@SatchelSF it is interesting to know that (sorry paraphrasing here) “many people hold the belief that the Black Death disproportionately wiped out less intelligent population”, I have never heard anything like that. I only know that Newton was spared from it and thank god for it. 
does smallpox have the same effect on humanity’s intelligence? Survival of the fittest, not the smartest nor the richest.
@makemesmart - I’m not sure I have read anything specifically about smallpox, but I don’t see why smallpox wouldn’t behave in the same way as, say, car accidents or drug overdoses or death from diabetes, etc. Poor life outcomes - including things like plagues that wouldn’t be top of mind when thinking about the subject - seem to disproportionately affect the less intelligent.
There are probably so many confounds of the variables involved that it would be hard to come up with one generalized reason why this is so. For things like the Black Death or small pox (or, insert, cholera, malnutrition, famine, etc.), these are likely to affect people most who live in poor environmental physical conditions. Since one of the benefits of intelligence in much of Western recorded history (and in Asia - especially China with its civil service and academic exam system going back almost a thousand years or more) is increased wealth and hence better living conditions, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at this. (Again, as I always say, we are only talking averages here - of course plagues take the wealthy too and of course some of the wealthy are not that smart and some of the very intelligent are poor, etc.)
Things like car accidents are fascinating. Personally, I believe that since there is such a significant lag between conscious awareness of our physical stimuli and the stimuli themselves, at driving speeds much of the “processing” has to be done unconsciously. There is a clear relationship between raw brain processing speed (as measured by simple reaction time tests like pressing a button) and intelligence (as measured by IQ), and so this may explain part of the observed differences in accident death rates by IQ. (No doubt there are other factors involved like time preference, learning, ability to make inferences, etc.) BTW, I can’t remember the cite offhand, but this simple reaction time/IQ approach has been validated in numerous countries’ air forces - there is a significant correlation between intelligence and fighter pilot ability.
“Survival of the fittest, not the smartest nor the richest.”
Exactly. In certain cultures and periods, intelligence is not much of an advantage. Someone above mentioned putting Einstein’s brain in an Equatoguinean body, but perhaps the more interesting thought experiment is to put an Equatoguinean mind in Einstein’s body in Equatorial Guinea. I suspect he would never make it past a few birthdays, demonstrating that in that society - even with a brain and reasoning capacity that had been selected genetically for the environment there - the physical limitations of having a European body would be devastating. Probably a lot more devastating than having an Equatoguinean body but genius European mind in early 20th century Europe!
We can get all emotional about this, but today in modern Western society, intelligence confers huge advantages. If one were a priori offered the chance to be born with intelligence 3 standard deviations above the mean, but destitute, or with mean intelligence and wealth 3 standard deviations above the mean (in each case, roughly top 0.3%), it really is not much of a choice at all.
Oh, and BTW Newton was about 300 years after the Black Death - he represents the progeny of the generations that survived the cataclysm!
Wow, I feel like I’m getting an elite college education from reading all of these posts. They are all so informative and interesting. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to write so much!
In the US, the intelligent one born into a poor environment may be neglected in terms of intellectual pursuits by overworked parent(s) working multiple jobs to feed the family and by overworked teachers in an underfunded school where there are too many other distractions to pay attention to cultivating achievement from those with the highest academic potential, so there is a good chance that the talent will be wasted. Meanwhile, the average intelligence one born into wealth will be given every opportunity to achieve something that at least appears to be earned (low achievers from high income families graduate college at similar rates as high achievers from low income families) and can usually fall back on a comfortable safety net of family money and inheritance.
@SAY Did you even bother reading my messages ? I have never contested the fact that intelligence as measured by IQ tests is largely heritable, I have even written that this is an uncontroversial view among psychometrics experts as evidenced by the APA’s 1995 statement that I have quoted several times.
However, this a completely different question from determining the causes of group differences in intelligence. There is no consensus on whether those differences stem from genetic or environmental factors.
@SatchelSF The results of PISA do not settle the debate : environmental and cultural explanations are also coherent with the differences highlighted by the test. Especially since the educational systems of the few African countries taking part in the testing are still very weak as pointed out by the OECD.
