THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN
Green, Philip
This article is the second of three dealing with the subject of Genetics, IQ, and Equality. The first, entitled "Race and IQ: Fallacy of Heritability," appeared in our spring issue; the last of the...
...Jensen's invariant procedure is to argue that the environmental condition he discusses can only have a significant effect on the average IQ of a deprived group if it occurs with a much greater frequency and intensity than it does in the U.S...
...The study of Aboriginals did not genuinely hold either race or age constant (as it had to, to make his point...
...All of these dubious propositions (as we have shown them to be) could be true, and yet the particular racial IQ gap in the U.S...
...He never says anything further to belie the obvious conclusion that environmentalists "posit" that "hypothetical" factor of "racial discrimination" as the summation of all the disabilities to which American blacks are subjected, because it is so obviously the determinative factor in the IQ difference...
...see p. 174...
...For 15 more, the claim that social status was "matched" is an obvious fraud...
...Jensen then reproduces a table (17.1 on p. 316 of Educability) titled "Comparison of the number of part-Aboriginal and THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 287 full-Aboriginal children showing conservation" (a conception from the Piagetian theory of learning that combines elements of what we ordinarily call memory and abstract reasoning power...
...I' Worst of all, a fifth study, from St...
...154-80...
...Educability, p. 240—a study for the Civil Rights Commission, despite the fact that the author of that study makes this yery same point about his own characterization of blacks as "professionals," pointing out as an example that blacks in his segregated city who list themselves as "ministers" routinely do manual labor...
...203-24...
...Of the 24 studies that seem to reveal significant differences, these four were without exception among the most carefully controlled...
...First, we can point out, as I did in the first of these articles that, by any reckoning, intelligence— the ability to cope with problems life sets for us or we set for ourselves—is something that can be and has been modified, taught, improved, adapted...
...We have seen that they were not, but the amalgamation serves the purpose of freeing Shuey and Jensen from having to pay real attention to an embarrassing datum...
...We can, however, say two things...
...Thus even at "SES level 2"—even at a fairly high level of income itself—blacks are likely to suffer disproportionately the effects of a stigmatized, ghettoized life—effects such as inferior health care and other services, and, perhaps, an extreme distrust and resentment of "white instiTHE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 289 tutions" such as schools and IQ tests...
...Alan B. Wilson, "Educational Consequences of Segregation in a California Community," in Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, Appendices, vol...
...With respect to the first kind of argument, Jensen purports to review the literature that suggests dysfunctional prenatal, natal, and postnatal environments should have a debilitating effect on intellectual performance and may thus account for much of the IQ deficit of blacks, who, on the average, suffer from these kinds of dysfunction so much more than whites...
...The whole theoretical apparatus of genetics studies—comparisons among separated twins, etc.—would then be irrelevant to the subject of race, whatever its scientific merit or (as I have argued) demerit.' Jensen must establish the two empirical arguments I have attributed to him...
...Arthur M. Jordan, "Efficiency of Group Tests of Intelligence in Discovering the Mentally Deficient," High School Journal, 31 (1948), pp...
...In this as in the previous case, Shuey provides enough information to falsify her claims on the basis of internal evidence, though she, as always, fails to take note of that information...
...and he reports that the debate over "immigrant" versus "native" intelligence (or "Latin" and "Slavic" versus "Nordic" and "Anglo-Saxon" intelligence) followed exactly the same path Jensen has marked out today, culminating in the conclusion that the intellectual inferiority of various immigrant groups had been scientifically demonstrated to be genetic in originj 21 One of the founders of intelligence-testing in America asserted that of the European immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in 1912, IQ testing showed 85 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, and 79 percent of the Italians to be "feeble-minded...
...Shuey and Jensen were quite evidently neither...
...Jensen is certainly free to believe all that, if he wishes just as Indians are free to wonder about the virtue of having high IQs...
...But, on the other hand, it is absolutely unnecessary to pursue so relentlessly the chimera of a "pure" social science, for in fact the environmentalist proposition has already been successfully tested...
...some ethnic groups, though alienated within American society, relate strongly to an external culture that they are still proud of, while others do not...
...Educability...
...Suppose Jensen were to insist on his genetic hypothesis—and we may certainly agree that there may be some differences among the different mating populations that have been "racially" constituted, since there are marginal differences among races for most traits, and no reason why that shouldn't also be true of "intelligence...
...It is impossible to argue (or even hold a discussion) with anyone who is racially prejudiced and content to remain that way...
...And a fifth study, which can also be put in the "carefully controlled" category, shows sharp IQ differences in a lower-class neighborhood, but only moderate differences in a middleclass neighborhood...
...Their mean IQ is also nearer that of the "low" whites...
...6. Zena A. Stein and Hannah Kassab, "Nutrition," in Mental Retardation Joseph Wortis, ed., vol...
...The real lesson of this study is thus the opposite of the one Shuey and Jensen draw from it...
...each of them suggests an environmentalist interpretation-such as that advanced here-of both the malleability of the IQ gap and the reasons for its existence...
...But the attempt to demonstrate the same phenomenon for racial or ethnic groups would deserve no further attention and would eventually be remembered only as a scandalous contribution to the lore of pseudoscience...
...if we wish to justify our inegalitarian behavior, we must look elsewhere.23 q Notes I. Edward Banfield, Daniel Bell, Christopher Jencks, and the world-famous geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky are only a few of the many prominent scholars in diverse fields who have seen Jensen's work in this light...
...THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 291 There is also a category for blacks called "professionals," which indeed shows a lower mean IQ than white factory workers—but a lower mean also than that of black butchers and bakers...
...for below-75 IQ rates, there are various statistical relationships that are only explicable on an environmental hypothesis...
...141 and 218...
...The existence of genetically different human races within one society is not a necessary obstacle to the attainment of equality...
...he thus again salvages his genetic hypothesis by misusing data, in that if genetic laws, including that of regression to the mean, were operating, the white/black retardation ratio at the lowest level of SES would make no sense...
