Race And IQ: The Fallacy of Heritability
Green, Philip
This article is the first of three dealing with the subject of Genetics, IQ, and Equality. The next two articles, to follow in our summer and fall issues, will deal with "Race and IQ: Arthur...
...He couples this junction with a rhetorical question (that can only be taken as ironical): "Where these conditions exist, has there been found an appreciably smaller achievement gap between the races...
...cit., pp...
...That hostility, too, could be implacable, perhaps most dangerously so after the abolition of slavery...
...Efficiency and Equity in Philadelphia Public Schools," Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Business Review, February 1975...
...See also William H. Grier and Price Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968...
...With respect to those well-observed traits, one geneticist has reported that "Less than 15% of all human genetic diversity is accounted for by differences between human groups...
...See Arthur L. Stinchcombe's discussion, "Environment: The Cumulation of Events," in Science, Heritability, and !Q, Reprint Series # 4 of the Harvard Educational Review, 1969, pp...
...Thus we can put a hard number to the old argument about "nature" versus "nurture...
...The only scholar who has actually gone to the trouble of reanalyzing 3 The defense of IQ as representative of a single real trait is given by Jensen, HER, pp...
...If in that circumstance the black twins' IQs were consistently the same as or lower than those of the white twins—even though they were receiving significant social advantages, including most prominently the noticeably higher IQs of their foster parents, unmatched by the white twins—then and only then could we say that the hypothesis of the genetic inferiority of average black cognitive ability had been supported...
...Obviously, such studies are no help in trying to determine between-population variance...
...some parents then had genetically identical twins except that one of them was genetically "white" and the other was genetically "black...
...Reliance on the much-cited Coleman Report (cited as authoritative, for example, by Jensen) also provides us with nothing but delusions about the possibilities of education...
...Thus there is produced the notorious condition that the performance of black children on the average declines with attendance in school, relative not only to that of whites but to the level of potential suggested by their first-grade performances...
...The list of conditions that have been observed by teachers, psychologists, and social scientists to impinge on intellectual performance is almost endless...
...and a careful, patient teacher aide (with a ninth-grade education) is working a minor miracle with Evon, who now can stand almost straight, can talk in sentences, can count and recognize colors...
...D.C.: U.S...
...1-23...
...Even the simple lack of enough sleep is an important element in this life-style...
...the general raising of average American IQ levels in the 20th century, as indicated in the need to rewrite and toughen the standard IQ tests on several occasions in order to prevent the national mean from rising...
...The evidence on this score is absolutely unequivocal...
...We shall see in a succeeding article how Jensen has misused and distorted the data on race and IQ in his attempt to bolster that prejudice...
...Here the sort of work Head Start programs by and large did not engage in is illustrated in an anecdote from the experience of a teacher working with Eskimo children: "Evon was badly damaged when he was born unexpectedly at a fishing camp with no one to attend his mother...
...22 A. Binet, "Les Ides Modernes sur les Enfants" (Paris: Flammarion, 1909), p. 143...
...also James S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity, vol...
...Our educational systems, despite the best efforts of educators, are still in their philosophical and historical infancy...
...It consists of theoretical propositions that are foolish or even nonsensical...
...The most the American educational system accomplishes as an equalizing force is to provide everyone capable of taking advantage of it with threshold resources...
...At best (and rarely), the former has tended to mean treating everyone equally—but treating people who are unequal equally simply insures their continued inequality...
...Some races or cultural groups might be said to be averagely of different stature, strength, etc., but no human group (with the exception of the Pygmies, perhaps) falls outside the normal ranges for such traits or is deficient in significant physical talents...
...Jensen insists at one point that American blacks have not been subjected to "extreme" negative environmental conditions—by which, it turns out, he means total sensory deprivation...
...but he certainly has discovered nothing at all about anyone's genetic abilities...
...One wonders if anyone would attempt to explain that disparity genetically, or to argue that American blacks live longer than South African blacks because their genes are superior...
...and especially Jane R. Mercer and Wayne Curtis Brown, "Racial Differences in I.Q.: Fact or Artifact?, in Senna, op...
...because blacks are proportionately much more likely to be found among the American poor than are whites, and because black people have been and perhaps still are excluded from the cultural mainstream in a much greater proportion than whites...
...The same is true for IQ scores...
...cit., pp...
...4 He concludes, on the basis of the available data, as reanalyzed, that there is no evidence for a heritability figure of greater than zero even among the white subjects of those studies themselves, and that there is at least some reason to believe that IQ simply is not heritable at all—on the basis of those studies...
...and Appendix A; Richard Hermstein, "IQ," Atlantic Monthly, September 1971, pp...
...In every way they have been, as a group, more removed from the cultural mainstream, and thus from a realistic sense of mastery of its most important artifacts...
...ism" is a hoax, the Piltdown man of social science...
...See the migration study by Otto Klineberg, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935...
...His report, furthermore, replicates the findings of a 20-year-old study by another psychologist who was able to produce even more dramatic changes in the measured IQs of "disadvantaged" children, using trust-inducing techniques that did not have nearly so great an effect on the test efforts of middle-class children...
...Remedial education (especially as limited to the institutions of formal schooling) is even now probably a lot like remedial dentistry used to be: capable of patching up holes but not of modifying the organism's disposition...
...But since the schools have not especially been trying to do that, it would be an absurdity to think that the data he summarizes tells us anything at all about what education can do...
...1259-66, and Harry Munsinger, "The Adopted Child's IQ: A Critical Review, "Psychological Bulletin, September 1975, pp...
...It may even be that schools as we know them are a relatively inefficient educational instrument...
...Those who doubt that education can be effectively compensatory should ask themselves how they would react to a proposal that we take the resources and teachers presently engaged in public education, add to them by a significant amount, and then devote this total primarily to the education of those, say, who scored in the bottom third of the IQ tests or other aptitude scores—that, in other words, we deprive IQ-advantaged children of all education while spending $20,000 to $30,000 a year on each IQ-depressed child...
...But the biological intransigence of the human material is not one of them...
...EDS...
...19 Hannah Arendt has commented on the effects of the nation's failure to pass a constitutional amendment explicitly aimed at racial segregation and discrimination in "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973...
...114-44...
...623-59...
...But most important of all for our discussion, there are traits, highly heritable in all populations, that are thoroughly malleable, and in some cases quite easily so...
...Some Studies of Early Education in Familial and Extra-Familial Settings," in Montagu, op...
...The core of Jensen's message is revealed most tellingly in a passage in which he denies uttering it—expounding the concept of "associative intelligence" (or ability to learn by rote) as a level of intellectual understanding at which it would be more constructive to approach and teach black people, on the average...
...that is, the difference between the average IQs of any two groups of people with different average IQs can be much more easily accounted for, statistically, by positing a genetic rather than an environmental influence...
