From: "Ian Pitchford" To: References: <2bf96f7a.252aabc9@aol.com> Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 12:53:58 +0100 Organization: http://www.human-nature.com/ MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Subject: [h-bd] Re: H-Bd members in the news Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: 5. Evolutionary Conservatives. This is an almost wholly intellectual group (e.g., [H-Bd member] Steve Sailer, John McGinnis, [H-Bd member] Charles Murray)- not a politician brave enough to stand with them - who have realized two things: first, that lessons of the new science of evolutionary psychology are largely conservative ones about an adamantine human nature, the natural basis of sex roles, and so on; _______ REPLY: This section is really quite ironic, as evolutionary conservatives certainly don't embrace either evolutionary psychology or evolutionary principles. In fact they explicitly reject mainstream evolutionary theorising in favour of group selection, differential K theory, genetic similarity theory, racist pseudometrics, crude "Mendelian" eugenics and so on - but, as most of this discussion is aimed more at influencing political opinion than in advancing knowledge of human biodiversity, why bother citing the scientific literature when there are folk tales, stereotypes and even French "anthroporn" to tap for polemical impact? As far as I know there are no mainstream Xopsychometricians who take the "data" on African IQs seriously, and the most convincing large-scale study of Asian (Japanese and Chinese) IQs in the US (the Coleman Report) also failed to find the fabled higher mean. For a genuinely impartial assessment of this work see chapter 5 of Mackintosh's "IQ and Human Intelligence" (OUP, 1998): "The most widely studied group difference in IQ is surely that between blacks and whites in the USA. The difference is usually described as one of 15 points, but it was probably greater than that at one time, and _may_ be slightly smaller today. In spite of claims to the contrary, there is remarkably little evidence that the difference is genetic in origin. Some of the results of one American adoption study are consistent with a genetic interpretation, but other aspects of that study point just as strongly to an environmental interpretation, and two other studies of black and white children brought up in comparable circumstances, one German the other British, found no difference in their IQ scores. If the effect _is_ an environmental one, it remains to be shown what the proximal environmental causes are. There are other ethnic group differences in IQ scores. Chinese and Japanese seem to obtain higher scores than whites on spatial IQ tests and _may_ obtain higher scores on other non-verbal tests. There is no evidence to decide whether such differences are environmental or genetic in origin. A popular argument is that differences between different groups are not due to real differences in intelligence, but merely reflect bias in the tests. The clearest sense of 'bias' is this: an IQ test is biased against a group if it underestimates their true level of 'intelligence'. From this, it should be clear that the only way to prove that an IQ test was or was not biased would be to compare its results with an independent, better measure of 'intelligence'. And what would that be? That said, it is important to acknowledge that confident pronouncements about the average intelligence of African peasants, based on the results of standard IQ tests, are foolish and dangerous: an IQ test can only purport to measure the intelligence of people with some common cultural background. The two sexes do not, on the whole, seem to differ greatly in average IQ, and that conclusion is not simply an artefact of any deliberate policy by IQ testers to eliminate items that favour one sex or the other. But they do differ in certain components of IQ - the most salient of these differences being that men outscore women on most tests of spatial IQ. Both biological and environmental explanations of this difference have been advanced - but the distinction between the two is not as clear as many writers as implied." Mackintosh is professor in the department of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge, and can be reached at n.mackintosh@psychol.cam.ac.uk Ian Pitchford Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies School for Health and Related Research University of Sheffield, S10 2TA, UK http://www.human-nature.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ How to contribute to H-Bd: 1. To reply privately to just the sender of this message, click the "Reply" button on your email package. 2. To reply publicly to the entire H-Bd list, click the "Reply All" (or equivalent) button on your email package. 3. To start a thread, email your message to h-bd@egroups.com . +OK 5368 octets Received: from smtp00.nwnexus.com (smtp00.nwnexus.com [192.135.191.25]) by mail3.