...348...
...According to this table the part-Aboriginal children show a distinct advantage on all six of the administered tests, and Jensen concludes: The results appear almost as if the admixture of Caucasian genes, even so few as one-eighth, introduces mental structures otherwise lacking, that permit the individual to reach higher levels of mental development than normally occurs in the majority of full-Aboriginals...
...For most of the 15 only one or two insufficient indices of well-being, such as length of formal schooling of parents, were matched, or formalized SES scales were mechanically applied in ignorance of their partial inapplicability...
...The other 19 studies do indeed show large differentials of about the national average of one standard deviation (SD...
...But the harder we try, the more the alleged IQ gap disappears...
...or anywhere), and 290 PHILIP GREEN even more about Jensen and his source, Audrey Shuey...
...Having seen all of Jensen's "evidence" vanish into dust, we have no reason at all (aside, again, from intellectual curiosity) to be interested in his final argument: his insistent use of comparisons among various American minorities in derogation of blacks' accomplishments...
...The "science" and "scholarship" contained in that passage are so wretchedly shoddy as to be beneath lengthy consideration (that may be why Jensen has dropped all references to this comparison in his later work...
...Not only that, but in an astonishingly self-contradictory passage Jensen remarks that "Negro grooms (in interracial marriages) were occupationally well above the average employed Negro male," and that therefore "the higher IQs of interracial children born to white mothers [rather than to black mothers who allegedly tend to marry low-status white men—P.G.] could be due to the genetic effect of the superior Negro father...
...Thus all Jensen's half-hearted and sometimes self-contradictory ransacking of researches into the effects of environmental deprivation is trivial...
...24, 1971), pp...
...His data are irrelevant or corrupted, his arguments unsound or meretricious, and his understanding of human society is virtually nil...
...The main body of Jensen's interracial "comparisons" are summed up in chap...
...q THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 297...
...Richard J. Light and Paul V. Smith, "Social Allocation Models of Intelligence," Science, Heritability, and IQ, in the Harvard Educational Review Reprint Series # 4 (1969), p. 5. 13...
...Some of his comparisons between "successful" and "unsuccessful" ethTHE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 293 nic groups or national populations are at best disingenuous, as when he compares the scores attained by Japanese citizens living in Japan on a translated and modified version of an English-language IQ test, with the scores attained by American blacks—as though the two groups were culturally comparable...
...But Jensen is wrong...
...We can hardly insist that racial equality has been "proven" any more than racial inequality has been...
...The average IQ racial differential is one standard deviation—one-sixth of the total range within which 99 percent of measurements fall in a normal, bell-shaped distribution...
...W II e shall look at Jensen's two propositions in turn: first, that environmental conditions usually thought to be detrimental to the normal development of the human organism, do not have a major effect on IQ (or "intelligence...
...5 None of these conditions may have a significant effect on the average IQ by itself...
...Jensen's lack of scrupulousness about his "data" is revealed even more strikingly by the fact that he also enlists in his cause—HER, p. 84...
...These were both studies of adults (soldiers and college students...
...18 And these findings, which dramatically falsify Shuey's and Jensen's reports, are even less striking than those of a later study (and misrepresented by Jensen in order to soften its impact) in which the "Upper SES Negro" IQ mean is only slightly below that of "Upper SES white," but more than one SD above that of "Lower SES white"1 19 V The truth of the matter, in sum, is that Jensen has written hundreds of pages of tendentious theorizing to "explain" a set of "facts" that does not exist and thus neither requires nor supports his explanation...
...there are data to bear out the supposition...
...III T here are, essentially, only a handful of major comparative data collections on which Jensen has rested his entire case that caste and class do not affect black IQ performance...
...171 and 198 of Educability...
...1328...
...Though differences exist, especially in the high IQ range, no one has recently argued that any of the white ethnic groups need have innate difficulty in achieving full-fledged participation in a modern economy...
...For black people (or members of other low caste groups), those indices do not measure the same things as they measure for whites...
...Spuhler, Race Dillerences in Intelligence (San Francisco: W.H...
...Jensen's performance in concealing the nature and impact of Tulkin's findings is almost brilliant (Educability, pp...
...Four reveal moderate differences (around one-half of a standard deviation, which is 15 IQ points...
...Similarly, in Educability (pp...
...Generally, among sociological matters Jensen is like a naive behaviorist run amok...
...David K. Cohen, "Immigrants and the Schools," Review of Educational Research, 4 (Feb...
...15 IQ points in this case...
...237-38...
...Not being standardized for differential racial or ethnic group performance (as they are, for example, standardized to make sure that the performance of the sexes is generally equal), IQ tests well reflect in what ways our kind of social environment has a differential impact on people who are able to participate more, or less, in its most characteristic institutions...
...the last of the series, entitled "IQ and the Future of Equality," will appear in the fall.—Eds...
...In the next issue of Dissent I shall discuss the further question, whether the existence of sharp IQ differences within ethnic and racial groups preordains a stratified class structure even were we to eliminate inequalities between groups...
...IV J ensen's justification is found in his statement, upon which in the end all of "Jensenism" stands or falls, that no one "has yet produced any evidence based on a properly controlled study to show that representative samples of Negro and white children can be equalized in intellectual ability through statistical control of environment and education...
...dissertation...
...Only because we have been told (by Jensen) that the hypothesis of "rough equality" is incompatible with the data about IQ and race—that the IQ gap manifests itself even under conditions wherein all those variables are "controlled" (in "matching" differential racial groups for comparative observation)—do we begin to doubt whether IQ has been socially rather than genetically molded in the past, and whether we may socially mold "intelligence" in a more egalitarian way in the future...
...That is the single most important empirical claim Jensen has ever made, and the one he relies on most...
...In fact, however, none of the six studies Jensen refers to supports his claim...
...But the studies remain, and it is instructive to look at them...
...The notion that biology accounts for the greater part of the average IQ difference between American blacks and American whites turns out indeed to be a footnote in the history of pseudoscience...
