The programme on C4 tonight which I've just watched (well, nearly finished watching), discusses the relationship between race and intelligence.

It is a 'controversial topic'.. that was the main early theme.

I'm not quite sure why this is classed as 'controversial', other than for the fact that some people daren't discuss it, because of fear of retribution.

I think it's a fair question. Or at least an interesting one. The statistics used were of IQ tests, which worldwide, showed that North east Asian people have the highest average IQs in the world, and that Aboriginal Australian had the lowest average.

However, I just can't see how a test can be entirely fair. If the tests included survival skills, then that certainly is an intelligence skill! An the AA's seemed to have done ok up to recent times.

anyway, I'll shut it, and see if anyone has owt to say. :)

I haven't watched this although I meant to. But I'm not sure I agree with the who "IQ test" thing in the first place. People can excell at all levels which is what I assume you mean in survival skills?

I haven't watched this although I meant to. But I'm not sure I agree with the who "IQ test" thing in the first place. People can excell at all levels which is what I assume you mean in survival skills?

Well yeah. The IQ point, was that the programme highlights a lot of quantitative evidence that African-American black people showed to have lower IQ's to European black people, European-American black people or European white people.

However, if you tested survival skills, then I would guess that a native isolated African tribe person would score highly, should many of the questions be based on multiple choice questions, on the lines of 'which leaves have the poison required to kill an animal?'. I doubt many African-American, Euro-black or White western people would get a multiple choice right, providing there were enough questions to make sure that guessing wouldn't be an issue to the evidential data.

Survival skills? I think your view of Africans is somewhat narrow..

I thought the main point being made was that IQ and success in the eduction system are affected by environmental factors, the strongest factors being parental influence, their own educational attainment and attitude to education.

He also showed that genetics cannot explain the difference in test scores and that popular notions of "race" don't make any sense scientifically.

I'd like to see who the researchers actually study....what is to say they haven't walked into a Mensa coffee morning in North East Asia so that they get the results they require.

It is like those surveys when they say '1 out of 5 25 year olds eat tic tacs for breakfast' etc etc.....they have never asked me what I eat for breakfast, nor my friends.....do they stand in the local co-op next to the counter and ask every customers age and then note if they are buying tic tacs?

IQ Tests are NOT based on general knowledge

They are based on logic questions which should require no information other than that contained in the questions. This *should* eliminate any differences in knowledge that are specific to certain cultures.

The problem is they still follow a format which is more familar to some cultures than others, (controlled exam environments), which could explain why there are apparent differences.

The real question is if these tests are biased, and if they can be considered a scientific measure at all.

(Ash - it looks like you get your crude ideas of Africa from Prince Phillip!)

I'd like to see who the researchers actually study....what is to say they haven't walked into a Mensa coffee morning in North East Asia so that they get the results they require.I watched this sporadically, so I may have got the wrong idea, feel free to shoot me down.

In some parts of the USA they've allowed college entry on the sole basis of the results of SATS (or whatever the equivalent is). This has resulted in an entry rate for Eastern Asians (chinese/japanese I presume) of something like 40% and for black Americans 6%. I may be wrong on the percentages but there was a huge difference.

However, rather than it being so straighforward as variations in brain power, there seems to be a debate to be had about family expectations, parental support and various other environmental factors, poverty, etc, skewing the results. Also there is also the undoubted fact that the more IQ tests you do, the better you get at them.

I can't really accept the findings there are too many variables. The only people that seem to accept the IQ findings on face value, are people who want to think that certain races are below them. The fact that EA consistently score more on the tests must have really upset them!

I caught one part where some bloke mentioned that the size of various races hips were proof of intelligence.

East Asians had the widest pelvis, Europeans had a slightly narrower one and Africans and the rest were even narrower.

According to him this reflected the head sizes of each race, the more intelligent ones having the wider hips to make way for the huge, brain-packed head.


All sounds a bit faddish and Quack driven to me.

(Ash - it looks like you get your crude ideas of Africa from Prince Phillip!)

? why ?


However, if you tested survival skills, then I would guess that a native isolated African tribe person would score highly,

I didn't say Mr or Mrs Average in Africa. See above bold.

