Noli Irritare Leones

First, see Chris Lowe’s comment on my earlier Saletan post for a really good set of criticisms of Saletan’s argument, that I missed making.

Second, before I get into the round up of other blogs, a quick clarification on my use of the words “dumb” and “stupid” in this post. Jose Solano has pointed out that equating “stupid” with low IQ may be problematic; he’s right. High IQ people are certainly capable of being stupid in their own way, and low IQ people can have real smarts in matters not measured by IQ tests.

But I’m not sure “low IQ” would quite get across the same impact I want to convey, here, with the words “stupid” and “dumb” – namely, that there are people who really do believe that black people are, in pretty much any sense of the word, relatively stupid – and discussions of IQ tests and “g” factors are highly charged precisely because of such beliefs. I really do think “black people are stupid and can’t restrain themselves” is a fair summary of Rushton’s views, for example (and Saletan’s heavily relying on Rushton), and his occasional talk about how black people are good at something or other, and after all well adapted to Africa, doesn’t conceal the fact that he’s assigned to black people all the qualities he himself doesn’t much like. So, consider “stupid” more a slam at particular political uses of IQ and what people like Rushton really mean to say about groups that score low on the IQ test than of all the people who may score poorly on the test. (But see the link to Stentor at the end for a caveat about the different kinds of biases that may affect columnists’ views on IQ and intelligence.)

Still, here’s a page on the theory of multiple intelligences, which seems relevant to Jose’s comment.

The theory of multiple intelligences was developed in 1983 by Dr. Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University. It suggests that the traditional notion of intelligence, based on I.Q. testing, is far too limited. Instead, Dr. Gardner proposes eight different intelligences to account for a broader range of human potential in children and adults. These intelligences are:

• Linguistic intelligence (”word smart”):
• Logical-mathematical intelligence (”number/reasoning smart”)
• Spatial intelligence (”picture smart”)
• Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence (”body smart”)
• Musical intelligence (”music smart”)
• Interpersonal intelligence (”people smart”)
• Intrapersonal intelligence (”self smart”)
• Naturalist intelligence (”nature smart”)

Robert Farley wonders why Saletan fails to draw any public policy conclusions from his argument whatsoever.

And so, now that we have this finding, what are the implications for public policy? Surely, demonstrating the intellectual inferiority of Africans should have a significant impact of various public policy choices. Our foreign aid strategy should change, because sending money to Africa based on the assumption that Africans are capable of understanding complex concepts like “economics” is surely a waste. The implications for immigration are clear; more Asians and Europeans, fewer Africans. While Saletan suggests that race mixing can bring blacks up to white intellectual levels, it would be irresponsible not to consider that the opposite might happen; miscegenation, on average, is going to result in a child intellectually inferior to its white counterparts. Family assistance and affirmative action will need to be radically restructured, if not eliminated entirely.

What? Saletan doesn’t propose any of that? Why not? Really, if the science is as compelling as Saletan claims, it would be absurd not to use the findings to guide public policy. Yet, Saletan specifically discounts the idea of using this race science to guide policy. Again, why? It’s almost as if Saletan doesn’t really believe everything that he’s just argued. It’s almost as if his grasp on the science is so shaky that he has no confidence in the claims that he’s supporting. Indeed, it’s almost as if he wrote the columns solely as an exercise in angering liberals.

Doing away with affirmative action leaps out as an obvious policy implication of Saletan’s argument, and one which would be immensely popular with white people.

In fact, Andrew Sullivan, who’s been heavily promoting Saletan’s race and IQ columns, is on record as opposing affirmative action. I had more trouble finding any place where Saletan had directly stated his views on affirmative action, but this column implies he’s against it.

And what exactly are Ehrlich’s reprehensible positions? … Worst of all, says Townsend, Ehrlich favors “affirmative action based on wealth” instead of race….

In a nutshell, Ehrlich sounds like my kind of guy. I’d like to pull the lever for him …

Sullivan and probably Saletan have plenty of company in their distaste for affirmative action. I checked the General Social Survey data, and 71.3% of white people responding were strongly against using affirmative action in hiring blacks. Another 19.8% were against, leaving only 8.9% to be in favor, strongly or otherwise. In contrast, 60.6% of black people were in favor of affirmative action to hire black people, 45% of them strongly in favor. The odds that we would ever see both a general consensus that those black folks are just dumber than us and ongoing support for affirmative action look pretty slender to me.