...But none of these differences is of interest to egalitarians—and none of them should be of interest to anti-egalitarians...
...186-87...
...For blacks, the median SES was 28.5, but the consistent blacks had scores 15.9 points lower...
...different groups have in the past emphasized intellectual attainment, as opposed to other kinds, for reasons that have nothing to do with genes...
...could still be caused by the obvious differences in the average social environments of American blacks and American whites...
...Louis in the 1950s, makes comparisons between black children from schools "serving the best residential area of appreciable size available to St...
...SES" refers, ordinarily, to an index composed of points equally gained for income, occupation, and years of education...
...But Jensen goes on to "note the results of studies which have attempted to control for SES by actual matching or by statistical equating of groups...
...That the full-Aboriginals at Herrmansburg did not do as well as either of the other groups is a matter of mild intellectual interest, and there are several obvious explanations—but it has no relevance for "genetic" interpretations of the test-score difference...
...As I have said, Jensen's bedrock argument is based on what happens when social class and caste are allegedly held constant in comparing IQ measurements...
...110-II...
...All of this supports the egalitarian/environmental interpretation, of course...
...if all the deprivations that blacks suffer from more than whites had such an effect, the IQ deficit would be 30 or 40 rather than 15 points...
...1972), pp...
...it is in no way a primarily biological and unmalleable phenomenon like eye color, somatic type, blood type, or length of bones, so far as we can tell...
...either way, the posited psychic effect will be the same...
...Of course this is not the point to be drawn either from the original study or from Jensen's dishonest use of it...
...In the end, therefore, a serious discussion of the possibilities of equality must dismiss Jensen's biological antiegalitarianism...
...1-123...
...Even now, when so much effort is still needed to equalize social conditions, there are undoubtedly more than enough highly, or potentially highly, intelligent black or brown or red people to fill such positions in proportion to their general representation in the American population...
...8. "How Much Can We Boost lQ and Scholastic Achievement?' Harvard Educational Review, 39 (Winter 1969), pp...
...Occupations, as it turns out, were specified by the children themselves, and it is perfectly clear from the internal evidence that in that segregated southern city few of the many black people described as "professionals" could possibly have been professional at all in the sense described by the professions listed in the quotation above...
...Nothing in that discussion was novel, nor even very arguable, as Jensen must be aware...
...But no matter...
...2 The root of Jensen's racial inegalitarianism must therefore be sought elsewhere...
...There were, in reality, two mission schools, at Herrmansburg and a village called Elcho, and the Elcho group were all (allegedly) full-blooded Aboriginals...
...13 It would be easy to dismiss these studies as pointless, on the grounds of Jensen's incomprehension of the operational meaning of class and caste in America...
...What Jensen has done, simply, is to suppress the most important part of the original evidence, by leaving out the words "(Herrmansburg Group)," after "children" in Table 17.1—words that appear in the original of the table...
...All of these studies make the same point—and it is not Jensen's point...
...In all then, only two of these studies both support Jensen's claim about "actual matching" or "statistical equating" and show a decisive IQ difference...
...Nor is it merely a deduction that "objectively" measured SES does not pay off for blacks as it does for whites...
...But prima facie racism, which is the only available "argument" left to support Jensen's case, can be of no interest to those.who wish to give serious consideration to the notion of social equality...
...Surely that is exactly what environmentalists "posit," but Jensen never returns to this point again...
...Nor would we be impressed by Jensen's erroneous arguments that there is a high value for the heritability of intelligence as between •the races, and that heritability suggests nonmalleability, even if we did not know that these arguments were erroneous...
...2. A recent book that makes a cautious attempt to justify the theoretical propositions I have criticized is John C. Loehlin, Gardner Lindzey, and J.N...
...Freeman, 1975...
...One of them, from a Pittsburgh high school in 1957, shows middle-class black students at about the national white IQ mean...
...I have reanalyzed 35 of her total of 42 cases, ignoring those reported between 1913 and 1929 as being without real credibility eo ipso...
...only one IQ point away, in fact...
...And shrimps may whistle...
...we must look first at two peripheral components of his overall argument to see how and why he goes so badly wrong in making these comparisons...
...Given what our restudies of social backgrounds show about the real relationship between black and white lifestyle and performance in America, advocates of social equality need hardly be concerned with these last of Jensen's comparisons...
...In some cases his arguments are self-contradictory, as when he tries to bolster his genetic "hypothesis" by offering evidence that "prolongation of infancy," from which black children allegedly suffer, leads to later intellectual stasis (chap...
...are implicated in the racial IQ difference...
...Thus, in order to combat the obvious conclusion that IQ tests are so culturally biased as to be worthless for interracial comparisons (see my argument in the Spring 1976 Dissent), Jensen quotes a study, from Australia, comparing "Piagetian test performances of full-blooded Aborigines with those who were part Aboriginal and part Caucasian," of whom the original author says that "the children were brought up under the same mission conditions and attended the same school...
...lack of sleep and parasitism and the results of delivery complications...
...16 A fourth study from the only junior high school of a northern industrial city attributes status solely on the basis of "occupational level of father"—a categorization that is virtually meaningless since, as Jencks points out, there is almost as much income (and thus social class) variation within as there is between occupations...
...5. In his discussion of nutrition, Jensen refers to one unpublished study, allegedly supporting his position, of which, despite diligent efforts, the Smith College research librarians have been unable to unearth a copy...
...At a given educational level (years of schooling), blacks were by the late 1950s almost equal to whites with respect to formal attainment but were still likely to have received an inferior education, which would pay off much less well than the education of whites)' Education and occupation at any SES level both pay off in much better income (the reality of the well-off life, to which the other two criteria are only tentative guides) for whites than for blacks...
...He then falsifies the table he is commenting on by aggregating and thereby changing the nature of the two top quintiles (upper and upper-middle SES...