...Among domestic animals, for example, the heritability of traits having to do with size is generally quite low...
...See also William Muraskin, "The Moral Basis of a Backward Sociologist: Edward Banfield, the Italians, and the Italian-Americans," American Journal of Sociology, May 1974, pp...
...The Head Start projects also were poorly funded...
...and so it continues, unto the nth generation...
...XVI (1951), pp...
...Today, even leaving such comparisons aside, "tracking" systems in many jurisdictions regularly guide middle-class children toward college and the well-paying professions, and lower-class children toward vocational training and the lesser wages of skilled or semiskilled labor...
...the same is true for blacks as opposed to whites: ...on the average, Negroes test about one standard deviation (15 IQ points) below the white population in IQ, and this finding is fairly uniform across...81 different tests of intellectual ability...
...The real meaning of the often heard criticism that IQ tests are "culturally biased" is not merely that bias inheres in their language, or in the specific questions asked, or in the expectations of what constitutes a "right" answer—though there is certainly much of that...
...It is easy to see why...
...The instability and penuriousness of family life add their effects, as does the greater susceptibility of the poor to chronic disease (often undiagnosed), their poor nutrition, poor prenatal and obstetrical care, and all the other components of the ill health of the poor...
...VI (1972), p. 396...
...Associative capacity" is also a form of learning behavior that is much more easily coerced into being...
...111 ff...
...Providing opportunity" is not "equalizing...
...No one has ever thought to explain life expectancy genetically, since a genetic explanation would be so outré, and an environmental explanation is so obvious...
...The "heritability" of a trait refers to the extent to which variations in measurement from the average value of the trait may be traceable to genetic variation in the measured population...
...And therefore these measurements can tell us little or nothing about how those groups "really" or "innately" differ from each other (if such a distinction is meaningful...
...Geneticists, as their texts reveal, do not do that sort of thing...
...Moreover, "intelligence" in its various measurable aspects is far from being the only indicator of comparative social welfare...
...As one researcher puts it: "Only if black children could be reared as though they were whites, and vice versa, could the effects of different rearing environments on the genotype distribution of the two races be estimated...
...This certainly has been the case in the past, during the pre-1960 period from which most of our IQ studies date...
...Moreover, he also provides plentiful evidence that discrimination against blacks in its inception was definitely caste-oriented, and the expectation that one is going to be mistreated for one's race can hardly be got rid of overnight, especially on the mere basis of Banfield's very equivocal evidence...
...It consists in some part of (1) the ability to understand conceptually abstract questions...
...For at that point Jensen is simply measuring a form of behavior (memorization and rote learning) that does not demand a great commitment to optimism about one's future ability to control one's environment—as compared to the search for conceptual mastery, which does demand such a commitment...
...In the two populations, we may under ideal experimental circumstances (which never exist for social research) be able to say what causes variation within each population, but the methods for doing this have no applicability to the prospect for determining the causes of variance between populations...
...1° For example, susceptibility to tooth decay through softness of dentyne ("poor dentition") is such a trait...
...2 Evon's, of course, is a much more severe case of intellectual deficiency than that afflicting most low-IQ children...
...2) the 1970, pp...
...But many children are not equipped to take advantage of the resources of public education and many who are lack the right kind of ambition, aggressiveness, or t 2Barbara Bowen Doak, "Life Out There Is Good," Swarthmore College Bulletin, July 1975, p. 22...
...Whether IQ scores defined in a wholly relational manner can sensibly be thought to measure a trait of the kind we could conceivably inherit is a complex and interesting question that must clearly be troublesome.' Yet it is not necessary to go into this question here, for where the subject of race is at issue, Jensen's use of the notion of the heritability of IQ is clearly and unequivocally defective in an even more fundamental sense...
...IQ tests of the various kinds used today—and from hereon I shall use the single phrase "IQ tests" to describe all those with which Jensen's work is concerned—do not measure "intelligence" against some independently "real" standard, the way mercury in a thermometer measures temperature, or the distance between grooves on a bar of platinum alloy in a vault in France is used to define our standard unit of distance...
...Yet one need have no hesitation in saying that the doctrine one critic has called "Jensen'Educability and Group Differences (New York: Harper & Row, 1973...
...A leopard born and brought up in a cage will never attain the running speed of its siblings born and raised on the veldt...
...Over the generations black people, in contrast with most other immigrant ethnic groups, have correctly perceived American society as continuously closed, tyrannical, and hostile...
...7 'The improbability of these genetic "explanations" is described by W. F. Bodmer, "Race and IQ: the Genetic Background," in Montagu, op...
...n 1969 Arthur Jensen first made the claim that it is "a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference...
...It is quite true, as Jencks claims, that "the largest and most comprehensive school surveys" (as of 1971) support a finding that "no measurable school resource or policy shows a consistent relationship to schools' effectiveness in boosting student achievement," and that "the gains associated with any given resource are almost always small" (p...
...RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 187 Jensen's summarizing remark that "compensatory education has been tried and apparently it has failed" (HER, p. 1...
...it was replicated 15 years later, with similar results, by E. S. Lee, "Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration: A Philadelphia Test of the Klineberg Hypothesis, "American Sociological Review, vol...
...Public schools in this country at least have been meant to domesticate the uncivilized or countrified, Americanize the immigrant, tutor the untutored, train the potential worker, and provide assistance in the form of educational opportunity to the upwardly mobile...
...Moreover, it would be possible to arrange things so that poor dentition would seem to be "carried" racially, in the same way that IQ seems to Jensen to be carried racially...
...But the variations may themselves be trivial, and the genetic "imprint" on the trait very weak or malleable...
...Jencks's findings, then, tell us quite accurately what our schools have done: with respect to the selective, compensatory raising of scores on various aptitude and intelligence tests, not very much...
...To the extent that this phenomenon exists, one can invent complicated genetic explanations for it: one can imagine that people who are genetically of low intelligence become poor because of their low intelligence, marry each other (what is called "assortative mating by intelligence"), and produce a lower class carrying low intelligence genetically...
...Indeed, given the history of race in the U.S., what needs to be explained is not why the gap is so large, but why it is not even larger...
...For blacks, these institutions have posed a special kind of obstacle...
...To sum up: it is plain that, genetics aside, there is considerable room for improvement both in the comparative preparation of black children for scholastic performance (including their use of the abilities measured by IQ tests), and in the nature of their typical educational experience—whether directly through interventions aimed at learning behavior or indirectly through the abolition of arbitrary racial barriers in society at large...
...Child 23 Ernest A. Haggard, "Social Status and Intelligence," Genetic Psychology Monographs, vol...
...associated with IQ-type tests (nor, obviously, was there a tradition of such careers either in slave society or in the preslavery African communities...
