More specific research showed that the results of certain kinds of tests were more closely correlated with each other than the results of other kinds of tests. Tests which require their takers to memorize a span of digits and manipulate shapes in their mind will generate similar results for the same students, while other tests which (for example) ask them to recall sports trivia will yield more varied results. Statistically, there seems to be a general intelligence factor which explains the cross-test variation; conceptually, there is within the human brain a corresponding general cognitive capacity, which drives these correlated results. People who do well on cognitive tests tend to have other interesting traits as well, most markedly faster reaction times and much broader vocabulary, than people who do poorly on them. They also tend to accumulate in different professions, have different lifestyles, and other things. Measuring intelligence via testing is not, in other words, a mere circular exercise in identifying people who test well. Loosely speaking, intelligence is something like the processing capacity of the human brain, and it varies substantially across individuals.
Some object that intelligence is a false construct of psychological research and is in some sense not real. A lot of objections to intelligence research are rooted in unscientific left-wing concerns about social justice. Others stem from a general skepticism that truly intelligent people are actually a thing, because it is hard to conceive of what is going on in the heads of people who are much, much smarter than we are. Here, it helps to consider the other end of the spectrum. There are people – many of them – whom we recognize as just not being very smart. In modern society, this segment of the population is most visible because of their problems with literacy. The limited intellectual capacity of these people is expressed in many ways, including their employment prospects, their life choices and their social status. The much greater intellectual capacity of people on the other end of the spectrum is the opposite phenomenon, though the options of such people are much less constrained. The IQ 160 person can choose to be a day laborer or a university professor, whereas for the IQ 75 person, university professor isn’t really an option. Higher IQ is thus rather weakly predictive of professional status at the individual level, but the professions themselves have a fairly clear IQ stratification, some professions are more cognitively demanding than others.
Also, to a point, higher intelligence correlates with very well with better overall health. Our brains are simply part of our bodies, and those with healthy, well-functioning brains are more likely to have healthy, well-functioning bodies.
Intelligence, like general health, is also substantially heritable; smart people tend to have smart children. The mechanisms, however, appear to be very complicated. Some extremely intelligent people have parents of merely middling intelligence. In these cases, high IQ results from fortuitous gene combinations; its correlation with overall health will be much lower, and the children of these people are unlikely to be nearly as intelligent as them.
So, because IQ is relatively easy to measure and has been studied for a long time with well-replicated results, it’s a very useful metric, but it is also often overemphasized. We are speaking here of one psychological trait among many. The so-called “big 5” personality traits also matter for human behavior and achievement. These are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and agreeableness. And of course, a wide range of non-psychological factors have their own role to play, including things like social background, education and physical appearance. What makes things even more complicated, are the various ways intelligence itself correlates positively or negatively with all of these other things.
“Evidence for measurable intelligence is overwhelming...It is disheartening that there are so many incorrect beliefs about intelligence. I cannot think of another topic in psychology that is the subject of so many widespread misconceptions.”—Russell T. Warne
“We presently live in an age of profound unreason, in which we are increasingly compelled to believe and accept, even celebrate, patent absurdities, evidence or reason to be damn.”— J. Scott Turner
wokism is built upon an ideological certitude about the origins of inequality. The whole ideology stands or falls on this empirical claim. Therefore, the greatest taboo in woke society is to consider alternative explanations for inequality, particularly those that implicate natural differences in the distribution of traits among racial groups.
Disinformation about innate group differences gets in the way of constructing sound social policy. Specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human nature tend not to work, often doing harm. One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities is the same across different groups, that there are no innate differences among groups. That assumption is blatantly wrong.
So often when the outcomes that policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, the fault for the discrepancy has been erroneously assigned instead to society which assumes that more programs, money, regulations or court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also blatantly wrong. Some group differences are intractable and government policies can only tweak the difference a little. Let’s focus on 2 sorts of differences: those between men and women and those between blacks and whites.