The reason I didn't use Aboriginal people in the example is that I was comparing an isolated African tribe compared to an African-American who undoubtedly would have a different educational background, yet the race is classed as the same.

Not much interest in this programme then, I thought there'd be a lot more discussion about it ... :cool:

"All sounds a bit faddish and Quack driven to me."

Neuroscientists are continuing to uncover the basis of intelligence and gray matter volume is one factor. For a summar of this paper by UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson & Yale's Jeremy Gray.

loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/PDF/nrn0604-GrayThompson.pdf

I thought the programme made a couple of errors.

1. It relied on the Lewontin Fallacy (more within group gene variation than between group variation). This was debunked in 2003 by Cambridge geneticist AWF Edwards. The problem is that it overlooks the correlations and that genes vary in frequency across groups.

2. It stated that scores are rising so eventually there will be convergence. Will in some developing countries scores maybe rising as nutrition improves, gaps between groups in the US, Canada & UK don't appear to be disapearing. Wicherts (2004) examined the Flynn effect & found the gains had few implications for group differences as they were qualitatively different.

3. Efforts to tar iq tests with bad things in history overlook the fact that Stalin and Hitler banned IQ testing. In Hitler's case he banned them because Jews did well on them.

4. IQ tests actually have a progressive background in allowing working class kids with academic ability to get into Colleges previously only for the rich.

hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/129.html

5. The brain traits that affect intelligence are significantly heritable.

"The UCLA researchers took the study a step further by comparing the white matter architecture of identical twins, who share almost all their DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only half. Results showed that the quality of the white matter is highly genetically determined, although the influence of genetics varies by brain area. According to the findings, about 85 percent of the variation in white matter in the parietal lobe, which is involved in mathematics, logic, and visual-spatial skills, can be attributed to genetics. But only about 45 percent of the variation in the temporal lobe, which plays a central role in learning and memory, appears to be inherited.

Thompson and his collaborators also analyzed the twins' DNA, and they are now looking for specific genetic variations that are linked to the quality of the brain's white matter. The researchers have already found a candidate--the gene for a protein called BDNF, which promotes cell growth. "People with one variation have more intact fibers," says Thompson."

technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22333/

6. Transracial adoption studies show that adoptees perform as well as their biological peers not their adoptive parents.

gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004064.html

7. Robert Plomin in MIT tech review reports on the increasing role of genes as you mature:

"My team, for example, has discovered that the genetic influence on IQ becomes more pronounced during development. In a study of 11,000 pairs of twins from four countries, we have recently shown that the heritability of IQ increases linearly from childhood (about 40 percent) to adolescence (about 55 percent) to young adulthood (about 65 percent). "

technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23700/

8.Many genes have undergone significant change over the past 10,000 years so the possibility that groups would differ to some extent on average is not implausible (see 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Harpending & Cochran).

"Dec. 10, 2007 - Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up - and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought - indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.

"We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago," says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

"We aren't the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago," he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. "The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any Temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence."


"Human races are evolving away from each other," Harpending says. "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity." He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, "and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then."

unews.utah.edu/p/?r=120607-1

9. For example new versions of serotonin transporters in both Europe and east Asia (such as SLC6A4). There are other neurotransmitter-related changes, also changes in genes that affect brain development. For example, east Asians have a new version of DAB1, a gene involved in the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex, while there is a fairly common new version of NKX2-2 (a brain homeobox gene) in Europeans. (March 2007 article from Plos Biology, A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome)

I think it's a fair question. Or at least an interesting one. The statistics used were of IQ tests, which worldwide, showed that North east Asian people have the highest average IQs in the world, and that Aboriginal Australian had the lowest average.


That, at least, is good news. The idiots who try to argue that blacks are inherently less intelligent and should be treated as second-class citizens, will never agree to treat themselves as second-class in favour of Asians, and will immediately argue that it's an outrage against human rights to discriminate merely on grounds of intelligence...

Of course, equal rights under law don't depend on literal equality in every sense.

That's what University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn is suggesting here in this recent Nature article:

"From Nature, October 8, 2009:

Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity

Science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals. This discovery should be embraced, not feared, say Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein.