Why does Saletan ignore this apparently popular policy implication, in favor of a listing of reasons why, even if black people are on average lower in IQ than white people, we still shouldn’t discriminate against them? It could be, as Robert suggests, that for all his talk about “liberal creationism,” Saletan doesn’t have that much confidence in his argument. But also, even if you do both believe, in all sincerity, that affirmative action is bad, and that black people are on average stupider, it certainly sounds better to offer a colorblind reason why affirmative action is bad than to argue that it’s bad because black people are just dumber than us.

Other people have been less shy than Saletan about drawing public policy conclusions from this supposed evidence. Bradley S. Rocket writes

Dr. Atrios posts this 1994 transcript from PBS’ News Hour of several polite and serious people politely and seriously debating whether black people are born stupider than us whiteys. This graf in particular tells you everything you need to know about Mr. Murray’s “thesis”:

MR. MAC NEIL: Given The Bell Curve’s thesis that intelligence, in large part, is something one is born with and can’t be changed, Murray and Herrnstein argue that the current anti-poverty programs such as “Head Start” and affirmative action are ineffectual and a waste of money.

In other words: “No more money for stupid and hopeless niggers!! Spend it on no-bid contracts for my corporate masters instead!!!”

Matthew Yglesias notes an odd reversal.

Saletan and my bloggy colleagues seem to have convinced themselves that there’s overwhelming opposition in public opinion to the view that whites are intrinsically smarter than blacks and also that there’s strong scientific consensus in favor of that hypothesis. As best I can tell, however, neither is true. The “black genes make you dumb” crowd is siding with widely-held popular prejudice against what most researchers believe.

Atrios asks Are They This Stupid?

The thing about the perpetual attempts to claim that TEH SCIENCE proves that black people really are stupid is that there are two simple fallacies that they are based on.

The first one is that the “intelligence” tests used in the data actually measure some sort of immutable inherent or potential intelligence when in fact people can be educated to do better on the tests.

The second is that race generally or especially as understood in America bears any relationship to the concept of “population” as understood by geneticists.

Elliot has a bit to say about William Jennings Bryan.

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.”

Well, he had some reason to think this was what evolution meant:

As Michael Kazin points out in his recent biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, the textbook in question at the “Monkey Trial’’-the prosecution in 1925 of Tennessee biology teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution-was titled A Civic Biology. Along with an explanation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it included a vigorous endorsement of eugenics, describing classes of the poor and “feeble-minded” as “true parasites…if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”

…

… Now we know that Social Darwinism was a pseudo-scientific ideology, while Darwinian biology is excellent science. But Bryan and others didn’t have the benefit of our hindsight. (See here for a bit more background.)

Crooked Timber rounds up the take downs of Saletan, and Kieran Healey remarks

I was going to write that it is astonishing how persistent this rubbish is. (Philippe Rushton has been on the scene for ages. And, if I remember right, a few years ago he sent out one of his little pamphlets to all the members of the American Sociological Association.) But really, it’s not astonishing at all. While racist cranks will likely always be with us, their persistent ability to get the attention of the likes of Saletan is a predictable consequence of the interaction between a part of American intellectual and political life with some key facts about American history and social structure. I haven’t seen such exquisite handwringing about the hard facts of life since the schmibertarians started justifying torture.

Much of the commentary concerns the dubious authority of Saletan’s chief source, J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton is a longstanding proponent of all kinds of supposed genetic racial differences. According to Rushton, compared to white people, black people have

• smaller brains
• less intelligence
• less sexual restraint
• bigger penises
• faster maturation
• less lawabidingness
• use “r” reproductive strategies, in contrast to white people’s “K” strategy

That last is pseudo-scientific language for “those black people breed like cockroaches.” An “r” strategy means that you have lots of kids and don’t invest much in taking care of them. Rushton also makes heavy use of the “model minority”; all those things that black people are supposed to be especially bad at, relative to white people, East Asians are supposed to be especially good at (though perhaps not quite as much smarter and more restrained than white people as white people are smarter and more restrained than black people). And vice versa.