Furthermore, this lining up of races is not universal. For example, in the UK, children of Black African immigrants score higher on standardized tests (GCSE) than Black Caribbeans and even White British on the average. See for example the 2015 and 2016 results : https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/revised-gcse-and-equivalent-results-in-england-2015-to-2016. There are even evidences suggesting that some students coming from some African groups score even higher : https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/rsu/sites/lambeth.gov.uk.rsu/files/The_Achievement_of_Pupils_with_EAL-An_Empirical_Study_2013.pdf
@Bartleby789 - Definitely, I don’t think PISA results settle any debate on whether group differences in intelligence are innate. They are simply consistent with such a view. Anyway, achievement tests in general are only imperfect correlates with true intelligence tests, for reasons you hint at. One can “teach to the test” if the test is coachable. Almost all countries with low mean IQ have very weak education systems - why is that so? If it is just “poverty” then how do we explain a place like Singapore, which was a poor fishing village almost within living memory, or Korea?
With regard to Black African immigrants in the UK, I do not know the groups well enough there (although I did live in England for a number of years a few decades ago), but I suspect there are massive selection bias issues, just as there are in the US - that is, only the “cream of the crop” emigrate from their home countries, at least with regard to the African ones. As I have said many times, and as anyone who holds to a hereditarian perspective believes, intelligence distribution is probabilistic within group; there will be significant overlap among the groups, and individuals in every group who are far above and below any average you care to look at.
And, getting back to group differences: “There is no consensus [among academics] on whether those [group] differences stem from genetic or environmental factors.” Yes, perhaps, but there is certainly a very strong consensus that to express the view that differences in intelligence are genetic is career-threatening, and can lead to physical violence, impossibility of receiving tenure for new researchers in the field, revocation of grant money, forced sales of Nobel Prizes, “blackballing,” loss of your cushy NT Times editor job, simply being called the “R-word,” etc., after which many will have to spend a lifetime addressing. Just ask Charles Murray, Richard Hernnstein, Richard Lynn, James Watson, Nicholas Wade, Philippe Rushton, Linda Gottfredson, Arthur Jensen, and about a few dozen others (some of course are dead now). Meanwhile, the IQ environmentalists can spend lifetimes accusing everyone of bias, racism, and Nazism and generally trying to destroy the life of anyone who dares to go against current orthodoxy (examples would include Robert Sternberg at Yale, Steven Jay Gould and Leo Kamin formerly at Harvard, etc.), and will generally be cheered on by the media. The Inquisition had nothing on our time!
@SatchelSF Obviously wading into such controversial areas can lead to backlash. However I do no think there is a witch hunt against hereditarian scholars. For example, sure, A. Jensen was decried by many and some of this lectures were even interrupted by angry protestors, yet he taught at Berkeley for years before becoming an emeritus professor. Besides, Linda Gottfredson was able to publish her Mainstream on Intelligence in the Wall Street Journal. As for Lynn and Rushton, who were both tenured professors, their -close- ties to white supremacists can explain the controversies surrounding them. Therefore, it is too easy to claim that the debate is not settled because hereditarians are silence and cannot carry out their research. After all the Pioneer Fund has provided them with millions of dollar since the 1960s.
As for Black African immigrants in the UK, indeed, they are arguably a highly selected group. However, those data are not about the immigrants themselves but their children. The achievements of their children is not coherent with the regression toward the mean that should take place according to hereditarians. As you have pointed out yourself, children of the most successfull African Americans have lower scores on standardized tests than students from poorest white households. In this light, one would not expect children of African immigrants, even highly selected ones, to perform at the same level or above their White British peers. Especially, since those Black African children come from poorer households on average as evidenced by the UK government data.
As I said, @Bartleby789, the real pressure is on new researchers; those who already had tenure were (somewhat) protected. But what about James Watson? Discovering the double helix was obviously not enough to keep him from the wolves. What about all the other potential researchers who don’t even bother trying to explore the area?