...No one can talk about the subject of equality without dealing with those writings, and the "hypothesis" has become a political weapon...
...We cannot easily close the intelligence-as-IQ gap that already exists between different classes or groups by educational effort or other environmental interventions, and we are doomed to the continued existence of a society based on real, "naturally" transmitted, and thus permanent group differences: ie., a "naturally" inegalitarian society...
...Where correlations have been reported, the exact causal sequence is almost impossible to disentangle...
...16 Moreover, in many cases it isn't even possible to distinguish genetic from nongenetic causes 1 "The most compelling treatment, by far, of "The Hidden Injuries of Class" is the book of that title by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (New York: Random House, 1972...
...Estimates of this heritability figure, by people who have followed Jensen's procedure, range from a low of 0.25-0.35 (that is, 25-35 percent as a proportion of the statistical variance between two different IQ sets accounted for by postulating a heritability factor), through a midrange figure of 0.50 to a high of 0.80 (Jensen's estimate, which he justifies chiefly by discounting almost all studies but those involving identical twins and adopted foster children, and by ignoring necessary caveats about interpretation of the data other authors have pointed to...
...In fact, as Kamin demonstrates, the studies that have been done are actually of no value for determining even within-population variance...
...28-39...
...This can happen to anyone, of course, but where class position disposes of so much of our fate, it is more likely to happen to those in a lower-class position...
...the classic heritability studies, Leon Kamin, has given a detailed report of his findings in a book that stands as a fascinating exercise in scholarly detective work...
...On the other hand, if people grow up in sharply unlike environments, then the heritability of the very same trait will seem to be low...
...we do not need a "genetic hypothesis" to explain that...
...They all require that the subject treat competitive paper testing as a legitimate institution that makes sense and to which energetic attention ought to be paid...
...In the Union of South Africa average life expectancy is about 65 for white males, 50 for black males...
...Furthermore, the condition of being especially subject to disadvantageous social circumstances has always been perfectly apparent to black people of all ages...
...Thus a reasonable person must look elsewhere than to genetics for an explanation of this IQ phenomenon...
...188 PHILIP GREEN "luck...
...The Milwaukee Project (as Herber's work is known) is described by Stephen P. Strickland, "Can Slum Children Learn?," in Carl Senna, ed., The Fallacy of I.Q...
...see also B. S. Bloom, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics (New York: John Wiley, 1964), and Martin Deutsch and Associates, The Disadvantaged Child (New York: Basic Books, 1967...
...Jensen postulates that by separating the environmental influence on these children (their places of residence and the people bringing them up) from the genetic influence (their actual blood ties), and then comparing their IQ scores, one can estimate the genetic influence— the heritability—quite accurately...
...This particular kind of intelligence is allegedly encapsulated in various intelligence or IQ tests (which have in common that their results, for a given individual, tend to show a high rate of intercorrelation...
...There is, however, still another byway through Jensen's morass of pseudoscience we have not yet explored: that is, even if genes 'Human height is the best-known case...
...These tendencies, which militate against positive IQ behavior, are strengthened by an educational system that has generally hastened the integration of aspiring social groups in exchange for their agreeing to become "Americanized...
...Even today perhaps— when, in conventional terms the "successful" black middle class is much larger than it has ever been before—a style of life that at key moments substitutes the "affective blockages" of anxiety, defensiveness, withdrawal, and suspicion of "white institutions" for more securely rooted behaviors may remain a seemingly realistic option for black children in much greater proportion than for white children...
...1484-96...
...New York: John Wiley, 1974...
...It would be astonishing if they did not...
...Even within the programs, moreover, different pedagogical methods were used, consisting more often of experimental attempts to find new methods for successful instruction than known methods of remediation...
...To be sure, millions of upwardly mobile children of lower-class parents "succeed" in conventional terms much better than many children of middle-class parents...
...it is made clear to them that the credentialing function of the schools will not be fulfilled for them as predictably as it would be if they were white, and that even when it is fulfilled it will be less meaningful to their futures...
...On the contrary, because the genes for intelligence are so many and so diverse, there is no conceivable reason why the original gene pools for intelligence should have had, overall, different genetic value in any of the human races...
...15) The statement about social class, by itself, may not tell us very much...
...Jensen himself, in fact, offers a similar analysis in chapter 5 of Educability, and then adds that "the higher the within-group heritability, the greater is the plausibility, or the a priori probability, that genetic differences exist between the groups...
...Now let us suppose that groups X and Y live together in a single society, and we are trying to determine the heritability of a trait like intelligence for the whole population (X + Y), so that we can determine whether the manifest average differences between X and Y (if there are any) are the result of genes or environment...
...Clarence Karier, "'Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State," Educational Theory, Spring 1972, pp...
...Furthermore, although almost nothing precise is known about the placement of genes for intelligence, much is known about the genetic loci for blood type, blood serum protein composition, etc...
...2. The counterargument is presented by N. J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, "IQ: Heritability and Inequality, Part I," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Summer 1974, pp...
...Unless the two populations are so interbred that we can no longer distinguish between them (making the original question meaningless), it is impossible to do this...
...it is greatest at the extremes (i.e., shows up most strongly when high-status persons are compared with lowest-status persons), and the relationship becomes more pronounced the more one studies the real culture of poverty...
...The Effects of Environment TO REASON as we have done here, and to suggest that the expectable "failure" of the schools can easily be accounted for without a "genetic hypothesis," requires us to specify with some plausibility the nongenetic components of the black/white average IQ difference...
...If the postulated heritability factor indeed exists, and is as high as he claims (or close to it), certain unpleasant conclusions seem to follow, according to Jensen...
...Otherwise Jensen's writings on race will continue to be treated as unpalatable, demanding refutation of a "difficult" kind, but generally to be given credence as having been offered in good faith...
...It is at this point, though, that the biological antiegalitarians, led by Jensen, take a crucial step...
...The concepts of class or status (the latter term referring more to perceived social position than to measurable economic position) are not by themselves sufficient to compare, even crudely, black and white accomplishment...
...11 These findings are not at all in conflict with Christopher Jencks's notorious conclusion that "the evidence suggests that equalizing educational opportunity would do very little to make adults more equal" (Jencks, p. 255), nor with "Zena Stein and Mervyn Susser, "Mutability of Intelligence and Epidemiology of Mild Mental Retardation, "Review of Educational Research, February 1970, p. 64...
...But that does not matter: for the most striking point in Jensen's work is that his proposition on the heritability of IQ distributions, true or false, is of no relevance at all with respect to the black/white (or any similar) IQ difference...
...The Head Start experiments to which Jensen refers were thinly scattered among the nation's school districts and usually instituted in precisely those neighborhoods where the cards are heavily stacked against scholastic accomplishment well before school age is reached...