One or another of those supposed differences might be plausible. Take penis size, for example. Are black men larger than white men? Oh, maybe, for all I know. I don’t have evidence to the contrary. Or any particularly well designed stuides in favor, come to think of it. But, hey, nose size varies by ethnicity, so, why not believe Penthouse Forum?

But when you look at a claim that black people have bigger penises and smaller brains and grow up faster and have less sexual restraint and less law abidingness, well, how likely is it that such a terribly convenient confirmation of everything racist apologists for slavery and Jim Crow have always claimed just happens to all be true? How likely is it that everything our culture sees as animalistic, everything we white people don’t want to believe about ourselves, just happens to be concentrated among black people? There wouldn’t be any cherry picking, here, and finger on the scale? Unsurprisingly, there is.

Although Rushton (1988, 1990a, 1991) implied that Blacks are consistently found to have smaller brains than Whites, some of the studies listed in his reviews actually show opposite trends: North American Blacks were superior to American Whites in brain weight (see Tobias, 1970, p. 6:1355 g vs. 1301 g) or were found to have cranial capacities favorably comparable to the average for various samples of Caucasians (see Herskovits, 1930) and number of excess neurons larger than many groups of Caucasoids, for example, the English and the French (see Tobias, 1970, p. 9). In general, skulls from people in countries with poverty and infant malnutrition are smaller regardless of race. This trend is apparent even in Rushton’s (1990b) tabularly summary of Herskovits’ s review: Caucasoids from Cairo had far smaller crania than North American Negroes (see more details in Cernovsky, 1992). In this respect, Rushton (1990a, 1990b, 1990c) also repeatedly misrepresented findings by Beals, Smith, and Dodd (1984) on cranial capacity. Rushton implied that Beals et al. presented large-scale evidence for racial inferiority of the Blacks with respect to cranial size. De facto, extensive statistical analyses by Beals et al. showed that cranial size varies primarily with climatic zones (e.g., distance from the equator), not race. According to Beals et al., the correlations of brain size to race are spurious: smaller crania are found in warmer climates, irrespective of race.

…

In a similar vein, some of Rushton’s references to scientific literature with respects to racial differences in sexual characteristics turned out to be references to a nonscientific semipornographic book and to an article in the Penthouse Forum (see a review in Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegler, 1991). Rushton’s claims that fertility rates are higher in Blacks disharmonize with well-known high figures for some Caucasoids such as North American Hutterites (a group of Swiss- German ancestry, see a review in Weizmann et al., 1990, 1991). Rushton’ s claims about racial differences with respect to brain, intelligence, crime, sexuality, and fertility (and also twinning rates; see Lynn, 1989a, 1989b; Weizmann et al., 1991) are based on an extremely biased and inadequate review of literature.

…

In summary, although Rushton’s writings and public speeches instill the vision of Blacks as small-brained, oversexed criminals who multiply at a fast rate and are afflicted with mental disease, his views are neither based on a bona fide scientific review of literature nor on contemporary scientific methodology. His dogma of bioevolutionary inferiority of Negroids is not supported by empirical evidence. Acceptance of similar theories should not be based on racist prejudice but on objective standards, that is, conceptual and logical consistency and integrity, quality of methods and data, and an analysis of disconfirmatory trends. Rushton’s racial theory does not meet any of these standards. (emphasis added)

Some related stuff that’s not directly in response to Saletan:

Eric Turkheimer discusses why “race science” is objectionable.

If the question of African IQ is a matter of empirical science, exactly what piece of evidence are we waiting for? What would finally convince the racialists that they are wrong? Nothing, it seems to me, except the arrival of the day when the IQ gap disappears, and that is going to take a while. The history of Africans in the modern West is roughly as follows: Millennia of minding their own business in Africa, followed by 200 years of enslavement by a foreign civilization, followed by 100 years of Jim Crow oppression, followed by fifty years of very incomplete equality and freedom. And now the scientific establishment, apparently even the progressive scientific establishment, is impatient enough with Africans’ social development that it seems reasonable to ask whether the problem is in the descendants of our former slaves’ genes. If that isn’t offensive I don’t know what is.