Anyway, let’s leave that aside. With regard to the scores of African immigrants and regression to the mean. It’s interesting information and I will spend some time with those articles. But, of course, that the children of highly selected African immigrants score better than average “English” students (do they include the large UK Muslim population in there, or is this truly limited to White English; the US statistics are specifically disaggregated by race/ethnicity), does not invalidate regression to the mean for some very obvious reasons. First, the GSCEs are not IQ tests, and I do not know to what extent they are correlated with IQ - do you? In the US, it is generally accepted that the SAT has approximately 0.75-0.80 correlation (probably getting weaker now, as the test becomes more an “achievement test.” And second, we do not know how smart the parents are. Perhaps the kids are less smart (regression) although the parents’ level is sufficiently high that the kids are not lower than the “English” average.
Thanks for the cites, though, as I said i will look at them closely. My quick review didn’t identify what statistics you are citing - could you provide page references? (The Lambeth piece, Table 2, p. 13 would seem to indicate that Black Africans do worse than White British, but only by a little, and significantly better than Black Carribbean. Nevertheless, at first glance we seem to see the same pattern of Black underperformance that you see in every country, regardless of history, education system, historical presence of slavery, etc.)
It is quite possible that some researchers shy away from this topic, however there are more than enough hereditarian researchers to cover the subject. The fact that there is still no consensus does not really stem from a lack of studies in the area. By the way, John Watson is not an expert of psychometrics, which may explain why he presented very controversial views as established truths.
As for African immigrants in the UK : GCSE is not an IQ test, indeed. However it is a highly g-loaded test with a correlation as high as 0.81 with IQ, see for example : http://www.unz.com/jthompson/iq-and-gcse-results-in-england-r081/ .It might be weaker than that but according to hereditarians, genetic factors play the largest part in explaining GCSE results : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0080341. The data I am refering to are not the ones from the Lambeth piece but the more recent ones displayed in the Characteristic national tables (in Excel tables) of the first link with results of 2015 and 2016 : https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/revised-gcse-and-equivalent-results-in-england-2015-to-2016. By the way, White British does not include the UK Muslims which come mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh: the results for those ethnicities are displayed on their own.
Indeed, we do not know how smart their parents are but I find it hard to believe that the selection of African immigrants can explain such results. Especially, since the children of high IQ African Americans, do not seem to do as well on the SAT. And Black African’s children are supposed to regress toward an even lower mean, according to hereditarians.
Thus the British data are not consistent with the underperformance of African Americans in the US which at every level of income trail behind their white peers. Not to mention the fact that some African groups like Igbo and Yoruba score significantly better than White Britons.
Interesting, @Bartleby789. Thanks for the reference, and I now see what you are talking about. The 2015/16 GSCE scores for Black Africans are slightly higher than for White British, but in most of the previous years presented were below. In all years they are significantly below White Irish, and very far below two other major categories (Asians, Chinese). The numbers seem to jump around a bit year to year - my suspicion is sample size and test differences across years are the culprits. I see absolutely nothing here that contradicts - or even weakens - a hereditarian position. In fact, if the g-loading of GSCEs is that high (0.8 with IQ), then the overall presentation of the data is consistent with the familiar pattern of IQ by race. Clearly, Black Africans in the data (I am assuming largely Yoruba and Igbo-speaking) are a relatively high-performing subgroup.
With respect to your other cite, the Lambeth piece will seem very familiar to anyone who has read similar pieces covering the US. Large achievement gaps for pupils of African ancestry, and all sorts of reasons are posited, which if nothing else shows that this is not just a US problem or North American problem. (For instance, p. 9: " These research reports [reviewing a half dozen or so earlier British studies] also reviewed the educational achievements of ethnic minority pupil and confirmed previous research findings which suggest considerable under-achievement of Caribbean and Other Black pupils, on average, compared with White and Asian pupils.") Again, though, thanks for the cites and specific reference!
Also, @Bartleby789, “Especially, since the children of high IQ African Americans, do not seem to do as well on the SAT.” Point taken, but it is a limited one. We do not know the intelligence of the US African American parents, only that they are from households earning $200,000 or more, and that their children score a bit worse than White students whose parents earn under $30,000. While there is obviously a relatively low but significant correlation between income and IQ as a general matter, decades of affirmative action and affirmative hiring will have lowered that correlation even further for African Americans.