...The only surprising thing about this study, then, is that Shuey and Jensen could bring themselves to use it as an argument for the genetic superiority of whites...
...Certainly, there are impelling historical reasons why blacks, or any others who are THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 295 both poor and excluded in 1976, may well have a comparatively hard row to hoe...
...In fact, if we take this (somewhat absurd) study seriously as evidence for a genetic interpretation of IQ differences, it actually shows that full-blooded Aboriginals at the ages Piaget considers close to intellectual maturity, and living in their own community, are slightly superior...
...2 (New York: Grupe & Stratton, 1970), pp...
...Some subpopulations come from cultures that have adopted a modernized life-style to an extraordinarily aggressive degree, while others are still torn between old ways and new...
...If we started with a hypothesis of rough equality among the genetic potentials of different racial and ethnic groups, we would have nd difficulty at all in explaining the shortfall of black IQ, nor would we feel a theoretical need to decompose the discrimination/ poverty syndrome into its (nondecomposable) component parts...
...There is one study, and one study only, that unambiguously shows the effect Shuey and Jensen describe, for young children— although that study too makes social status assignments on a very puzzling basis, and the author comments that "social-class groups of children were far more differentiated among whites than among blacks, despite the same criteria for assignment...
...Jensen misses all of this...
...16 of Educability): how the prolongation of infancy can be anything but cultural Jensen cannot explain, and his tortured discussion of this point gives the impression of nothing so much as a man wrestling himself to a fall...
...The page references I give here are to the reprint in Environment, Heredity, and Intelligence, Harvard Educational Review Reprint Series# 2. 9. Among other things, Jensen compares a 1963 sample of blacks from five southeastern states (where IQ, white and especially black, is generally lowest) with a 1937 sample of whites from all over the U.S...
...etc...
...Jensen's claim, as stated, is deliberately shocking and provocative...
...where whites tend to be supervisors and blacks laborers, the spread gets greater...
...If one insists on genetic explanations for this data in the face of at least one perfectly obvious cultural explanation, the 296 PHILIP GREEN only possible one is that blacks are genetically superior with respect to certain motor abilities or propensities-a possibility that would not discomfit egalitarians but does discomfit Jensen...
...HER, p. 84...
...The sixth study, finally, from a northern 292 PHILIP GREEN elementary school in the early 1960s, makes a more determined effort at matching class characteristics, though relying on the very dubious measures of the prestige ratings of occupations and education of the "main breadwinner" in a family...
...The author of that study also notes that SES differences among blacks are considerably less than among whites, and suggests that that is because there are much fewer genuinely middle-class blacks in the community...
...Martin Deutsch and Bert Brown, "Social Influences in Negro-white Intelligence Differences," Journal of Social Issues, 20 (1964), pp...
...But before we consider those studies, it is necessary to look at a related discussion Jensen uses to justify his major overall claim that race differences in "intelligence" (as measured by IQ tests) are generally determined genetically: for we could not take Jensen's argument at all seriously if the claim was that only between American blacks and American whites did this particular relationship hold...
...I. Christopher Jencks et al, Inequality (New York: Basic Books...
...The three components of SES are each rated on a separate scale from 1 to 100 (the result is an overall rating that could be as high as 300 or as low as 3...
...Louis Negroes," and white children from three schools serving "the downtown, river-industrial areas...
...All of'his assertions about such comparisons are false...
...in other words, the black lower class begins higher up on the SES scale than the white lower class...
...No doubt, each of us can think of many more positions that, we could claim, ought to be filled only by the highly intelligent, but remarkably few such positions lay claim to a markedly disproportionate share in society's rewards...
...only an absolutely totalitarian state, devoted to nothing but testing theories of social causation, could arrange the conditions for a "proper" test...
...And they are false even given his own pollyannaish view of our ability to do truly controlled social research.The data show equality more than they show inequality...
...Attacking the thesis that caste-linked cultural and physical deprivation might have a significant effect on intellectual performance, Jensen approvingly quotes Shuey: "It seems improbable that upper- and middle-class colored children would have no more culture [sic] opportunities provided them than white children of the lower and lowest class...
...that environmental damage, depressed economic and social status, and a psychic orientation limited by low or simply nonprofessional aspirations, all fit together to make up a relatively low-performance intellectual life-style...
...It is found, to be precise, in his alleged empirical demonstration that, all such theoretical questions aside, the environmental differences between blacks and whites do not account for the average IQ difference...
...The study thus completely falsifies Shuey's and Jensen's account of it, and it seems almost superfluous to add that it also falsifies their conclusion: the black students described by their teachers as being of "superior" background, compared to other black students, outdid the analogously described "inferior" white students by six IQ points...
...That same observer would also have noticed that the black...
...343ff) Jensen argues that the lower average SES of black people cannot account for the overall strikingly higher incidence of prematurity and pregnancy complications among them...
...for as we have now seen, in the end the veridity of Jensen's argument about racial equality rests entirely on the second series of comparisons, those purporting to show that even when class and caste are "held constant," average black intellectual ability does not measure up to that of whites...
...15 ) The other studies follow this pattern...
...It never occurs to him that saying, e.g., blacks are in the "second 20 percent," does not make it so...
...Moreover, most often two or more conditions will be operating together (e.g., slum living and lead poisoning...
...Moreover, internal evidence again reveals that more than 10 percent of the black subjects exceed the white mean by about one SD—which is just about what we would expect on the basis of a comparative class analysis from that period, thus demonstrating further that "mean IQ by occupational title" (which fails to turn up this 10 percent) is a futile rubric for ranking the IQs of blacks...
...But these problems of policy and cost have nothing to do with the inherent qualities of races...
...24-35...
...Finally, he misuses the geneticist's concept of "filial regression to the mean" by analyzing its effects only at upper SES levels and ignoring them at the lower levels...
...second, that the IQ gap persists even as the environmental conditions of black people improve toward the average situation of American whites...
...Audrey M. Shuey, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, 2nd ed...