...5 Needless to say, we have not studied the behavior of such children any more than the behavior of gryphons or sphinxes: Jensen has attempted to pass off the worst kind of pseudoscience as the real thing...
...We hardly need look farther to explain the shortfall of American blacks in average IQ scores...
...RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 191 of poor performance...
...That is, pluralist but inegalitarian societies should, other things being equal, produce roughly the same trait measurements for cultural phenomena as Jensen has produced for "intelligence...
...Plausibility is a subjective judgment of 'Sandra Scarr-Salapatek, "Race, Social Class, and IQ," Science, December 24, 1971, 1287...
...Neither general public education nor even the particular 1960s compensatory education programs for preschoolers have anything in common with known cases of successful selective intervention...
...Moreover, what differences do exist seem to shrink with changes in diet and health care, and this is even true of within-population variances...
...A recent book, The Enduring Effects of Education, by Herbert Hyman, Charles Wright, and John Shelton Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), sums up the evidence we have for the positive effects of schooling...
...So it is, but italicizing words does not increase their truth-value, and it must be repeated that nothing in the literature of withingroup heritability has the slightest bearing on an informed estimate of that "likelihood...
...and the nonexistence of such schools demonstrates that the Coleman Report and other studies have not been analyzing the results of our commitment to educational equality—but rather the results of our lack of commitment to it...
...Jensen, whose pursuit of egalitarian arguments is indefatigable, has never answered the statement by Stein and Susser who, summarizing all the available data, conclude that "improvement in the social environment of groups at a marked disadvantage can bring about a substantial improvement in IQ levels and a decline in the frequency of mild mental retardation...
...But we do know a fair amount about the genetics of what seem to be more strictly biological traits, among both animals and humans...
...An equally dramatic account concerning individuals rather than structured learning groups is that of Robert B. McCall et al., "Developmental Changes in Mental Performance," Monograph # 38 (No...
...The key word here is "population," for heritability statistics only apply to a specific breeding and rearing population (as geneticists put it...
...Success" in Jensen's terms—permanently improving IQ and scholastic achievement for many children—would in these circumstances have been surprising, if not miraculous...
...relevant comparisons among the children and their backgrounds that would have returned much lower heritability estimates were overlooked...
...On the average, the lower one's 181 social class by the usual census indicators, the more likely one is to have a below-average IQ, and the less likely to have an IQ well above average...
...also Uric Bronfenbrenner, "Nature with Nurture: A Reinterpretation of the Evidence," in the excellent collection Race and IQ, Ashley Mantagu, ed...
...It is hardly surprising that schooling does not always overcome the effects of environment...
...64 ff...
...That suggestion is unwarranted...
...and the black twin never encountered any discrimination or other derogating behavior...
...2"See the summation of what we know about the genetics of intelligence by Lloyd G. Humphreys, "Theory of Intelligence," in Robert Cancro, ed., Intelligence: Genetic and Environmental Influences (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1971), p. 34...
...As with most human traits—certainly those that are properly classed as dispositions or potentialities—our best guide is still the commonsense observation that whatever the natural limitations of our various intelligences, their force can be and has been greatly attenuated by concerted human action...
...All of that can happen and has happened thousands or millions of times in every modern nation...
...3 (Washington, D.C.: Society for Research in Child Development 1966...
...3) the ability to answer conceptually abstract questions for existentially abstract purposes speedily and as commanded...
...All we can say for certain is that Our existing noncompensatory schools do not compensate...
...An environment does not need to be "extreme" in that peculiar sense to have a chilling effect, any more than black children need be actually caged or beaten on exhibiting creative intellect for their exhibition of it to be inhibited...
...And so these conditions can be called to account for some of that differential, especially as many of the apparent causes of what are now called "learning disabilities" are visited predominantly on the poor or the excluded...
...9 R. C. Lewontin, "The Apportionment of Human Diversity," in Theodosius Dobzhansky et al., eds., Evolutionary Biology, vol...
...All IQ-type tests, whatever their apparent and superficial dissimilarities, have in common that one must be tuned in to the idea of abstract testing behavior, which includes the existentially arbitrary notion that tests ought to be finished quickly and as specified by authority, in order to do well at them...
...The conditions discussed in the preceding pages—conditions inhibiting and constraining the expression of cognitive skills—also exist in some form or other for many white children...
...But if the separated children have IQs like each other's, and unlike those of foster parents who reared one of them from birth, that would seem to be good evidence of a genetic inheritance that can't easily be effected by changing social circumstances...
...In those early studies the true home/foster-home differences were not nearly as great as claimed...
...The New York Times "News of the Week in Review" for April 27, 1975, describes the immense success of a much more carefully focused compensatory education program in Philadelphia...
...The question is how best to teach him in a two-teacher school with no special equipment except interest and concern...
...Educability, p. 272...
...Some of these studies or experimental programs are, as Jensen has remarked, theoretically questionable, in that the researchers or experimenters have done an incomplete job of establishing the exact causes of either the initial IQ deficit or its subsequent erasure...
...We need only eliminate all fluoride (including natural fluoride) from our water supplies, give fluoride pills in copious amounts to all whites '°E.g., height...
...43-51...
...The only relevant question, then, is not whether intelligence as measured by IQ is inherited in some way but whether it is malleable...
...psychologists who use IQ tests diagnostically, in an individualized therapeutic setting (the only legitimate use for such tests) have always known that it is impossible to make generalized comparisons using a measurement instrument that has been standardized according to the norms of a particular population or subpopulation (such as white Americans...
...likelihood...
...The original HER essay is "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement...
...For many if not most of those who begin with less than equal advantages, therefore, not merely equal treatment but compensatory treatment only (both within and without the schools) would suffice to overcome their initial deficit...
...supply adjusts to meet demand...
...Thus even the middleclass black trying to make a way in America— especially in the past—has had to put excessive energy into avoiding destruction, figuratively or literally...
...When we state or imply, as Jensen does, that the heritability of intelligence gives cause for concern, we are obviously suggesting that the more trait variance is heritable (traceable to genetic differences), the more difficult egalitarian social reform must be...
...87, 95, and 99 of Banfield's The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), one finds examples of his self-contradiction on this fundamental 192 PHILIP GREEN Of course, there are similarities in the fates of the various ethnic (immigrant) groups in the U.S., but the differences do make a difference: conscripted slavery is hardly similar, psychologically or sociologically, to voluntary emigration...
...There are highly heritable traits that are almost totally unmalleable, to be sure: blood type, for example...
...But the successes themselves remain as a dramatic critique of those who claim that "heredity" cannot be modified by "environment...
...Indeed, to the extent that "compensatory" treatment is offered, it is often overcompensation for the already advantaged...