The main point of the comparison of $200,000+ AA households versus low income White households is to point out that environment has very little - if any - effect, on intelligence. If it did, it would be hard to imagine that such wealthy households could not provide the right building blocks for their kids.
Just a point : comparing Black African students to White Irish is not very relevant since White Irish are a minority in the UK which charecteristics are not necessarily representative of UK Whites, indeed they score significantly above the white mean. I have merely pointed out that unlike the US where virtually all groups of African Americans seem to be outperformed by Whites, the situation is not exactly the same in the UK.
As for the point about household income and SAT results and more generally the underachievement of African Americans with a privileged background, I have stressed it because those data have often been used by hereditarians to support the idea of a regression toward the mean rather than simply proving the weak relationship between income and academic achievement. Unlike the US data, the UK data do not seem consistent by a statement like : “Regression would explain why Black children born to high IQ, wealthy Black parents have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents” (Jensen, 1998b, p. 358).
Actually, my apologies to the group, I (post 1353 above) followed the lead of @Bartleby789 in misinterpreting the GSCE data he presented. They are not scores per se, and so are not “g-loaded” data points from which we can infer anything substantive. Rather, they are simply percentages of students from each group who satisfied a categorical requirement (achieving A* through C - a “pass” - on two GSCE exams). Obviously, since 60% of both White British and Black African students satisfied this requirement, this is a requirement that has been calibrated to average levels of intelligence. One would not expect to see very large performance differences on this type of task between groups even with significantly different mean IQ. It is at the tails of the distributions, of course, where one would expect large differences. Thus, a more interesting comparison would be the respective percentages of the ethnic groups earning A* (the highest) on their GSCEs.
Selection bias also likely plays a huge role here. The White British in the study are indigenous, and therefore comprise the entire spectrum of intelligence for their group, while even a small amount of selection bias in the Black African immigrant cohort could radically change the shape of the intelligence distribution for that group of students (consider, for instance, that people with IQ below about 80 or 85 would have a very tough time figuring out a bus schedule, let alone organizing an intercontinental move, so is it really so hard to imagine that the lower half of the Black African immigrant cohort has been truncated in the data?). An analog could be the White Irish in the study, who presumably had the “gumption” to relocate to England, and who demonstrate very significant (about 10% as opposed to the 0.6% difference in one year for Black Africans) pass rates for GSCEs as compared with White Britons. So, again, a very slight difference in one or two years in the percentage of Black Africans versus White Britons earning satisfactory grades (with no actual scoring data provided) is not convincing.
In any event, the data cited by @Bartleby789, are not comparable to the US ratio scale SAT scoring data, which are more indicative of intelligence (the fact that AA children from $200,000+ households score lower than White students from $30,000- households strongly suggests that that AA cohort is less intelligent on average than that White cohort, and that the obvious wealth disparity was not enough to overcome the difference through environmental effects).
Last, the cite provided on the genetic component of GSCE results (and which provides actual mean scores, not just a categorical “pass” as in the earlier GSCE cite) is very interesting. From the abstract: “The significance of these findings is that individual differences in educational achievement… are not primarily an index of the quality of teachers or schools: much more of the variance of GCSE scores can be attributed to genetics than to school or family environment. We suggest a model of education that recognizes the important role of genetics.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I strongly believe that a focus on individual education is desperately needed in the US. The current obsession with examining group differences and achievement gaps, and then trying to address them through insincere preference programs against a backdrop of mutual recrimination between racial groups, is shortchanging our kids in every group. It is simply impossible to maximize the educational opportunity for each individual if we insist that every group difference that turns up is prima facie evidence that we are on the wrong track.
- do u know, which group of people, on average, based on IQ testing, is more intelligent, Chinese or Ashkenazi Jews?
- native Americans have been largely wiped out by diseases such as smallpox, is there any studies on the proportionality of deaths in more vs less intelligent population?
- don’t you think mongol invasion and the destruction of advanced Muslim countries in the 13th century may have bigger (unintentional) effects on the rise of (western) European countries than the Black Death the mongol brought with them?