...In each case, Jensen's analysis shows that he lacks sociological sensitivity, for he treats SES categories as though they were handed down on tablets from above...
...It is possible (anything is "possible" to an empiricist) that generations from now, when a black middle class has finally had the opportunity to develop on equal terms with the white middle class, there may still be more than marginal IQ differences between the races...
...At one point of an analysis depending on his use of variance models involving the mythical h=.80, he says with clear condescension that "an environmental theory of the racial group difference must therefore posit some hypothetical factor or factors (e.g., racial discrimination) having no within-group variance to account for the between-groups difference...
...The American majority and American elites may well find it too costly—this is the real message of Banfield's Unheavenly City—to adopt the policies necessary to eliminate this final bastion of ethnic inequality...
...255-69...
...Even the comparatively high nonverbal IQ performance of some groups of American Indians, in which Jensen oddly takes an almost personal pride as another "stick" with which to "beat" blacks, would be easily explainable by cultural factors if we had never heard of genetics...
...The results are fascinating...
...This ambiguity in the meaning of socioeconomic status or class, whenever we speak of race in America, is what must be kept in mind once we come to Jensen's ultimate justification—the very cornerstone of his assumption that racial IQ differences are in need of additional explanation that only genetics can provide...
...Ordinarily we would expect these components of social rank to vary roughly together...
...One can and ought to differ with Banfield over whether the disproportionate amount of culturally and personally self-destructive behavior among blacks is a "rational" response to over a century of oppression, or if it has become blameworthy, willful behavior...
...White professionals are described as "accountants, auditors, bookkeepers, managers, clerks, engineers," in a city in which the blacks were still concentrated "in the simpler tasks" and had in their homes "few of the appurtenances of our modern culture...
...Shuey "hides" the findings of this study (as does Jensen after her) by amalgamating them with the other five studies (some of which had much larger sample populations), as though the data and the control methods were comparable...
...This study also is unpublished: a Ph.D...
...A 1940s study from Winston-Salem is perhaps the most interesting of the six, though Shuey and Jensen fail to find the points of most interest in it...
...The real point is, generally, that we should be wary of "statistical studies" purporting to contradict decades of informed observation, and, specifically, that Jensen is unable to find any cross-cultural evidence for his genetic hypothesis without engaging in the distortion of data...
...the Pittsburgh study described above is one piece of evidence suggesting that process has begun...
...The median overall SES for all whites was 55.2, while the median SES for consistent whites - was 11.8 points higher...
...P) ersons were registered as being "consistent" in SES if they had scores on each of the three underlying 100 points scales which all fell within 20 points of each other...
...There was a lesser disparity between black and white "factory workers," and only one-half SD between black and white "barbers and beauticians" or "truck-drivers...
...he must refute the two counter-propositions I have suggested immediately above in this paragraph...
...Shuey, p. 520...
...On the one hand, he tries to show that particular negative environmental conditions (such as those discussed by me in the Spring Dissent) do not affect IQ performance...
...B. Pasamanick and Hilda Knobloch, "Retrospective Studies on the Epidemiology of Reproductive Casualty: Old and New," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, 12 (1966), pp...
...It is interesting to note too that his reports of these researches are often obscurantist, even if we follow him in giving more credence to such studies than they probably deserve...
...From a genetic standpoint, once we have seen that the statistical "evidence" for innate black inferiority disintegrates when exposed to the harsh light of inspection, we have no reason to doubt that blacks could follow the same path as Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc...
...Without these comparisons, we might reasonably conclude that it is difficult to trace in a methodologically satisfactory way the exact causal sequence in differential IQ performance (the precise separation of cause and effect being so elusive in social research...
...7-26...
...I. 7. Marion M. DeLemos, "The Development of Conservation in Aboriginal Children," International Journal of Psychology, " 4 (1969), pp...
...It is not possible to "test" the results of each of these relative deprivations in the sense that Jensen would like us to test them— isolating an experimental group and a control group for each variable, and discovering the discrete effects...
...That is, at a given occupational "rank" blacks are almost certainly lower down within the particular occupation, and therefore earning a good deal less income...
...Since the preparation of this article and my previous one, reports have been published on three interesting pieces of research...
...1285-95...
...see especially p. 163...
...22 All of these groups, as well as the Irish and others who were found to be "subnormal" at the time, have long since left behind them any vestige of their alleged inability to perform an average function in American society...
...A trial-anderror analysis of the original data from both missions shows that no matter how we reanalyze the data to make all measurements as comparable as possible, the partAboriginals at Herrmansburg did indeed do better than the full-Aboriginals there, but among the older age groups the full-blooded Aboriginals at Elcho did better than or equal to the part-Aboriginals on at least four of the six tests...
...But he must have in mind a "Coleman Report" that no one else has ever seen, since no such data appear in the famous one that James S. Coleman produced for the Office of Education of HEW...
...Greek-Americans and Chinese-Americans do not have the same likelihood of becoming nuclear physicists...
...And he puts all the weight of his argument on the finding of Audrey Shuey that where such studies provide the data necessary for more detailed interracial comparisons, "upper-status" blacks are invariably found to do worse than "lower-status" whites...
...For though those studies, as it turns out, tell us nothing about innate racial IQ differences, they tell us much about the meaning of discrimination in the U.S...
...How a "superior" father who but 11 pages later becomes inferior (as Shuey and Jensen assert) to "the lowest SES white group" can have that strikingly positive genetic effect is a question Jensen does not attempt to answer...
...51620, and passim...
...so too does Arthur Jensen's scholarship...
...he is able to write about one intergroup comparison that "especially for children who have been exposed to three or four years of schooling, such marked differences in performance would seem difficult to explain in terms of differential experiences, motivation, and the like" just as though Banfield had not written an entire book explaining certain aspects of black life in America wholly as a function of "differential" motivation...
...A third study, from a southern city in the late 1950s, assigns SES solely on the basis of educational attainment of parents, thus again completely missing the real points of comparison...