Observable truths:
I. Variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. Psychological and cognitive dimensions of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. Intelligence does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Alas, intelligence may be less like cholesterol levels and more like height, which can be altered society-wide over long stretches of time by changes, but very little by a single individual whose genes were set in place of birth. One can still improve one’s life, sometimes substantially, through well-chosen, self-directed choices and changes in behavior. But no matter how much one might desire, there are limitations. By not acknowledging how crucial intelligence is in economic and social spheres, we do a great deal of harm to those with lower levels of intelligence. Denialism does nothing to make society fairer, freer, more prosperous or more egalitarian.
II. On specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from "low" to "high," but not a score running from "bad" to "good." that lend themselves to simple comparisons. And all of us use a weighting system that favors our group's strengths.
Further comments will be limited to the arts and sciences.
Women have a small part in the history of the arts and sciences. Even in the 20th century, women got only 2% of the Nobel Prizes in science and 10% in literature. The Fields Medal in mathematics has been earned by only men. Male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is fact. The question is whether sex-specific characteristics are at work.
Mathematics offers an answer. Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but boys do better on standardized tests. The difference is modest, but the male advantage continues to increase, exponentially, as the focus shifts from means to extremes. Evolutionary biologists explain that men have developed elevated 3-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations--differences that show up in tests. Men consistently exhibit higher variance than women on characteristics including visuospatial abilities, meaning that there are proportionally more men than women at both ends of the bell curve. Another answer is that someone with a high verbal IQ can easily master algebra, geometry and calculus in an ordinary math test. Elevated visuospatial skills are most useful for difficult items. If males have an advantage in answering those comparatively few really hard items, the increasing disparity at the extremes becomes explicable. Yet most psychometricians conclude that men and women have the same mean IQ. But, even after adjusting for body size, men have larger brains than women. Magnetic-resonance imaging has revealed parts of the brain's parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women.
This pattern demonstrates what should be obvious: there is nothing inherent in being a woman that precludes high math ability. But there remains a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference is evolutionary, physiological and historical. Male advantage is most pronounced in abstract items and in abstract domains of accomplishment. For example, in the abstract field of philosophy, no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophies. In the abstract field of mathematics the number of great female mathematicians numbers two. In the other sciences, the contributions of great women have usually been empirical rather than theoretical.
In the arts, literature is the least abstract and the most rooted in human interaction; visual art and musical composition are the most abstract. Women have been represented among great writers virtually from the beginning. Women are represented less in visual artists or composing. Social restrictions undoubtedly come into play, but the pattern of accomplishment is strikingly consistent with the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires. Another aspect of male-female differences that bears on accomplishment is motherhood. The experience of parenthood is more profoundly life-altering for women. Extensive empirical study has demonstrated that women are more attracted to children, respond more intensely emotionally and get more and different kinds of satisfactions from nurturing them. These behavioral differences have been linked with biochemical differences between men and women.
Thus, for biochemistry and neurophysiology reasons of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement also have something else they want to do in life: motherhood. In the arts and sciences, 40 is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of mastering the discipline, precisely the years during which most women bear children. Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for accomplishment shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater. My point is that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.
A study of 2,000 people who were identified as extraordinarily talented in math at age 13 and were followed up 20 years later. The women came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, when women were actively socialized to resist gender stereotypes. By their early 30s, both the men and women had become exceptional achievers, receiving advanced degrees in roughly equal proportions. Only about 15% of the women were full-time housewives. Among the women, those who did and those who did not have children were equally satisfied with their careers. Yet women with careers were 4.5 times as likely as men to say they preferred to work less than 40 hours a week. Men placed greater importance on "being successful in my work" and "inventing or creating that will have an impact," while the women found greater value in "having strong friendships," "living close to parents and relatives" and "having a meaningful spiritual life.” Both constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took different forms. The different forms, which directly influence the likelihood of achievement, are consistent with differences between men and women that have biological roots.
Why do men and women differ at the highest levels of accomplishment: Men take more risks, are more competitive and are more aggressive than women. Studies document the hormonal basis of personality differences that bear on sex differences in extreme and venturesome effort, and hence in extremes of accomplishment. Just one more of the ways in which science is demonstrating that men and women are really and truly different, a fact so obvious that only intellectuals could ever have thought otherwise.