- And do you have the link to the article comparing sat scores of AA families income abover 200k with those of white families income lower than 30k?
I would love to get the link to number 4 from above also.
Sure, @makemesmart, I’m happy to try to answer your questions, and be honest where I don’t know.
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My understanding is that Ashkenazi Jews test higher than any other race/ethnicity. People argue about the numbers, but it is most often cited as approximately 1 standard deviation higher than “White” (115 vs. 100). I have typically seen numbers around 105-108 for East Asians generally, with Han Chinese often mentioned as being at the top of the scale (though no real consensus on numbers that I’ve seen). Keep in mind that testing data have become relatively sparse in the West generally. Most IQ testing has de facto become impermissible due to lawsuits and disparate impact theories. We once had much more data, as companies and schools regularly tested IQ until about 1970, more or less. The US Armed Forces have continuously administered the AFQT to recruits, and so there are millions of data points there, but the correlation between the AFQT and a full spectrum IQ battery is very high but not perfect. Regarding group differences, there have been many strong inferences based on the data that Ashkenazi Jews test very high in both verbal and quantitative IQ, but relatively less so (not even to the level of Whites generally - although of course Ashkenazi are a subgroup) on visuospatial tasks. These are very infrequently encountered in standard academic tasks, which may help explain the massive outperformance of Jewish students on traditional academic tasks. There is very little evidence of exceptional Jewish intelligence before the middle ages at the earliest. I’ve also seen that Blacks have relatively high verbal IQ, moderate visuospatial, but relatively poor quantitative, and the data appear to support this. East Asians have relative strengths in quantitative and visuospatial. Nothing too surprising and this all generally accords with what the stereotypes say.
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The Native American holocaust - and it was a true holocaust - is fascinating and tragic at the same time. That is an example of such a severe cataclysm that I believe that no distinction could have been made between more or less intelligent (similar to a meteor hit in my opinion). It really wasn’t anything that settlers did - at least not consciously - it had everything to do with resistance to certain European diseases. It is thought that the path that the original Native Americans took, through the icy Beringia of 15,000 years ago, meant that Native Americans lost most of their old world parasites that had long cycle times (they couldn’t survive the winters in the migration). Also, no experience of living with herds of domesticated animals left them ill-equipped to deal with the animal-based pathogens that European explorers became selected for. There has been nothing like the disappearance of the Native Americans in recorded history of which I am aware. Consider, by contrast, that discovery and colonization of Africa has been characterized by an explosion of the native African population. Few people realize that Africa, throughout most of history, had many fewer people than even the Roman Empire. I might have my numbers a little scrambled, but I think as recently as 100 years ago, Africa was more sparsely populated than the American West, with fewer than 100 million people on the whole continent (there are more than 1 billion today). Until the mid-19th century at the earliest, any real attempts to settle the interior of Africa was met with disease that quickly wiped out the would be conquerors - a very different result from the Americas. If you are interested in this whole discussion, that 10,000 year explosion book is again fantastic. The authors of that book estimate that upwards of 90% of Native Americans were killed by disease and almost all well before any had even met a European settler.
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Regarding the Mongol invasion, perhaps it had just as big an effect as the Black Death. I am not an expert in this area, and that’s why I didn’t put forth the proposition that the Black Death was definitively responsible for the passing of the mantle of progress of civilization from the East (China was already very advanced by the 1300s) to the West (following the Renaissance). (We might be seeing the pendulum shift back towards Asia today, which would make sense if you subscribe to the view that intelligence is what is driving many major events in human history.) BTW, the Mongols apparently were lactose tolerant, and some believe that tolerance was one of the main driving forces for their remarkable success, in that the ability to make their herds “work for them” was a massive genetic advantage.
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And @collegemomjam as well, here is the general cite, from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html. The numbers have been updated in a later update by JBHE but I don’t have the cite handy. Also, NCES data used to include ACT scores by race, but this was discontinued in around 2005.
Hope that helps!
@SatchelSF fascinating info!
I, for one, think this thread has gone in another direction. I would suggest a separate thread to debate IQ’s.
@cottontales - hard to go off topic in this particular thread but I agree, it’s happened.