A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels (see box, page 728). The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide that were committed with the support of pseudo scientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.

We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data..."

gnxp.com/blog/Lahn.pdf.

What I thought was telling, and Rageh didn't seem to get a proper answer from any of the old blokies, was that in response to the 'large hips due to larger heads containing larger brains' theory, was that he brought up the point that women, en masse, have smaller brains than men and yet are generally just as intelligent. They just seemed to skip over that salient point, unless it was the editing that was at fault.

If they're trying to use that as a pointer, surely it throws all the rest of their wonderful 'theory' into doubt?

btw PK019, two very interesting posts. Thanks :)

The biggest difficulty with studies like the one the program was based on is in coming up with an acceptable definition of intelligence.

I wouldn't accept the IQ test as an acceptable measure, not if that is the only thing measured.
Beethoven was a musical genius, that doesn't mean that he'd do well in an IQ test. It doesn't measure intelligence, it measures the ability to do well at an IQ test.

I wouldn't accept the IQ test as an acceptable measure, not if that is the only thing measured.
Beethoven was a musical genius, that doesn't mean that he'd do well in an IQ test. It doesn't measure intelligence, it measures the ability to do well at an IQ test.


This is a good point, but note that IQ tests don't claim to predict musical performance. The best tests are able to measure what's known as 'g' (general intelligence factor). High-g brains work more quickly, efficiently, and consistently, like well-greased engines.

Neuroscientists are finding that the brains of those with high g (as found on psychometric tests) are more efficient, they process less glucose in performing basic tasks. So the tests don't just reflect an ability to do well on tests, they reflect differences in the brain.

technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23695/

In terms of what they predict, at the individual level it is important for success in school (and nurtured by school attendance), for success in jobs, and health management, (e.g. Gottfredson, 2002).

udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2002notamystery.pdf

At the macro-social level cognitive competence is more important than economic liberty for the economic growth of nations (Rindermann, 2008a) and it is more important than wealth for the democratic development of countries (Rindermann, 2008 European Journal of Personality, 21, 667-706.).

Just write two more posts... doesn't matter what they contain, but just so you can post your links! :hihi:

Good point

Will repost the links

I wouldn't accept the IQ test as an acceptable measure, not if that is the only thing measured.
Beethoven was a musical genius, that doesn't mean that he'd do well in an IQ test. It doesn't measure intelligence, it measures the ability to do well at an IQ test.


This is a good point, but note that IQ tests don't claim to predict musical performance. The best tests are able to measure what's known as 'g' (general intelligence factor). High-g brains work more quickly, efficiently, and consistently, like well-greased engines.

Neuroscientists are finding that the brains of those with high g (as found on psychometric tests) are more efficient, they process less glucose in performing basic tasks. So the tests don't just reflect an ability to do well on tests, they reflect differences in the brain.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23695/

www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/PDF/nrn0604-GrayThompson.pdf (Thompson summary from above)

In terms of what they predict, at the individual level it is important for success in school (and nurtured by school attendance), for success in jobs, and health management, (e.g. Gottfredson, 2002).

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2002notamystery.pdf

At the macro-social level cognitive competence is more important than economic liberty for the economic growth of nations (Rindermann, 2008a) and it is more important than wealth for the democratic development of countries (Rindermann, 2008 European Journal of Personality, 21, 667-706.).

rubydazzler,

What I thought was telling, and Rageh didn't seem to get a proper answer from any of the old blokies, was that in response to the 'large hips due to larger heads containing larger brains' theory, was that he brought up the point that women, en masse, have smaller brains than men and yet are generally just as intelligent. They just seemed to skip over that salient point, unless it was the editing that was at fault.

If they're trying to use that as a pointer, surely it throws all the rest of their wonderful 'theory' into doubt?