...when it comes to class (or SES—socioeconomic status, as it will hereafter be called) Jensen fares no better...
...The interested reader will want to compare their arguments with the ones I offered in the Spring 1976 Dissent, as well as with the lengthy discussion by Block and Dworkin cited in footnote 3 of that article...
...In any event Jensen would be much wiser not to mention this study at all, since it also reports a generally low proportion of genetic variance among its black subjects...
...In other cases he flagrantly misuses simple statistical notions to avoid the clearly environmentalist implications of his own evidence.' But on the whole his efforts in this vein are of little interest, even if the best face is put on them...
...In the first of these (p...
...That variation surely seems to be of about the same order of magnitude as the average differential in life chances between blacks and whites: to repeat, this seems to need no further explanation...
...The matching studies to which Jensen refers have been collected by Shuey (pp...
...14 When blacks and whites were matched by occupational title, there was a great disparity (more than one SD) between black and white "salesmen," and between black and white "railroad workers...
...It is very hard, in a racially discriminatory society, to equate any indices of social well-being among the races...
...2 of the Report of the U.S...
...Jensen makes a researcher's work a bit difficult by citing the article in vol...
...Few of the relationships he produces are significant, but all are easily susceptible of cultural explanations that Jensen misses only because he is insensitive to the complex nature of culture in a pluralist society...
...I will report on those findings in the Fall issue of Dissent...
...Thus these "proofs" are not only theoretical but also circular: proof of nothing but the truism that if you take an equation that is supposed to give a causal explanation of variance, and one term in the equation is for the genetic determination of variance, and you feed a high value into this term, you will find that the variance is "caused" genetically...
...Jensen, casting around for examples of tasks that require a very high level of intellectual skill, mentions chess-playing, piano-playing, orchestral conducting, and playwriting—hardly professions or jobs earning a high level of average reward in this society...
...white retardation ratio falls sharply in the lowest quintile, which suggests that the rate of subnormality in blacks has already reached diminishing returns before one gets to the lowest quintile, in which contrarily retardation among whites is just beginning to "take off...
...Referring to a widely cited study from Baltimore in the early 1950s, he doubts that "the average Negro SES is below the lower tenth or lower fifth of the white population in Baltimore," as the comparative rates of reproductive casualty would suggest...
...Yet it is doubtful if a supposedly serious intellectual argument has ever before been based on a more uncomprehending use of genuine data, and a more wholehearted reliance on utterly spurious "data...
...But where there are differences, the striking fact is that the SES scale does not even behave similarly for the two races in its gross properties—always a strong signal that we are not measuring the same thing in each population...
...Jensen himself is well aware of this...
...Those feelings, of course, can bear fruit in poor test performance...
...On the other hand, he tries to prove that blacks (or certain nonwhite races generally) in the "same" social position as whites still do not, on the average, perform as well as whites on IQ tests...
...See Clarence J. Karier, "Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State," Educational Theon, 22 (Spring 1972), pp...
...How then can Jensen assert with certitude that environmental differences do not account for that gap, but that the explanation of it is rather to be found in the "science" of human genetics...
...In a moment of incredible forgetfulness, Shuey lets us know that, based on census data given in the original (unpublished) study, "the high socioeconomic group of the Negroes would be equivalent to some point between the low and middle socioeconomic groups of the whites but nearer the former" (Shuey, p. 114...
...Why should there be different expectations for blacks...
...this action has the effect of creating statistical relationships between blacks and whites that seem to demand a genetic explanation, whereas the more or less real relationships (if we can discount the time and place factors...
...In several chapters of Educability and Group Differences, Jensen attempts to attack the notion that unequally distributed conditions of reproductive casualty, malnutrition, or poor nutrition, lead poisoning, chronic disease, etc...
...Two of them offer no evidence of any control of background variables, Shuey's and Jensen's claim to the contrary...
...12 The most obvious explanation for this discrepancy, as noted above, is that the value of education and occupation "points" were deflated for black people by the discriminatory treatment they were receiving in both schools and job markets, as compared with whites...
...I n my previous article on this subject I have discussed the differential social conditions that can, without difficulty, be seen as accounting for most or all of the average black/white IQ gap that Arthur Jensen has tried to explain with a "genetic hypothesis...
...No one, it should be clear by now, can really hope to produce such a study, since the only appropriate "control" would be a comparison between blacks and whites living in a color-blind, racially egalitarian society— and "studies" will not produce that...
...73-94...
...It is fundamental to his hypothesis of racial differences...
...In the absence of any data at all showing different racial intelligence when social factors are "held constant" even to the limited extent that social scientists are able to accomplish, we ought to find it conclusive that other ethnic groups from many different parts of the world have been able to make their separate ways, albeit at different rates of progress, in American society...
...Thus an environmental (sociological) hypothesis has no trouble accounting for such figures as those on subnormal intelligence, whereas the "genetic hypothesis" can only explain them by falsifying data and torturing itself into selfcontradiction...
...But hardly any of them show any appreciation at all of the difficulty involved in comparing black and white SES...
...No doubt...
...8 In these passages, however, Jensen has almost nothing to say about his own conception of how to compare SES...
...Jensen's genetic "explanation" is that a high rate of reproductive casualty is "related to the genetic heterogeneity of the ancestral gene pools of the American Negro" (p...
...Blacks should be inherently able to do as well as anyone else: unless we prejudge their "inferiority" on purely racist grounds...
...His attempts to decompose and "measure" the effects of an entire way of life are often comical—see, e.g., pp...
...he himself, as we saw, conducted a testing exercise during which he revealed more than half of that gap to be illusory even though he controlled only some of the severe caste disabilities from which American black people have suffered...
...but in either case the result is the same—an ultimately environmental explanation...
...This alleged empirical demonstration must finally bear the entire weight of Jensen's case...
...The obvious suggestion is that dividing the two racial populations up into the same SES quintiles does not truly equate them with each other socially—but Jensen fails to notice that suggestion...
