
Other blog responses to Saletan.
And, just because I find it interesting, an article about the effect of breastfeeding on IQ.
November 21st, 2007 at 1:59 pm
One thing all this left me wondering is why, if IQ measures fitness for success in a culture created largely by white people (capitalism, industrialism, etc.), Asians and Jews do better at it than white Euros do. Neither the genetic nor the cultural theories really explain this. It’s like the test is less about picking out the ruling class than finding the model minorities.
Actually, Saletan’s description of what high IQ predicts seems to support this: “… finishing high school, staying employed, and avoiding poverty, welfare, or jail.” Important things, no doubt, but it doesn’t tell us who is most likely to make a million dollars, build a better mousetrap, attain political office or start a religious movement. It sounds like IQ predicts how well people adapt to our culture, but actually shaping culture is another matter.
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:01 am
I think you may be onto something about what’s being measured. Other thoughts:
To the extent that Lewis Terman and others like him were measuring things that they themselves were good at, well, they weren’t people who made millions of dollars or started great political movements, either. But they were pretty good at the things high IQ is supposed to predict. Not that that explains why “model minorites” would do better than whites at those things.
Terman is also said to have proposed to use IQ tests to measure children and put them on the right job tracks. So it does seem designed to fill those middle manager and professional sorts of slots, while pushing the lower IQ people toward the more menial things; presumably that sorting doesn’t apply so much to the rich and powerful. In fact, if you’re Paris Hilton, you don’t need to care much what your IQ is.
There could be an effect where groups in the “model minority” position see themselves as at just enough disadvantage that they try harder, but not enough that they lose hope.
The easiest part to understand is why people like Rushton and Jensen would be motivated to find any model minority group they can and work them into their argument. A big part of the benefit of believing that white people are smarter than black people is that you get to believe that you’re not getting any particular unfair advantage; your culture is basically just, any serious wrongs mostly in the past, and it’s nobody’s fault if other groups just happen to lag behind yours. And of course model minorities are great for this; they’re the living proof that the game isn’t rigged.
November 22nd, 2007 at 9:09 am
The William Jennings Bryan reference is kind of a back-handed compliment. Bryan was wrong about evolution and biology but in his own way he was right about the doctrines of Social Darwinism that were being promoted in those days. They were supposedly scientific, too. People will call you an irrational hick if you stand up against cruel policies based on biased pseudo-science, but in the grand scheme of things you may very well be right.
November 22nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
Yeah, I had a similar thought about the creators of IQ tests — they were academics, so their test finds other academics. That would explain why cultures with strong traditions of scholarship do well at them. And academics are indeed more likely to finish school and stay out of jail than other people, but they’re just one component of the dominant culture.
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:14 am
Hi Lynn,
Always a very controversial subject. I’m sorry I’ve only been able to skim over it but I have two general thoughts to share.
Reflecting on evolutionary and genetic theory, if all of humanity is supposed to have a common ancestry stemming theoretically from the Olduvai Gorge, it would seem that to account for the genetic dissimilarity today, intellectual or physical, environmental factors must be seen at work. Of course, if there were several homonoid branches from which homo sapiens sapiens evolved, as some believe, that throws an entirely different light on the issue and over perhaps millions of years there could have been more blending of genetic material in certain areas than others with certain strains developing in regions that were genetically “purer” for one branch than others.
The evolutionists are going to have to work this one out if the geneticists are going to try to account for present variations. Now, because the present human genetic condition is universally so similar and all fertile humans can interbreed—but cannot with any existing homonoids (apes)—and we note that IQ measurements may change among particular groups, it would seem to me that one resolution to discrepancies in IQ would be through environmental efforts over a long period of time.
My second related observation is that whatever the possible origins of humanity, it would be advisable for the overall human situation that there be more interracial marriage and blending of genetic material, especially if there is any merit to the findings of those claiming intelligence “inferiority” of any race. This would go contrary to the selfish and loveless inclination of trying to breed intellectually “superior” humans through specific individual selectivity, as is being done in certain laboratories. It seems reasonable that the blending approach would in time produce a healthier, stronger and more intelligent humanity overall.
Nevertheless, it would be inhuman to try and have any sort of planned-parenthood to achieve this end as it would lead to loveless breeding programs that would devastate the psychological well-being of humanity and undermine the social harmony—already in a grave state—that is always predicated on loving marital and family relationships. The philosophical and ethical problem with the selective IQ breeding program is that it stigmatizes those of lower IQ and raises the question of “what to do with them,” the vast majority of humanity. It somehow identifies level of IQ with level of “goodness,” value or worth, which is total nonsense.
For this reason I have a problem with your referring to those of lower IQ as “stupider.” Stupidity I understand as a mental state that can be just as common among those of high IQ as among those of lower IQ. It is the loveless state that makes one really stupid, and this is unrelated to IQ that measures only particular aptitudes. As a matter of fact, I have a problem with the term “intelligence quotient” itself as it usurps the much more encompassing term “intelligence” related to consciousness.
Happy Thansgiving.