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA13816 for ; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 07:39:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by smtp00.nwnexus.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id HAA02890 for ; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 07:39:47 -0700 (PDT) X-eGroups-Return: h-bd-return-1502-arthurhu=halcyon.com@returns.egroups.com Received: from [10.1.2.1] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 05 Oct 1999 15:39:44 -0000 Mailing-List: contact h-bd-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: h-bd@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/h-bd/ X-eGroups-Approved-By: steveslr@aol.com / SteveSlr@aol.com via email Received: (listserv 1.262); by m5; 05 Oct 1999 14:39:43 -0000 Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-h-bd@egroups.com Received: (qmail 3699 invoked from network); 5 Oct 1999 13:22:05 -0000 Received: from mail9.svr.pol.co.uk (195.92.193.22) by qg.egroups.com with SMTP; 5 Oct 1999 13:22:05 -0000 Received: from modem-119.sulfur.dialup.pol.co.uk ([62.136.7.247] helo=oemcomputer) by mail9.svr.pol.co.uk with smtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 11YUXa-0003ol-00 for h-bd@egroups.com; Tue, 5 Oct 1999 14:22:03 +0100 Message-ID: <00cd01bf0f34$ee2b62c0$02000003@oemcomputer> Reply-To: "Ian Pitchford" From: "Ian Pitchford" To: References: Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 14:24:14 +0100 Organization: http://www.human-nature.com/ MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Subject: [h-bd] Re: African IQ scores Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: An enlightening section on African IQ scores from Marek Kohn's 'The Race Gallery' "The African scores, gladdening as they may be to white supremacists, actually push the genetic hypothesis towards an absurd extreme. Given that the threshold of mental retardation is widely set at 70, the implication is that half the black African population is mentally retarded by Western standards, and millions in the lower reaches of the range are below the level at which they can perform the basic operations of life unassisted. Europeans may have traditionally regarded Africans as childlike, but the idea of the white man's burden surely did not extend to feeding and dressing a significant proportion of his colonial charges. The African figures appear to be a demonstration of James Flynn's argument that IQ tests are limited in their ability to bridge cultural distance. Flynn himself cites a study by Jensen, in which black schoolchildren on a Georgia town were found to have an average IQ of 71. Their scores declined as they got older, however, and on this basis Flynn estimates that the maximum average IQ of the adult black population was 63.5. Yet the blacks of this unnamed town appeared quite normal, and in no need of benevolent white guardianship [10]. Five of the eleven African studies Lynn cites were conducted in South Africa, between 1929 and 1991. (The 'pure Negroid' mean in the 1929 survey was only 65). All but the first were conducted under the period of National Party rule that began in 1948. The attitude of the apartheid regime to black education is indicated by the fact that, during the mid-1970s, the state spent more than fifteen times on each white pupil as on each black pupil [11]. The results of underfunding included shortages of books, shortages of classrooms, sometimes solved by putting two classes and two teachers in one room, and shortages of teachers, sometimes tackled by getting one teacher to look after two classes. Conditions had improved somewhat by 1989, when the study Lynn regards as most reliable produced a mean figure of 69. Yet its author interpreted the results in quite a different way from Lynn. Interviewed by Charles Lane for his _New York Review of Books_ article, 'The Tainted Sources of "The Bell Curve"', Ken Owen ascribed poor black African performance to bad schooling and difficulties with English. The scores, he said, 'certainly cannot' be used as an indicator of black African intelligence in general." Kohn, M. (1996). The race gallery: The return of racial science. London: Vintage (First published London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). pp. 119-120 References [10] Flynn, J.R. (1980). Race, IQ and Jensen. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [11] Omond, R. (1985). The apartheid handbook. London: Penguin. http://nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19941201014F Ian Pitchford Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies School for Health and Related Research University of Sheffield, S10 2TA, UK http://www.human-nature.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ How to contribute to H-Bd: 1. To reply privately to just the sender of this message, click the "Reply" button on your email package. 2. To reply publicly to the entire H-Bd list, click the "Reply All" (or equivalent) button on your email package. 3. To start a thread, email your message to h-bd@egroups.com .