Turning to race, Harvard geneticist richard lewontin originated the idea of race as a social construct. In his words: "racial classification is of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." If correct, then statistical analysis of genetic markers would not produce clusters corresponding to common racial labels. It’s been tested and lewontin was wrong. Analyses confirm the genetic reality of group identities going under the label of race or ethnicity. All but 5 of the 3,636 subjects fell into the cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group. When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9% of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary.
Of all the intractable differences identified, one is a hot button like no other: the IQ difference between blacks and whites. Yet there is no technical dispute on the core issues. Yet there is an enduring and substantial IQ difference between black and white and Asian populations in the US, a controversial finding that has nevertheless what stood various criticism over many years. There is not a definite answer as to why this is so and the failure to understand this disparity has social and economic consequences. Harvard's Fryer and the University of Chicago's Levitt comprehensive study of black and white children over the first 4 years of school found that blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races per school year. By the end of 3rd grade there is a large black white test score gap that cannot be explained by observable characteristics. Family wealth is unlikely to have changed much over the 4 years of this study so this can hardly explain as the effect.
The American Psychological Association published on this matter in 1996. Cultural bias in IQ tests does not explain the difference; and the tests are equally predictive of educational, social and economic outcomes for blacks and whites. Such assertions are fact within the scientific community. The size of the black-white difference since the 1970’s has: (1) On educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly. (2) On convergence in scores on the most highly "g-loaded" tests--the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability--has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 100 years ago.
Regarding the difference in educational achievement, on the SAT gaps in the verbal and math tests in 1972 were 1.24 and 1.26 standard deviations respectively. They’ve dropped by 0.37 and 0.35 standard deviation. The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress are similar. For ages 9, 13 and 17, the black-white differences in math of the NAEP test in 1973 were 1.03, 1.29 and 1.24 standard deviations respectively. 9-year-olds’ difference hit 0.73 standard deviation in 2004. But almost all of that convergence had been reached by 1986, when the gap was 0.78 standard deviation. 13-year-olds’ gap dropped by 0.45 standard deviation in 1986. 17-year-olds’dropped by 0.52 standard deviation in 1990. In the reading test, the comparable gaps for ages 9, 13 and 17 as of the NAEP test in 1971 were 1.12, 1.17 and 1.25 standard deviations. Those gaps had shrunk by 0.38, 0.62 and 0.68 standard deviation respectively in 1988. They have since remained unchanged.
Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell examined trends for high-school seniors by comparing 6 large data bases from 1965 to 1992. The black-white difference on a combined measure of math, vocabulary and reading fell from 1.18 to 0.82 standard deviation in that time, a reduction of 0.36. So black and white academic achievement converged significantly through the 1980s and since then has stayed the same. Further, the IQ difference of about one standard deviation is effectively unchanged since the first black-white comparisons 100 years ago. The case for an unchanged black-white IQ difference is straightforward. From WWI to the present, there is no statistically significant change, remaining about 1.0 to 1.1 standard deviations. The Armed Forces Qualification Test, a statistically relevant measure, confirms a black-white difference of 0.97 standard deviation. The substantial convergence that had occurred in academic tests has at best been minimally reflected in IQ scores, and at worst not reflected at all.
In academic achievement or IQ are the causes of the black-white difference environmental or genetic? Surely environment plays a part but, is biology also involved? Why should cognitive ability be the sole heritable trait that is immune from racial differentiation?(1). Obvious environmental factors such as income, parental occupation and schools explain only part of the absolute black-white difference and none of the relative difference. All races of students from affluent neighborhoods are separated by as large a proportional gap as are those from poor neighborhoods. However, some claim environmental causes work with cultural explanations instead of socioeconomic status to cause a phenomenon labeled the "stereotype threat” as defined by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson. It’s thought by some, erroneously, that the stereotype threat explains the black-white difference. Reality shows only that it increases the usual black-white difference. If one eliminates stereotype threat, the usual difference remains.