UC Berkely Psychologist Arthur Jensen has addressed this point in his book 'The g factor'. Jensen comments:

Because of the small correlation (about .20) between brain size and body size, the sex difference in brain volume and weight can be only partially accounted for by the regression of brain size on body size. The resolution of this paradox may come from the evidence that females have a higher density of neurons in the posterior temporal cortex, which is the major association area and is involved in higher thought processes. Females have 11 percent more neurons per unit volume than do males, which, if true for the brain as a whole, would more than offset the 10 percent male-female difference in overall brain volume. This sex difference in neuronal packing density is considered a true sexual dimorphism, as are the sex differences in overall body size, skeletal form, the proportion and distribution of body fat, and other secondary sexual characteristics.

http://www.prometheism.net/articles/chap12.html (chapter 12 - the g factor)

Familiarity with the style of questioning and practice can both improve your score on an IQ measure.
Unless practising IQ tests actually makes you more intelligent it suggests that the test is not measuring some sort of inate intelligence, but is measuring your ability to do well at IQ tests.

I'm not saying that it has no value, just that it's an extremely narrow definition of intelligence and on it's own not one that I would accept.

Familiarity with the style of questioning and practice can both improve your score on an IQ measure.
Unless practising IQ tests actually makes you more intelligent it suggests that the test is not measuring some sort of inate intelligence, but is measuring your ability to do well at IQ tests.
I'm not saying that it has no value, just that it's an extremely narrow definition of intelligence and on its own not one that I would accept.I agree. As I said earlier, imo, the more tests you do, the better at them you get.

I've found this with the Brain Training on the DSlite. I started off with a brain age of 80 and in a few weeks of daily use, it was down to 31. The machine had actually just trained me in the way it wanted me to speak and write so it could understand my answers :) I'm sure my brain is no more agile that it was before.

Unless practising IQ tests actually makes you more intelligent it suggests that the test is not measuring some sort of inate intelligence, but is measuring your ability to do well at IQ tests.


You can definitely improve with practice to an extent. Here is the APA Taskforce's Report on Intelligence:Knowns & Unknowns.

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html

I think they measure more than just test taking ability because they are so predictive of other outcomes. If they weren't then the US Military wouldn't still use them to screen recruits for appropriate roles. I think the cut off is 80 - it's just too hard to train people who score below that.

Also, they're still used to determine whether people have capacity to form intent in death penalty cases and in determining the affects of lead poisoning in children.

An interesting thing that Ian Deary at University of Edinburgh has found, is that reaction time tests actually correlate very closely to performance on iq tests & health outcomes.

http://www.stabroeknews.com/2009/features/02/03/why-do-smart-people-live-longer-by-ian-deary/

The best summary of research in terms of their value for occupational prediction is here by Linda Gottfredson.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/index.html

I'm not sure that use by the US military is really an indicator of how good something is.
You have heard the oxymoron military intelligence before?

I don't doubt that they measure some portion of brain function and agility, but I don't believe that what they measure is an accurate definition of intelligence.

If you ask a dozen people what defines intelligence, you'll get a dozen different answers. If we can't agree what it is, how can we agree that a few logical puzzles can be an accurate measure of it?

I don't doubt that they measure some portion of brain function and agility, but I don't believe that what they measure is an accurate definition of intelligence.

If you ask a dozen people what defines intelligence, you'll get a dozen different answers. If we can't agree what it is, how can we agree that a few logical puzzles can be an accurate measure of it?

How do you define gravity, health or stress? They all have more than a single agreed definition. The key thing is that it has external validity. That is, it predicts performance in other areas very well. Obviously it's just one factor, but it is more useful than anything else the social sciences have come up with.

This chapter discusses various criticisms of tests.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.pdf

interestingly on this (http://raceandscience.channel4.com/) program today, how racist are you?

this was said

"Those given power assume it is their right. Those disempowered, give up. They underperform"

"Those given power assume it is their right. Those disempowered, give up. They underperform"

Sounds like a very simplistic explanation. Jewish people living in the ghetto's of Brooklyn 100 years ago without welfare benefits still went on to dominate academically. Similarly in the 1960's Chinatown in San Francisco had the lowest household incomes and highest unemployment in the city. Today those of Chinese Ancestry are hugely overrepresented at UC Berkeley and other campuses.