...Jensen mocks those who, having been unable to establish a strong correlation between any particular aspect of the poverty syndrome and low IQ, insist that the syndrome itself is the chief contributor to the poor performance...
...Commission on Civil Rights, 1967...
...New York: Social Science Press 1966...
...This study, on reanalysis, shows the top 15 percent of blacks having a mean IQ at about the national average, 5 points above that of the bottom 45 percent of whites in the study, and slightly above that of the bottom 80 percent of whites in the study (when their means are pooled...
...But no matter...
...We are thereby alerted to look more closely at what he offers as evidence within the American setting—and this close attention is amply repaid...
...The cumulative impact of their various relative deprivations, for black people as a whole, is the total impact of being black in America, and thus disproportionately (on the average) poor, excluded, or even oppressed...
...92-117, see especially pp...
...Thus neither of those studies is likely to tell us anything about "innate intelligence...
...Six of the 35 are discussed separately later on: the remaining 29 are correctly classified as follows: • Five reveal insignificant differences (twofour points) between black and white average IQs...
...One unpublished master's thesis is from another segregated southern school system in the 1940s and contains no occupational comparisons at all, the children being identified instead as from "superior" or "inferior" backgrounds by their teachers, "the ratings in each case to be relative to the particular classroom group...
...These remaining minorities, at a time when the economic growth seems not to keep up with its past pace, make up a very disproportionate segment of the lower class, the lumpenproletariat of Marx's scathing description...
...poor nutrition and chronic disease...
...VI W hat can we say in conclusion...
...Jensen also cites the Coleman Report, in a cryptic reference, as having replicated this finding...
...It is clear that the blacks and whites in these studies could not have been socially "equal" in any real sense, and that the black children in the studies almost certainly partook of considerably more lower-class life-styles than the whites...
...4. In discussing--and discounting--the effects of early brain damage, Jensen relies heavily on a pioneering and questionable study of "development quotients" which purports to show that initially black infants are physically more precocious, but later fall behind white children...
...are a good thing...
...those with a background in statistics will find his blatant falsehood on p. 345 of Educability...
...The original article provides no such analysis, and our own must be trial-and-error because it does not provide the same kinds of data about age or test-score distribution for the two missions...
...9 But it is of interest that within the table Jensen presents, 288 PHILIP GREEN which compares blacks and whites in 5 SES quintiles (top 20 percent in socioeconomic status, next 20 percent, etc...
...83, HER) Jensen attempts to explain genetically the much greater incidence of subnormal IQs (below 75) among blacks than among whites...
...All of this is merely a complicated way of saying that no matter how many quintiles or deciles the population is sliced into, within or between races, there is proportionately a much larger black than white "lower class...
...His estimates of the frequency of occurrence of these phenomena are often idiosyncratic, but that hardly matters, given the naivete of his reasoning...
...The most important of them must be analyzed in detail, if we are to understand how empty an intellectual construction "Jensenism" is, once stripped of its undeserved scientific pretensions...
...81-84 of his original Harvard Educational Review article...
...On the basis of what we have seen so far, the most likely genetic relationships would seem to be that whites and blacks are roughly equal in "innate intelligence," Orientals are somewhat more advanced and Amerindians are a lot smarter than anyone else...
...and how has he persuaded so many otherwise thoughtful people that he has made a serious critique of egalitarianism?' (For Notes, see p. 296) Jensen cannot simply believe that intelligence is measured directly by IQ tests, that IQ values within and between populations are heritable, and that heritability equals irremediability...
...But these models produce their results only because the fabulous .80 heritability factor --for which, as I observed in my earlier article, there is little or no warrant--is fed into them...
...Once we look carefully at the "control" of SES variables, we find that there are twice as many "controlled studies" that falsify Jensen's claim as support it...
...Tulkin, "Race, Class, Family, and School Achievement," Journal of Personality and Social Psrchologv, 9 (1968), pp...
...Thus one imaginative researcher who has, unlike Shuey or Jensen, investigated what data there are, found that well into the 20th century the disparity between the IQs of "native whites" and Italian schoolchildren was on the average even greater than what now exists between blacks and whites...
...But we would certainly find no reason to doubt the impressionistic observations of those who work in the field: that various kinds of environmental deprivation have a noticeable effect on mental alertness and performance, nor would we have any reason to doubt that a sleepy, hungry, uninterested child will perform worse on an IQ test than a well-fed, alert, and eager one...
...1970...
...He goes on to give an outré genetic explanation of reproductive casualty itself.'° The "average SES" was not in question in the Baltimore study, but rather average health care and general maternal and infant welfare in a border city, in a period well before the rise to middle-class status of a significant proportion of American blacks had got under way...
...Thus, from the use he 286 PHILIP GREEN makes of a summarizing article about the interrelation between nutrition and intellectual performance, one would never know that its authors conclude...
...Whether the motive for discriminations to which black people are especially subject is racial or, as Banfield insists, social—because of their "lower-class" life-style—is not relevant here...
...In short, the information available at present about the distribution of malnutrition and retardation in the United States suggests that it resembles the distribution in other areas of the world [being found] among groups who are vulnerable not only because of food deprivation itself but as part of the whole culture of poverty...
...Italians and Jews do not have the same average IQ...
...It is also totally false...
...Demographers will be interested to learn that American whites have relatively homogeneous "ancestral gene pools," and geneticists may be a bit surprised to learn that homogeneous gene pools ("inbreeding...
...It is enough that each of the postulated conditions—I mean the conditions educators and psychologists have observed, at one time or another, to have a depressing effect on intellectual performance—more often makes THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF ARTHUR JENSEN 285 some small, additional negative contribution to the lives of blacks than to the lives of whites...
...Second, we can and should note the fascinating and finally persuasive historical 294 PHILIP GREEN circumstance, that all of the deficiencies Jensen finds in the intellectual performance of black people were found but a few generations ago in the measured performance of other ethnic groups as well...