From a theoretical standpoint, cultural explanations offer ways of looking at the black-white difference when socioeconomic explanations reach a dead end. From a practical standpoint, however, the cultural explanation points to a cause of the black-white difference that is as impervious to manipulation by social policy as causes rooted in biology. If there is to be a rapid improvement, some form of mass movement with powerful behavioral consequences would have to occur within the black community. Absent that, gradual cultural change can only be effective after decades of effort.
Comprehensive evidence for the above appeared in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law. An article titled Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability by Rushton and Jensen based their conclusion on 10 categories of evidence that are consistent with a model in which both environment and genes cause 50% to 80% of the black-white difference. What percentage of the IQ difference is genetic? A methodology is now available. In the United States, few people classified as black are actually 100% African descent (the average American black is about 20% white). To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. Using genetic markers allow for taking a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then using genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as "white" or "black," but along a continuum. Analyzing the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum would be close to dispositive. Much of the evidence reviewed by Rushton and Jensen bears on what we can expect about future changes in the black-white IQ difference.
Comparing black and white mean scores on a battery of subtests does not find a uniform set of differences; nor a random assortment. The size of the difference varies systematically by type of subtest. Some of the largest differences are found on subtests that have little or no cultural content, such as ones based on abstract designs. In 1927, Charles Spearman proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern. Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory. For example, 2 items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as "forward digit span" and "backward digit span." The subject's score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder. The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward. It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to "act white" is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting.
Arthur Jensen tested Spearman's hypothesis. He summarized the results from 17 independent sets of data, derived from 149 psychometric tests. They consistently supported Spearman's hypothesis. Subsequent work on Spearman's original conjecture has confirmed it. No matter how analyzed, a single factor kept dominating the results. It is now established that there is an inheritable component of IQ. A variety of studies have found correlations such as brain-evoked potentials, brain pH levels, brain glucose metabolism, nerve-conduction velocity and reaction time. It has been determined that a highly significant relationship exists with the volume of gray matter in specific areas of the frontal cortex, and that the magnitude of the volume is under tight genetic control. In short, we now know that captures something in the biology of the brain. So, the size of the black-white difference represents a biologically grounded and highly heritable cognitive resource. When those two observations are put together, a number of characteristics of the black-white difference become predictable, correspond with phenomena we have observed in data, and give us reason to think that not much will change.
One implication is that black-white convergence on test scores will be greatest on tests that are least g-loaded. Literacy is an example: People with a wide range of IQs can be taught to read competently, and it is the NAEP reading test in which convergence has reached its closest point. Spearman's hypothesis explains why the convergence that has occurred on academic achievement tests has not been matched on IQ tests, the source of the black-white difference lies in skills that are hardest to change. It points to a valuable underlying mental ability which cannot be coached.
Another implication is that the "Flynn effect" will not close the black-white difference, the increase in IQ scores over time. If IQ scores are so malleable that they can rise steadily for several decades, why should not the black-white difference be malleable as well? The evidence has grown, and now seems persuasive, that the increases in IQ scores do not represent significant increases in g. If the black-white difference is concentrated in g and if the Flynn effect does not consist of increases in g, the Flynn effect will not do much to close the gap. A study by Dutch scholars found "the implications of the Flynn effect for black-white differences appear small."
Taking the black-white IQ difference as a whole, 2 facts beyond much doubt. 1st, the conventional environmental explanation of the black-white difference is inadequate. Poverty, bad schools and racism, which seem such obvious culprits, do not explain it. Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of. 2nd we are left with an IQ difference that has, at best, narrowed by only a few points over the last century. Nothing in the history of this difference, or in what we have learned about its causes suggests that any faster change is in our future.
Many are living a lie, basing the futures of society on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects, a lie so many who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. A lie so many scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences. In the public-policy debate, witness the contorted ways in which even the opponents of policies like affirmative action frame their arguments so that no one can accuse them of saying that women are different from men or blacks from whites. Witness the unwillingness of the mainstream media to discuss group differences without assuring that the differences will disappear in a better world. The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, there would be no need mention it. But taboos have consequences when people are fearful of exploring them. Consider that organizations are riddled with people who have been promoted to their level of incompetence because of pressure to have a staff with political correctness. Shouldn’t we be worrying about the effects on the quality of their skills and efforts? It would be helpful to know the answers, but we will not so long as the taboo against talking about group difference prevails.