...It is always possible that properly conceived studies, permitting of genuine comparison and correctly reported, would have demonstrated an IQ heritability figure of some value or other...
...When we look at other apparently unrelated indices we discover, for example, that an almost exactly similar relationship obtains with respect to the relative life expectancies of blacks and whites (at age one year) as holds for IQ...
...According to the Coleman Report, this phenomenon does not occur in nonsouthern "metropolitan areas...
...Equally certain is that millions of children of lower-class parents have higher IQs than many children of middle- or upper-class parents, and the psychosocial pressures on many middle- and upper-class children are disastrous...
...209-44...
...IQ figures, sample sizes, and variance analyses were misreported...
...Their cautious treatment of that topic leaves a strong impression that Jensen has confused people with fruitflies...
...Leaving aside considerations of the fairness of this Draconian measure, can anyone doubt that it would have an effect...
...II, U.S...
...Jonathan Kozol, writing about Boston's schools, offered impressive first-hand observation to the contrary...
...that they have been for many black children there can be no doubt...
...Other decisive critiques of the methodology and findings of these studies are David Layzer, "Heritability Analyses of I.Q...
...Jerry Hirsch has called this aspect of "Jensenism" to our attention...
...13 This last aspect of American educational history produces the raised expectations many believe Jencks has deflated...
...Compare, e.g., Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp...
...Once again, however, there is literally no evidence that this has happened...
...The Malleability of IQ AS WE HAVE SEEN, there is no evidence for Jensen's contention that any innate genetic factor is implicated in the IQ gap between the races...
...24 The tests' fundamental bias is in the more general, and foolish, notion that children will approach the tests at an equal level of physical and emotional morale...
...Above this threshold, ambition, aggressiveness, and sheer luck (as Jencks notes) will, in an expanding economy, carry some of the system's beneficiaries upward: enough to fuel the ideology of equal opportunity...
...Poor dentition, in this sense, is both heritable and endemic, yet the simple addition of a goodly amount of fluoride to all water supplies (plus the general inculcation of good dental habits) would virtually wipe out caries within one or two generations...
...it is quite likely that we are all living in educational cages of unknown dimensions, and with unmeasurable effects...
...see also the excellent summary (from which I take the term "ecological intervention") by Urie Bronfenbrenner, "Is Early Intervention Effective...
...Then, obviously, genetic variations will seem to account for most of the variance in a variable trait that is manifested within those environments...
...8 ) 'BOn pp...
...They again marry others like themselves, have too many children to care for successfully, and do not get adequate help from the social order that surrounds, ignores, or oppresses them...
...13 See Colin Greer, The Great School Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1972...
...The schools themselves, confronted with a relatively ill-prepared and stigmatized population that is suspicious of their intentions, very often perceive this population as a social problem to be "dealt with" in a merely custodial way, rather than as a human resource to be nurtured and encouraged...
...The same article also appears in Environment, Heredity, and Intelligence, Reprint Series # 2 of the Harvard Educational Review, with the same pagination, accompanied by various responses and a counterresponse by Jensen ("Reducing the Heredity-Environment Uncertainty," pp...
...This magnitude of difference gives a median overlap of 15 percent, meaning that 15 percent of the Negro population exceeds the white average...
...But these studies, on the whole, have measured only the "value added" by additional, marginal dollar expenditures, and by marginal decreases in average class size...
...That is, suppose two environments very much alike regarding those aspects that have the strongest impact on measured intelligence in a given society...
...and R. Herber et al., "Rehabilitation of Families at Risk for Mental Retardation" (Milwaukee: Regional Rehabilitation Center of the University of Wisconsin, 1969...
...All in all, then, to deal with the subject of race by offering what careful analysis shows to be an unsupported "genetic hypothesis" that would be of no social significance, even were there merit in it (given the malleability of intelligence), can only be attributed to prejudice...
...609-10...
...Many of them go together in what can correctly be described as the average life-style of poverty in the urban (or rural) slum...
...cit., pp...
...We have no knowledge of human genetics with respect to such traits— Jensen is a "pioneer" here...
...They in turn marry others like themselves ("assortative mating...
...All mere page references will be to the Review...
...Therefore, the heritability of a trait in subpopulation X is wholly irrelevant to knowledge of its heritability in subpopulation Y. The members of population X may live in environments that are on the average pretty much like each other compared to the more dissimilar environments that members of population Y live in, and in that case the genetic variance for the particular trait would seem to be greater...
...Genetics and depressed environments exert mutual influences on each other, as when a better diet helps a child seem brighter and so able to benefit from the disposition of teachers to favor "brighter" students...
...Within a very short while our "statistics" would show that white children "inherit" good dentition from their caries-free parents, and black children "inherit" poor dentition from their cariesridden parents...
...That comment merely highlights his social insensitivity...
...So far no one has studied any school of this kind, because no such school exists to be studied...
...National Center for Educational Statistics (Wash...
...14 Of course, no one as yet has studied a school or school district where, over time, receipts and expenditures took a quantum jump, average class size was reduced not marginally but virtually to tutorials, and dramatically new and improved methods of remediation were implemented by intensively trained and highly skilled teachers absolutely dedicated to their task...
...His air of a man who has courageously produced a tiger from a hat is thus without any justification...
...On the contrary, the heritability of a trait, assuming that there is any cultural effect on its expression at all, can equally be conceived of as nothing more than a function of the extent to which salient features of the environments the observed population live in are themselves *The Science and Politics of I.Q...
...It is instructive to contrast the presentation of the idea of "heritability" in this standard textbook with Jensen's...
...But we are only trying to account for the average differential in what we have noted as a purely relational statistic (IQ scores...
...That would be if the two races had thoroughly interbred...
...69-203...
...It is not necessary that the developmental environments for behavior be "extremely" different but only that they be different in relevant ways...
...182 PHILIP GREEN The Heritability of IQ CRITIQUES OF "JENSENISM" ordinarily begin with the recognition that the notion of heritability is very questionable, regardless of what "statistics" allegedly show...
...RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 185 And among humans, though there is much within-population variance for most traits, we have no evidence for anything but marginal racial variations except among certain trivial matters of physical appearance...
...These points must be made in some detail, in order to set the record straight, especially since most of the people who quote Jensen have not read him carefully, if at all...
...That is not difficult to do...
...There may also be all sorts of reasons, from fiscal stringency to lack of political will or even considerations of justice, why we cannot drastically increase and dramatically reallocate the resources we spend on formal and other types of education, including on-the-job training...
...RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 195 children benefit, comparatively speaking, from coercive forms of learning that do not demand high levels of morale, then he may have added something useful to our store of knowledge about the cultural fate of black people in America...