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:47 am
IQ & related tests measure ability to take IQ & related tests. There is a reasons colleges and universities rely on grade measures, receommendations and evidence of achievement & not just on the tests — the tests are not such great predictors even of academic success. I say this as someone who is very successful on the tests but has been impeded by other aspects of who I am, that I would also say should count as part of “general intelligence” but which the tests don’t touch.
Test scores also vary with test taking occasions, sometimes by huge amounts. That’s why students who score lower than they’d like on an SAT are advised to take it again, if they have the means. How much do access to PSATs or multiple testings affect the general statistics.
Test scores are also highly suscpetible to modification by coaching, perhaps particularly in math. After college I did test-oriented tutoring in a couple of contexts. The general mathematics portion of the SAT (or GRE) is largely basic middle school/junior high and early high school math. Students who had forgotten or never learned that material could cram it and have it fresh in mind when they took the tests. Nearly all of my students gained 50 points, and increases of as much as 200 points were not uncommon.
This is a fine critique of Saletan as far as it goes. I particularly like the point about Vikings. But there is so much wrong with his peice…
1) Individuduals have intelligence. Groups or categories do not.
2) Races are social categories, not genetic entities. See the work of geneticist Jonathan Marks for very clear expositions of this.
3) Not all biology is genetic. Many biological factors affecting individual development including neurological function are matters of biological environment.
4) Genetic biology does not operate independently of biological environment. The same gene expresses itself in different ways under different conditions.
5) Races are social categories and are socially and culturally unstable. The same person will be categorized racially in different ways depending on where he or she lives, or would be at different times in the history of a given society.
What limited study there has been of associations of genes responsible for skin pigment shows no evidence that those genes are in any way involved with anything to do with brain development.
6) In addition to the vagueness you’ve pointed out about what is being measured and how, there is a separate vagueness about what is being measured among whom? Just who are black people and white people?
7) The characteristics generally taken to define “races” as understood in the U.S. are primarily skin pigment, and secondarily stereotpypes about facial features and hair texture. There is no evidence or reason why such features, as genetic phenomena, would have anything to due with the genetics of neurology. (Those genetics may have been affected in expression by biological *environmental* influences shaped by social discrimination due to skin pigment etc. , e.g. disproportionate undernutrition, exposure to lead and other hazardous chemicals etc.)
9) Saletan’s main physical (not genetic) argument has to do with purported mean head or brain sizes. But apart from the dubiousness of the argument (not related to body size, for starters) society does not group races on head or brain sizes. Head size is not a racial characteristic.
10) Nor do Saletan or his sources actually show that it is the small-headed individuals within lower mean score categories that contribute the lower scores to the distribution of scores.
11) Which brings us to: the statistical ideas employed by Saletan & the scientifically disreputable sources on which he draws are crude and misleading.
12) Not only has the gap in aggregate national IQ scores been shrinking, but that has gone on at the same time that mean scores among all race-label categories have been rising. This means that the gap as a % of the higher group average has shrunk even more. (Heursitic example, in 1941 group X mean score 100, group Y mean score 80, Y/X=80%. 2001 group X mean score 120, group Y mean score 105, Y/X=87.5%. In gaining 5 points mean relative to group X, group Y gained 5% of 1941 X mean, or 4.2% of 2001 X mean. But Y gained 7.5% in proportion of its mean to X’s mean. This is because X’s gain of 20 mean points is 20% of 100, but Y’s gain of 25 points is 31% of 80 mean points. So Y’s mean score has been increasing by half again the rate as X’s)
13) Means are notoriously bad for comparisons beyond a rough initial indication (more easily subject to distortion than medians), and means without reference to variance are nearly meaningless.
14) Saletan does not deal at all with the fact that the variance of scores within any of these groups is much larger than the variance among their mean scores. The closest he comes is saying 15-20% of blacks score higher than the mean white score (he claims). But what proportion of whites scores lower than the mean black score? And what is the degree of overlap between the scores within one standard deviation of the means?
15) Lack of attention to variation within broad racial categories leads to lack of attention to subcategories that indicate sources of variation that are more certainly more causal than skin pigment, and may in fact go toward defining what “race” means in social and experiential terms. Or put differently, skin pigment may be an occasion for the really causal factors. For instance, in historical army intelligence tests, black soldiers from Ohio had significantly higher average scores than white soldiers from Arkansas. Was this due to selection bias in migration among both blacks and whites? Or is it more likely explained by the condition of education systems in the two state? Or to extend Sowell’s interesting observation cited above about black women’s higher scores (and implicitly, the lack of such striking differences between white women and white men), what does it look like if black women’s mean scores are compared to whites in general, to white men, or to white women?
Given the intellectually rancid quality of the thinking going on here, the speculations about motives and apt comments you provide as to the crocodile tears disingenuousness of Saletan’s tone seem well justified.
November 23rd, 2007 at 10:40 am
[...] see Chris Lowe’s comment on my earlier Saletan post for a really good set of criticisms of Saletan’s argument, that I [...]
November 28th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
I’m sure one of the things that these tests measure is the ability to anticipate what answer the tester or testing entity wants to hear. People who can give the correct answer to a question should score high, but people who know how to give the answer that is both correct and *pleases the teacher* undoubtedly score higher.