Elsewhere at Cato Unbound, here’s Stephen J. Ceci on why the Flynn effect is so devastating to the claim that IQ tests are primarily measuring inherited intelligence.

So when Flynn revealed massive IQ gains over the course of the 20th century, he threw a spanner into the syllogism by revealing several paradoxes. How can IQ be a test of general intelligence (g) that is biologically driven and highly heritable and yet improve so quickly—often rising dramatically within a single generation?

…

Each of us gains every year approximately .3 of an IQ point (6 IQ points every twenty years), and this has been found for nearly 30 nations. It was a secret before Flynn and others made this discovery because the IQ tests were periodically re-normed and the average scores were reset to 100 even if the average person had actually scored a 106. The size of the IQ gain is smaller on tests that are more directly taught in school and home (e.g., vocabulary, arithmetic) and largest on tests that would seem unrelated to schooling (e.g., matrices, detecting similarities).

Hold that fact for a moment. Remember where Saletan claimed that black people score relatively worse on precisely the tests of intelligence that are most likely to be genetic? And remember how I said that Saletan wasn’t any too specific about which tests showed the largest black/white IQ gap, but Thomas Sowell was? Well, here’s what Sowell had to say.

[T]he greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability….

On the face of it, tests of spatial perceptual ability would seem less likely to be culturally biased than tests of middle-class vocabulary, and more likely to indicate real genetic differences between the races, right? No doubt that’s what Saletan has inferred. But notice how these very tests, where black people are particularly prone to do worse than white people, are the same ones that are most prone to the Flynn effect, the ones where scores are rising most rapidly? Given that our genes aren’t changing nearly so rapidly, there has got to be a strong environmental component on exactly those tests that are being used as evidence on the born inferiority of black people.

Stephen J. Gould’s review of The Bell Curve has lots of interesting points, but I’ll draw your attention to just one:

As for Kaus’s second issue, cultural bias, the presentation of it in The Bell Curve matches Arthur Jensen’s and that of other hereditarians, in confusing a technical (and proper) meaning of “bias” (I call is “S–bias,” for “statistical”) with the entirely different vernacular concept (I call it “V–bias”) that provokes popular debate. All these authors swear up and down (and I agree with them completely) that the tests are not biased—in the statistician’s definition. Lack of S–bias means that the same score, when it is achieved by members of different groups, predicts the same thing; that is, a black person and a white person with identical scores will have the same probabilities for doing anything that IQ is supposed to predict.

But V–bias, the source of public concern, embodies an entirely different issue, which, unfortunately, uses the same word. The public wants to know whether blacks average 85 and whites 100 because society treats blacks unfairly—that is, whether lower black scores record biases in this social sense. And this crucial question (to which we do not know the answer) cannot be addressed by a demonstration that S–bias doesn’t exist, which is the only issues analyzed, however correctly, in The Bell Curve

Finally, Stentor makes a good point about the different kinds of biases that may be at work in this debate. While I do still think that at least some people (Rushton in particular) really are likely to be seeing the differences that they’re motivated to see (his whole set of conclusions is hard to read any other way), Stentor’s right that seeing what you want to see isn’t our only source of bias:

I noticed an interesting aspect to their denunciations: the cause of the columnists’ error, insofar as one is asserted or hinted at, is portrayed as motivational bias. That is, while these columnists are not necessarily racist per se, it’s also not exactly a negative influence on their lifestyle to decide that their race is smarter, so they like and want the conclusions they’re coming to…. What’s not raised as a possible explanation is interpretational bias. What I mean is the tendency to take one’s own culture as an obvious universal norm, and therefore to see people from other cultures as coming up short (a tendency that is stronger for people in dominant groups, since that dominance means they are less likely to encounter a situation where they’re forced to question those assumptions). I find the comparative inattention to interpretational bias curious since the most common anti-racist attack on intelligence testing is that the tests assume certain norms and background knowledge that make sense for middle-class whites, but which can’t be assumed — and therefore lead to poorer test performance — on the part of people from other backgrounds.

If I suspect Rushton (and at least some others) to be influenced by what Stentor calls motivational bias – I think he really, really wants to see black people as dumb and unrestrained – people reading and commenting on his findings may have varying combinations of motivational and interpretational bias.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.