Race and IQ in NYT

So, the NYT continues in its coverage of the racial IQ gap in this editorial
So I'm gonna take a look at some of their arguments. Remember, I'll admit that I am not 100% certain of the racial gap in intelligence being genetic, but I believe in occam's razor: the simplest explanation is usually the best. So, here we go:

First of all, the quote about Watson forgot to mention:
"there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

Huge concept that the article did not even touch.

"
"For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q."
As you can see here
The gap remains despite changes in SES (in which the high SES parents are most likely also high IQ). In fact, a black child at the top 10% of SES is barely at the 50% for whites.

Also, as Lynn notes in his book "In the 57 studies of general population samples in Africans in 17 african countries, all of the IQ's ly in the range between 59 and 88, and in the 14 Caribbean and Latin American countries it's between 60 and 80."

Africans in Britain, Netherlands, Brazil, and the US have significant differences in IQ from the white population.



"But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests."

Actually, correcting for body size there isn't a substantial difference in IQ between men and women. Lynn also cites studies that puts the brain size-IQ correlation at .4, which is huge. A study found that a rat's ability to solve a maze is positively correlated with brain size.

"Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives."

This is anecdotal, not statistical evidence. And have their IQ's been tested? Or is this as useful as Jared Diamond's assertion that the Maoris are more intelligent than westerners because of their survival skills?




"About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features)."

The article fails to mention the Weinberg Scarr study experiment, in which mixed race children (who had no idea they were mixed race) had an intermediate IQ between total black and total white children. Also, he claims
"There is a statistically significant association between light skin and intelligence."




"During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference."

This is absolute bullshit. All the black fathers were IQ tested and only allowed in if they had IQ at the mid 90's level. So it's not an unbiased sample.



"But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large."

Are you serious? How is the kid going to know the degree of white ancestry of his parents? And most of the interbreeding happened during slavery.



"Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and I.Q. Similarly, the blood groups most closely associated with high intellectual performance among blacks are no more European in origin than other blood groups."

I'll admit, this seems odd. But, given that we can now do geographic modeling of genes, blood type studies will become irrelevant.





"The closest thing to direct evidence that the hereditarians have is a study from the 1970s showing that black children who had been adopted by white parents had lower I.Q.’s than those of mixed-race children adopted by white parents. But, as the researchers acknowledged, the study had many flaws; for instance, the black children had been adopted at a substantially later age than the mixed-race children, and later age at adoption is associated with lower I.Q."

The difference is merely that of a year or less. Are the authors really implying that black environments are that poisonous? If that's the case, why are we letting black mothers raise their kids? I have seen many a moronic woman in NYC totally clueless on how to discipline their kids. I don't think this citation is a vindication of Africans.








"A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites."
1) Were the kids tested as adults? Heritability increases with age, so this study is not quite valid.
2) There is a good possibility that this is not an unbiased sample, as there could have been many factors which made the white families pick certain black children over the others.




And of course, the Flynn effect argument. As Flynn even points out, the differences in IQ come about because of the change in the way we view relationships between objects. Arithmetic and vocabulary scores have remained constant over the years. And honestly, looking at the speeches of Roosevelt and John Adams, do we really think that people 200 years ago were as intelligent as the average African American? I doubt it. It's just that our way of looking at the world changed, allowing us to do better on IQ tests.






"In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era. Black progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows equivalent gains. Reading and math improvement has been modest for whites but substantial for blacks."

This ignores the fact that the IQ gap between blacks and whites remains one standard deviation. Also, griffe demonstrates how changes in gaps between blacks and whites could be more a reflection of the test becoming easier than a relative change in intelligence.


"And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds."
I agree, but head start has tried and failed to create long lasting IQ differences.
In fact:
"White children, who were the most disadvantaged, showed larger and longer lasting improvements than African-American children."

So yeah, what we have here is some serious obfuscation. But guess what? Alot of people are gonna check out the Saletan article or the infamous watson defense

The flood continues.