...This is exaggerated, of course, but my scenario is not totally removed from an accurate description of those societies where a separate (by and large) breeding and rearing population also has a sharply different average social-class attainment than the dominant population...
...21 20Death at an Early Age (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1967...
...20 We may all live in environmental cages of unknown dimensions, but black people have surely been more stringently "caged," on the average, than most of us...
...Their descendants, similarly untrained and ill-cared for (by misfortune rather than design of the parents), eventually move to the city and discover the additional chronic ailments and obstacles to ambition that slum living offers, as well as the inattention of educational institutions...
...In any event, the Coleman data are of little use, since RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 193 they do not take into account the many black children who are defined as "problems" and forced out of the schools early, in all cities...
...The case is that of two untrained rural people who marry and bear children whom they also bring up without much training, and who develop various chronic ailments that are never treated medically...
...Compare the table in Srb, Owen, and Edgar, General Genetics, 2nd ed...
...Jensen reaches this conclusion by reviewing a series of studies of genetically related persons, ranging from mere siblings to one-egg (monozygotic) identical twins, who, from birth or a very early period in their lives have been reared apart (there are also a few studies of unrelated children reared in the same home...
...87] Jensen makes this unsurprising datum seem much worse than it really is by comparing the unrepresentative "failure" rate of southern blacks on the Armed Forces Qualification Test with a national sample of whites, and by also neglecting to mention that draftees were not necessarily representative of the two total populations in the same way...
...There are also acquired traits that, once widespread, are probably unmalleable: habits and customs can endure for millennia despite strenuous efforts to erase them...
...The others are all the results of transactions between the tested individual and that individual's experience, culture, environmental background, hopes and fears...
...Compensatory treatment, however, is exactly what the American educational system has never offered and has never been intended to offer...
...The social and intellectual ramifications of Jensen's original essay in the Harvard Educational Review (hereafter HER), as well as his subsequent work (especially Educability and Group Differences, hereafter Educability) will be with us for a long time.' Sober and influential persons in the worlds of academia, journalism, and politics have taken it all with deadly seriousness...
...What may have originally been a slight and potentially inconsequential genetic disparity thus increases, perhaps sharply...
...At least this is true among humans, who are not being bred, raised, and observed in "controlled" environments...
...All IQ measurements are relational: that is, my IQ score relates my performance to the mean performances of persons of my chronological age, rather than to any particular concrete standard of intellectual attainment...
...23 Those two studies tell us clearly that measurements reflecting the way people live will more or less faithfully reflect differences in the ways various identifiable groups of people live...
...If we begin by considering the most obvious facts about race in the United States, it is clear that we would expect average black IQ scores to be lower than average white IQ scores in some unpredictable but noticeable degree...
...the identification of drastic changes in individuals' IQs from infancy to adulthood, related at least partially to degree of environmental enrichment...
...280 ff...
...Not a few black people, expecting the most violent repression for any display of independent behavior, have in the past found it most rational to "play dumb" (as is often true generally among women) and to teach their children to "play dumb," and thus effectively to be "dumb," for their own protection: a message reinforced by the institutions the children encounter later, which expect nothing but failure from blacks...
...First, it turns out—surprising no one familiar with the difficulty of arranging controlled social observations—that the "data" on which Jensen based his "finding" about the high heritability of IQ are worthless...
...The "intelligence" they measure, then, like all but a few human traits, is socially constrained if not defined...
...Harvard Educational Review, Winter 1969, pp...
...Of course, Kamin could be wrong...
...In the United States, black people have also constituted a separate caste, that is, a group of persons marked off from the rest of society by special and, in this case, discriminatory and restrictive treatment...
...By virtue of their encountering exacerbated conditions of frustration (being prevented, in effect, from becoming "Americanized"), in addition to their disproportionate vulnerability to physical disabilities of certain kinds, black children are often (by comparison with whites, on the average) less well prepared than they might be for constructive interaction with a structured learning environment...
...Of those subtraits, only (1) has to do with what we might mean by genetically transmitted "intelligence...
...Thus, if Jensen is correct in his assertion that black 2 'Fascinating examples of the kinds of materials to be found on allegedly "objective" standard IQ tests can be seen in Kamin, op...
...All the tests are abstract in the sense that none of them involve solving a concrete life problem...
...What Jensen is doing is analogous to a geneticist's arguing about the causes of variance in the average different size of wild sheep in the Scottish highlands and domestic sheep in an English barnyard...
...But that figure is not, as Jensen has erroneously implied, simply a function of the "innateness" of the trait being measured...
...the existence of strong effects from what one observer has called "ecological intervention" is beyond cavil...
...To think that these conditions might have no effect on an organism's performance is clearly absurd...
...we do not need technical refutations of his statistical manipulations to support such a perfectly obvious observation...
...4) the willingness to answer, the interest in answering, or physical ability to answer conceptually abstract questions, speedily, and as and when commanded, for existentially abstract purposes...
...It is much more consonant with our sociological information to attribute the difference to his having mitigated, by his personal intervention ("environmentally"), the inhibitory effects of some of the factors discussed above...
...22) We must never forget that test scores by themselves are in no way a direct outcome of the organism's characteristics, whether genetically or culturally induced...
...That life-style is compounded of constricting surroundings, reduced expectations, and injuries to physical well-being...
...Indeed, the discussion of heritability studies in the context of racial IQ differences is a waste of time, made necessary only by Jensen's original error in asserting their relevance...
...Jerry Hirsch, again, has called this passage to our attention...
...Jensen himself, interestingly, reports (in HER) a difference of 8-10 points in the IQ scores of a group of black children between a standard pretest situation, in which no attempt was made to overcome fear, racial distrust, resistance, etc., and a final test situation that he supervised very carefully with an eye toward overcoming those external constraints...
...At one point in his HER essay [p...
...RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 189 the white children, and in which the teachers, both white and Negro, have been specially selected for their dedication and favorable attitudes toward minority pupils...
...q 25I am paraphrasing from a comment by S. L. Washburn in a presidential address to the American Pyschological Association, quoted by 1. M. Lerner, Heredity, Evolution, and Society (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1968), p. 23...
...Affective blockages" is a term used by S. Biesheuvel, "An Examination of Jensen's Theory Concerning Educability, Heritability, and Population Differences," in Montagu, op...
...Again, one wonders why anyone should be puzzled by this conclusion, since schooling has never been intended to "equalize" children's IQs...
...Jensen continually assumes that "culture-loaded" equals verbal, whereas "culture-fair" is anything that has to do with numbers or abstract shapes...
...Jensen expresses his approach to this social problem in his injunction "to examine those schools which have taken pains to give Negro children every advantage that is provided for 14(See, e.g., David Wiley and Annegret Harnishfeger, '`Explosion of a Myth: Quantity of Schooling and Exposure to Instruction Major Educational Vehicles,' Educational Researcher, April 1974...