Also, Carl F. Horowitz discusses Elliot & her thinking here:

"Elliott's crusade against racism, launched from the far Left, is about manipulation and punishment of Caucasians. It provides no encounter with serious ideas, something she derisively terms "intellectualizing." Whites are evil and parasitic; blacks are downtrodden unappreciated fountainheads of creativity. In a 1998 interview with an Australian Internet magazine, Webfronds, she pontificated:

You're all sitting here writing in a language [English] that white people didn't come up with. You're all sitting here writing on paper that white people didn't invent. Most of you are wearing clothes made out of cloth that white people didn't come up with. We stole these ideas from other people. If you're a Christian, you're believing in a philosophy that came to us from people of color.

White people, she added, "invented racism." At least Susan Sontag, in her infamous diatribe of some 40 years ago likening the white race to "the cancer of human history," credited whites with producing, among other things, Mozart, Kant, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare and parliamentary government. Elliott credits whites with virtually nothing except oppression of people of color. Less a heartland Susan Sontag than a white Louis Farrakhan, Elliott is consumed with the need to force whites to experience shame and atonement. She's in good company. As Ryan O'Donnell pointed out in these pages nearly four years ago, virtually all the early leaders of the diversity industry began as hard-Left activists in the Sixties."

http://archive.nlpc.org/view.asp?action=viewArticle&aid=1851

Sounds like a very simplistic explanation. Jewish people living in the ghetto's of Brooklyn 100 years ago without welfare benefits still went on to dominate academically

because of their social cohesion and strong family support networks pk :)


Similarly in the 1960's Chinatown in San Francisco had the lowest household incomes and highest unemployment in the city. Today those of Chinese Ancestry are hugely overrepresented at UC Berkeley and other campuses]

and also view themselves as elite wrt the western world, wouldn't you agree?

again, very strong group dynamic going on, due to communism

and also view themselves as elite wrt the western world, wouldn't you agree?

again, very strong group dynamic going on, due to communism

Indeed, culture and supportive networks are involved in both cases although I think that there's a genetic factor here. In terms of the east asians you see this with the cross-racial adoption studies. http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004064.html

In terms of the Ashkenazi Jews there is an interesting paper explaining how their high group average arose. Steven Pinker has suggested it is plausible and subject to an easy experimental test, but I understand Cochran was told it wouldn't happen (basically because it is too un-pc). Here's the extract of the paper & pdf which gets quite technical in parts, but is quite an interesting history.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16867211

http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

I don't doubt that they measure some portion of brain function and agility, but I don't believe that what they measure is an accurate definition of intelligence.

If you ask a dozen people what defines intelligence, you'll get a dozen different answers. If we can't agree what it is, how can we agree that a few logical puzzles can be an accurate measure of it?

How do you define gravity, health or stress? They all have more than a single agreed definition. The key thing is that it has external validity. That is, it predicts performance in other areas very well. Obviously it's just one factor, but it is more useful than anything else the social sciences have come up with.

This chapter discusses various criticisms of tests.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.pdf

In terms of the study of IQ test performance variation amongst different human populations there is 'other area' for it to be a useful predictor in.
The study is an end, not a means to an end, and what it studies is not intelligence but IQ test performance.

Gravity is a very tightly defined physical phenomenon, health and stress are both abstract and subjective. Intelligence is abstract, but in theory can be objectively measured, the problem is that it is not well defined and so cannot be accurately measured.

The study is an end, not a means to an end, and what it studies is not intelligence but IQ test performance.


The term IQ should not be used synonymously with the term intelligence or cognitive competence because IQ is only a norm scale. But if science is concerned with prediction, then tests are very useful as they are predictive of a wide range of important societal outcomes.

The thing most psychologists now focus on is 'g'. Bob Williams explains this here:

IQ derives almost all of its validity because it is a good proxy for psychometric g.Arthur Jensen reports (P. 91, The g Factor) a g loading of about 0.88 for most IQ tests.Jensen suggests that the word intelligence not be used in scientific discussions, because it lacks a scientific definition, and that we should instead focus on g, since it is unambiguously defined as the product of a hierarchical factor analysis.It happens that all categories of test items correlate with one another to at least some degree.The ultimate relationship between the various categories of cognitive activity is reflected as g, which is common to all mental abilities.

http://members.cox.net/sidelock/pages/intell.html