...For example, between the highest and lowest SES quintiles the retardation ratio is similar for each race, whereas in every such comparison not involving the highest quintile, the black interclass ratio is very foreshortened compared to the white: a datum suggesting to any sensitive observer that at the time the data were gathered only a very small proportion of blacks compared to white (only those in the upper SES quintile) had escaped the stultifying aspects of lower-class, or lower-caste, life...
...But as for the interracial comparisons on which such an imposing structure of biological antiegalitarianism has been erected, it suffices to say that not only does the race/IQ relationship reflect the realities of social division in America...
...To be sure, certain marked differences among groups still remain...
...Ruth C. Wylie, "Children's Estimates of Their Schoolwork Ability, as a Function of Sex, Race, and Socioeconomic Level," Journal of Personality, 31 (1963), pp...
...The egalitarians' view is only that human environment is more crucial to human accomplishment than the genetic factor, just as it is more crucial to the state of our teeth, and that therefore the more we can equalize or attenuate the impact of the most powerfully destructive environmental influences, the more likely we are to produce citizens all of whom are capable of making a useful contribution to their community, and thus deserving reward from it...
...in the original table could not possibly have supported such an explanation statistically...
...On another occasion, when a discussion about the total variance in IQ measurements for blacks and whites seems to be leading in a discomfiting direction, he suddenly begins to discuss genetic variance, thus by definition upholding his own hypothesis about the genetic factor in IQ-see p. 215 of Educability, and the preceding discussion...
...If we look at Jensen's most central empirical "demonstrations," we see that his view of what constitutes "evidence" is idiosyncratic, his presentation meretricious, and thus his claim to have demonstrated the genetic ineradicability of the IQ gap utterly false...
...children from underprivileged families in the United States exhibit growth characteristics resembling those of children in less developed countries, where inadequate nutrition has been shown to retard physical growth...
...If there is no significant difference between the average IQs of those members of the two races who live in roughly similar social environments, and if those environmental conditions bearing on them unequally when they live in dissimilar environments can be direct284 ly linked to IQ gain or deficit—then there would be nothing further to explain...
...or, rather the black lower class effectively begins at a much higher point on the SES scale than does the white...
...The article also finds strong suggestions of a linkage between poor nutrition, infectious disease, and low-level retardation—by which is meant simply low IQ.6 That finding is no doubt as questionable as Jensen's contrary conclusion...
...Jensen's attempt at empirical demonstration consists of two parts...
...11 of Educability and on pp...
...That black butchers should have had higher average IQs than black "professionals"—a complete and (if true) inexplicable reversal of the pattern for whites—should have alerted any disinterested or unbiased reader to the spuriousness of the comparison...
...Moreover, the minimal egalitarian demand of "equal opportunity" for a group in a society such as our own, one with an unequal reward structure, is easily satisfied...
...But of course the effects of that syndrome have been measured: by IQ tests...
...IQ tests at that age have considerably less reliability than at younger ages, their subjects having been long removed from a state of innocence about the purpose of testing, the nature and desirability of rational test behavior, and the types of materials that tests (even "abstract" tests) cover...
...He could not, since any such attempt to explain away a naked self-contradiction would only highlight the fraudulence of the interracial "comparisons" that are the rockbottom foundation of his antiegalitarianism...
...31-37...
...The two strands of reasoning together lead him to conclude that whether or not IQ represents a malleable trait, interracial IQ differences at least are not socially malleable...
...3. In at least three chapters of Educability Jensen does develop statistical models that produce an apparently genetic and theoretical explanation for observed black/white IQ differences, when allegedly relevant background conditions are "controlled" in setting the parameters of the models' operations...
...Egalitarians do not assert the proposition that all people are equal in measurable "intelligence," nor anything like it...
...The more alike the actual work done by the subjects, the closer their average IQs...
...He handles this embarrassment by making what seems to be a deliberately false statement about the relationship between the means in two sets of measurements and the size of the variance in the two sets...
...But the latter two categories especially (even the first to an extent) are meaninglessly abstract unless we know they are measuring the same thing all the time...
...If he cannot do that, then the work that geneticists have done may still be thought to be suggestive about the importance of genes in determining some amount of the apparent differences in intelligence that exist among individuals...
...Sandra Scarr-Salapatek, "Race, Social Class, and IQ," Science, 174 (Dec...
...Similarly, a genetic hypothesis can make no sense of the correlative fact that according to the table the subnormality ratio differs in the various quintiles, for if subnormal intelligence were carried racially, the ratio would always be the same for any two similar breakdowns of the two populations...
...The remaining six studies reported by Shuey are supposed to bolster the assertion about "upper-status" blacks being intellectually inferior even to "lower-status" whites...
...If it is true, as he continually points out, no one can in good conscience support the hypothesis that environmental differences account for racial IQ differences...
...It is incomprehensible that Jensen can have failed to see this, since he himself states that "15 percent of the Negro population exceeds the white average"—a figure that, to repeat, is just about what we would have predicted on the basis of a totally environmentalist and egalitarian theory of the differences in measured intelligence among racial and ethnic groups...
...But as to our present topic, it is enough to note that most of the eximmigrant groups have by now got to the point where they are able to hold their own in our society as it is presently constituted, and that they would be able to do even better in a more egalitarian society...
...Moreover, SES in that study was defined by average census tract characteristics, and it is quite possible, if not likely, that the average black census tract in that segregated city at that time was in about the state of the worst white census tract...
...The jobs of which it has reasonably been said that they require both noticeably above-average intelligence (as measured by IQ) and above-average rewards—say, those of executives, corporation lawyers, and organizers of advanced technical systems in this country—are not that numerous...
...Caucasian genes" either add something that non-Caucasian genes lack, or they don't: the performance of the Elcho children is sufficient evidence that they don't...
...while another psychologist assured the House of Representatives that IQ tests were "objective," and thus problems of language had nothing to do with the finding that "the Slavic and Latin countries show a marked contrast in intelligence with the western and northern European group...
Vol. 23 • July 1976 • No. 3