...54 ff...
...There is less than average incentive or opportunity for parents to foster aggressively careerist orientations in their children, protect them from "bad" or even "dull" company, etc...
...56-114...
...Observed phenomena of IQ modification include such wellknown cases as: • a dramatic rise of IQs in a single generation of American blacks involved in migration from the rural South to the urban North...
...But this influence is of wholly unknown dimension and magnitude ' 26 and there is no theoretical reason to believe that it varies between racial groups...
...According to Jensen, "success" in the American society is legitimately a function of a particular kind of intelligence that might best be called "conceptual" intelligence or "cognitive ability"—the kind of intellectual skill needed to make complicated technical decisions, do essential scientific research, etc...
...196 PHILIP GREEN...
...It is neither satirical nor cynical, but a simple statement of fact, to say that there is at present one way we could determine the extent 184 PHILIP GREEN to which genes account for the IQ variance in population X + Y, where X are American whites and Y American blacks...
...As for American schools generally, we must be very careful in interpreting Jencks's findings (as his critics have not always been...
...It may well be, alternatively, that some unobvious likeness in the allegedly different environments is having a strong and similar effect on the separated children, masking the environmental impact and producing a spurious picture of high heritability...
...That monograph and Bronfenbrenner's article both have full-length bibliographies...
...Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp...
...220...
...The next two articles, to follow in our summer and fall issues, will deal with "Race and IQ: Arthur Jensen's Hoax" and "IQ and the Future of Equality...
...6 As we shall see, the "plausibility" of Jensen's "hypothesis" really has nothing to do with the literature of human genetics but rather with the entirely unrelated question, discussed at length below, of whether environmental effects can "plausibly" be said to account for the known IQ difference between the races...
...Despite his impressive apparatus of studies in statistical genetics, Jensen's genetic hypothesis is ultimately unnecessary and misconceived for explaining the racial IQ gap...
...We can describe here an imaginary paradigm case that alas seems all too real...
...141-86...
...He has cerebral palsy as well as some intellectual retardation...
...21 Of course, there is probably some genetic influence on all our intellects, or at least genetically influenced limitations setting an outer boundary to our intellectual potentials as individuals...
...154-80...
...Naive" is the kindest characterization of that assumption...
...But, generally, there is some correlation between measurements of the two concepts...
...As for between-population variance, the Scandinavian, English, and American siblings who were the subjects of the most cited heritability studies lived considerably more like each other, and closer to the cultural and economic mainstream (or average environment) of their societies, than American blacks, whose typical life experiences have been comparatively deviant...
...were implicated in the racial IQ gap, this fact would have no relevance at all for social policy, nor any necessary implications for the long-run prospects of an egalitarian, interracial society...
...That is so because average black social class is considerably lower than average white social class...
...A later visit proves that those were the essentials...
...see note 8. 186 PHILIP GREEN and to whites only, and prohibit dentists from treating black patients in any way...
...the "hypothesis," as quoted, appears on p. 82...
...The education of black children is taken less seriously than that of whites...
...New York: Third Press, 1974...
...But Jencks has only punctured an illusion that should not have been aloft in the first place...
...Thus, for a population that has regularly interbred to the exclusion of outsiders, a heritability of, say, 0.50, would mean that half of the total variation from the mean (average) would be accounted for by genetic differences in the population...
...And as for the possibility of differential natural selection, the only concrete suggestion ever offered—that mostly unintelligent Africans were sold into slavery—is historically ludicrous and statistically incredible...
...Jencks's comment on experimental school programs is equally true of the schools studied in the Coleman Report and others like them: they are schools that, when observed, were doing pretty much what schools generally had always done...
...59-72...
...revised (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1965), p. 490...
...But they exist disproportionately for black children, and the extent of the disproportion seems directly and logically related to average performance on "intelligence" tests...
...Binet himself, who should have known, said specifically that intelligent thinking was an art that improved with practice, and with the opportunity to practice...
...People living in well-off communities, whose children are already advantaged by most indices, benefit from a richer tax base and therefore are able to spend more money on education than people living in poor communities— just as for generations the South supported the education of whites more generously than that of blacks, or as upper-class Protestants had special access to private schools providing considerably more social opportunity than the parochial schools available to working-class Catholics...
...From a policy standpoint, the only fact of importance about differences in manifestation of a trait is not whether those differences (and by implication the boundaries of expression of the trait itself) are "caused" genetically, but whether the trait itself is malleable...
...Merely to survive in the present requires more energy, often expended in a state bordering on desperation, than is necessary for middle-class people to "get ahead...
...8 ff., and by Hermstein, IQ in the Meritocracy (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), chap...
...Effects of Environment: Race USE OF THE TERM "EXCLUDED" in addition to "poor" suggests that if we turn now to the subject of race rather than class, our picture of an averagely depressing environment becomes even more striking...
...White society has never wholeheartedly repudiated the attitudes that made such behavior seem reasonable...
...At the simplest level of analysis, some of the deleterious side effects of poverty (lead poisoning and parasitism, for example) are visited primarily on black children and perhaps one or two other groups of minority children...
...Yet not a single aspect of that history of inherited deficiency is ascribable to genetics: it is all a product of social conditions, and thus potentially susceptible to social amelioration...
...194 PHILIP GREEN ability to answer conceptually abstract questions speedily and as commanded...
...And since Jencks reports (on the basis of the very few studies of this kind that we have) that there is little correlation between "adult income" and "cognitive skills," and the "best estimate is that we would find only about 3 percent less income inequality in genetically homogeneous subpopulations than in the entire American population," there is a good deal of evidence that it has not happened (p...
...Jencks in no way denies that schooling increases cognitive ability—and one might well ask, what else does...
...see also Anita A. Summers and Barbara L. Wolfe, "Which' School Resources Help Learning...
...Since he has just finished telling us that conceptual ability is the cornerstone of true success in our kind of society, and since "associative" (rote) ability in his description clearly fails to reproduce the important types of intellectual linkage that are ascribed to conceptual ability, e.g., the hidden prescription that low-IQ blacks and their descendants should be adjusted to a permanently secondary role is unmistakable...
...Scores: Science or Numerology...
...For the disproportionate injury done to blacks in America is not merely what we would expect to be imposed on just any group of low-average social status...
...According to Jensen, the kind of intelligence measured by IQ tests is largely heritable...
...For since we don't know precisely what aspects of our environment stimulate or retard our intellectual maturation in precisely what degree, we can have no idea, given a finding of high "heritability," whether the trait and its parameters are really being inherited...
...Government Printing Office, 1966), p. 220...
...All our previous "measurements" of poor dentition, its incidence and variations in incidence, would turn out to be of no importance, though the trait indeed represents an "innate" disposition...