How much damage has the taboo done in education? Christina Hoff Sommers has argued that willed blindness to the different developmental patterns has led many educators to do pervasive damage to the way our elementary and secondary schools are run. James McWhirter, a black Columbia university linguist and New York Times columnist has lamented that affirmative action dehumanizes black students, leaving them “in over their heads nationwide.” Richard Sander in Stuart Taylor found that of the students attending elite law schools 52% of blacks were in the bottom 10th of their class with only 8% in the top half.
Few have been willing to pursue this issue lest they be required to talk about innate group differences. Similar questions can be asked about the damage done to medical care, whose practitioners have only recently begun to acknowledge the ways in which ethnic groups respond differently to certain drugs. How much damage has the taboo done to our understanding of America's social problems? The part played by racism in creating different outcomes in black and white poverty, crime and illegitimacy is not the raw disparity we observe but, what remains after controlling for group characteristics. For some outcomes, sex or race differences nearly disappear after a proper analysis is done. For others, a large residual difference remains. In either case, open discussion of group differences would give us a better grasp on where to look for causes and solutions.
The taboo has crippled our ability to explore the ways in which groups respond to the world--which means almost every political, social or economic topic of any complexity. Shouldn’t we be honest and start talking about group differences openly? About the nature of different virtues? About differences between cultures? About differences between political ideologies? Even listing the topics of an inquiry into the nature of group differences is stifled today. A truly open and free society would puncture that irrational fear of differences, which will favor all groups in some measure, and none of which is large enough to frighten anyone who looks at them dispassionately. For every implication one might seize upon, another gives fodder to the other. Talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to what Jefferson had in mind as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal more succinctly saying: "equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
Many educational outcomes are tractable even if group differences remain unchanged. Dropout rates, literacy, numeracy, discipline, teacher performance, the quality of the curriculum and academic performance within a given IQ range is tractable. Group differences shouldn’t discourage improving schooling for children getting bad educations due to policies that ignore differences that are impeding, not facilitating, progress. Creating double standards ensures that some will never see others as their equals. Intentions notwithstanding, today's policies create separation, condescension and resentment. It need not be. Any genuinely applied single set of standards would find that performance really is distributed indistinguishably across different groups. But getting to that point will require us to jettison an apparatus of liberal laws, regulations and bureaucracies that has been 40 years in the making. That will not happen until the conversation has opened up. In careful honest analysis of problems lies the hope that they might be solved.
The ideological precept underlying wokism is not scientifically supported. No matter how much people are punished for telling the truth, denied jobs, kicked off social media, or called names, and no matter how much honor is bestowed on those who defend woke lies, the facts will not change. Different ancestral populations are genetically distinguishable. They have different distribution of traits, including measured IQ and athletic abilities. Almost every remotely plausible environmental explanation for these differences has been repeatedly tested in both natural and control experiments, and have the same patterns of differences appear every time. As of yet, there is nothing that seriously casts doubt on the hereditarian explanation, and if it weren't for political implications this wouldn't be controversial.
As Charles Murray stated, we can start by stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial and start facing reality. And as Christianity preaches, remember we are all God’s child, and therefore all treated with dignity.
"...sweeps of the genome across human populations...Dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found in traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, facility, or the ability to delay gratification."--Jonathan Haidt
"A heterodox movement that does not support free inquiry into genetic differences among races and their potentially effect on outcomes is guaranteed to fail."--Nathan Cofnas, University of Cambridge
1. However, asking this question obviously conflicts with deeply held social ideals about the inherent equality of all humans which unfortunately in the process embraces phantom ideological phenomenon such as systemic racism, micro-aggressions, and toxic whiteness. Of course, pointing out the essential irrationality of this ideology is to court liberal ire and hate. Is science the victim of a societal reaction against reason, or is science the cause of our age unreason?
Further reading:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/20/american-medical-associations-racism-course-is-unscientific-propaganda/
https://spectator.org/crts-pernicious-effect-on-scientific-research/