...see L. L. CavalliSforza and Bodmer, The Genetics of Human Population (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1971), pp...
...The authors of the text emphasize not deductions about "nature" and "nurture," which the concept allegedly enables us to make (according to Jensen and Hermstein), but the limited and controlled circumstances under which geneticists are able to make any statements at all about heritability in animals...
...21 See, e.g., Alvin F. Poussaint and Carolyn Atkinson, "Black Youth and Motivation," Black Scholar, March Conclusion WHEN PEOPLE TAKE IQ TESTS, their performance is determined more by their whole life experience than by their "innate capacities...
...If the results of these indicative tests are then summarized for certain population subgroups, it turns out that there are marked differences in the average scores obtained by some of them...
...227-33...
...See note 7.) The method "human geneticists" have adopted for determining within-population variance is to study children who have been separated at birth—preferably identical twins, but also siblings—and raised in sharply different environments...
...And behavior, of course, is based not merely on the innate ability to perform a task but also on one's momentary ability to perform it according to instructions, and on the (conscious or subconscious) willingness or desire to perform it...
...Jensen himself, thinking he is showing us more support of his "genetic hypothesis" about radical differences, demonstrates the existence of this fundamental cultural bias when he isolates the kind of performance he calls "associative capacity," for which the measured black/white difference is allegedly not so great when social class is "held constant" (HER, pp...
...On the other hand, more carefully focused and imaginative studies of single schools or school systems, conducted since the Coleman Report, have found correlations between scholastic improvement and such simple matters as faithfulness of school attendance (a very strong correlation with suggestive policy implications) or the college background of schoolteachers...
...3-27, discusses several of Jensen's errors and distortions, which altogether are too numerous and complex to receive adequate discussion in less than a full-length book...
...Moreover the difference between populations within a race accounts for an additional 8.3%, so that only 6.3% is accounted for by racial classification...
...No other evidence having to do with the statistical study of trait variance is at this point even remotely relevant to Jensen's proposition...
...Less energy is left over for instrumental purposes, especially those bearing on long-range goals that are difficult even to conceptualize under the circumstances...
...Children generally imitate the behavior of adults around them, and thus the general intellectual talent of black people has tended to flow elsewhere: differential expectations will clearly dictate differential behavior...
...despite many dogmatic remarks by Jensen to the contrary, we have little hard information about the relationship between social class and IQ...
...19 Although the black middle class has grown greatly, there is still strong resistance to black entry into many walks of life, and black income as a percentage of white income, having risen briefly in the 60s, has once again begun to fall...
...though Jensen suppressed this "mistake" in his later writings, he 190 PHILIP GREEN has never, as far as I know, apologized for it...
...Once we have discovered that intensive, selective educational interventions can have a compensatory effect on the IQs or learning abilities of small groups of children, as in the studies mentioned above, and that even the minimally efficient efforts of our public schools have succeeded in raising the national IQ level noticeably in this century, then it is no longer either logically or empirically possible to say that compensatory schooling cannot be effective...
...3) of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1973...
...Edward Banfield, it is true, has argued that black people no longer constitute a caste but are now discriminated against only because of their lower-class life-style...
...thus the statistical heritability of "intelligence" in the more environmentally integrated and more mutually similar population can tell us nothing about the genetic inheritance of "intelligence" in the less integrated and similar population...
...Science, March 29, 1974, pp...
...49 (1954), pp...
...That chain of circumstance can produce and has produced, after a number of generations, large subpopulations that in every respect seem to manifest congenital intellectual deficiency: seeming to be genetically "inferior" subpopulations...
...the twins were separated at birth, the black twin (say) moving into an environment significantly above the mean environment (a mansion), and the white twin remaining in an environment significantly below the average environment (a slum...
...RACE AND IQ: FALLACY OF HERITABILITY 183 alike or unlike...
...9 These figures are probably no more reliable than any others in this area, but it would certainly require some ingenuity to explain how the genetic influence on a trait like intelligence, which is so dependent on surrounding social circumstances for its expression, could be much greater than the genetic influence on a set of traits whose almost wholly genetic nature is not in doubt...
...He denies that the difference indicates a change in "ability," and he is certainly correct...
...Rather, they represent a translation of the relevant characteristics by some mediating behavior, whether purposeful or not...
...287-322...
...The "data" on which it is based—where they exist at all—are distorted, misreported, and virtually worthless...
...Usually, such particular conditions as mentioned here have an impact on lower-class life...
...But there are various more substantial reasons why we should, again, expect average black IQ scores to be lower than average white scores, again in some unknown degree...
...That "hypothesis" has since been defended by Jensen and his epigones with all the zeal often brought to that most dogmatic creed, the orthodoxy of "scientific" truth...
...His own data, however, show that even non-lower-class blacks suffer from immense discrimination...
...the raising of the IQs of "retarded" or lowIQ children to the overall social mean or above through lengthy, intensive educational programs, including a case in which the "new" IQ levels have been maintained in adulthood...
...Most significantly, it is only very recent that black parents of any social class have realistically been able to think of preparing, or have been encouraged to prepare, their children for a career in professions that make particular intellectual demands most apparently point...
...Although Jensen continually works to cast doubt on it, that proposition is surely beyond any doubt...
...Most notably, class, race, and certain other ethnic statuses tend to be predictors of IQ...
...Only infrequently if at all was any follow-up program maintained consistently throughout the pupils' scholastic (let alone their extrascholastic) experience...
...cit., pp...
...it is mythical...
...81.] If that were all the information we had about IQ in American society, our most likely response would be, first, to note that of course we expect people who live less well to do less well on tests of various kinds, and, second, to redouble our efforts in the direction of making social conditions more nearly equal for all...
...The most dramatic studies are by H. M. Skeels, "Adult Status of Children with Contrasting Early Life Experiences," Monograph # 31, No...
...331-409...
...One reviewer has written an extended and telling article on Banfield's propensity to attribute people's accurate perceptions of the way they are being treated to their ` `irrationality...
...Jerry Hirsch, "Jensenism: The Bankruptcy of 'Science' Without Scholarship," Educational Theory, Winter 1975, pp...
...and also in a collection of his essays, Genetics and Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp...
...Jencks merely argues that schooling has not equalized measured cognitive abilities...
...The only factor that could legitimately cause us to give a high a priori probability to the notion that significant genetic differences in intelligence exist between racial groups would be the general existence of significant genetic differences among the human races, especially among behavioral traits heavily implicated in social interactions...
...If the environments are truly unlike, and there is a strong environmental determination of trait variance, the separated children ought to manifest the particular trait, as measured, more closely adhering to the value exhibited by their adoptive rather than their biological parents...
Vol. 23 • April 1976 • No. 2
