1. Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, by Richard E. Nisbett. A good compendium of the arguments for environmentalism in the IQ debates. But this book has all the same flaws as The 10,000 Year Explosion — albeit from the other side of the issue — and egads are those people in the comments section touchy. This book, by the way, offers the state of the art rebuttals to genetic explanations of Ashkenazi achievement, if you are looking to advance your understanding of those debates.
2. Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman. The best book on "food sanity" to date.
3. Yesterday's Weather, by Anne Enright. I'm not usually a consumer of short stories (Alice Munro is one exception) but the best ones in this (high variance) volume are very very good.
4. Bioethics and the Brain, by Walter Glannon. I wished for more of the author in this book but still I found it a useful compendium on what people are arguing about in the field these days.
5. Ted Gioia, Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. So far this is the book of the year for me. There are many fine books in this area but this one rises to the top of the heap. It's both the best introduction to its topic and the best book if you've read all the others and feel that nothing more can be said; a major achievement.
At one endpoint, it would be difficult to consider the various cases of feral children, and still conclude that environment doesn’t matter. As to how much, intelligence, whatever it is, is not something that lends itself to ready quantification.
Has anyone ever made the case that environment doesn’t matter? Certainly nobody is arguing that feral children should turn out perfectly normal.
I’m pre-ordering Nisbett’s book, although I hope he doesn’t rely on the old trick of trying to obscure the difference between temporary effects on children and lasting effects on adults, as there are plenty of the former but not of the latter. The transracial adoption studies did give big IQ boosts when the kids were young (without greatly decreasing racial gaps, since both white and black kids benefitted, with biracial kids in between)but the effects faded as they reached their late teen years. The scientifically most rigorous hostile reply to the Bell Curve, Devlin’s book, relied on lumping together child and adult data to drive down heritability numbers.
I read the book today. Nisbett’s selective attention to data was aggravating.
“This book, by the way, offers the state of the art rebuttals to genetic explanations of Ashkenazi achievement, if you are looking to advance your understanding of those debates.”
This is a surprising statement since the book offers basically nothing on this issue in the very thin chapter about Jews. His arguments are thus:
1) All genetic explanations for Ashkenazi IQ are unsupported speculation.
2) Cochran and Harpending are not plausible because Sephardic Jews were 15% of scientists from 1150 to 1300 (This is actually Charles Murray’s argument and reference from the April 2007 issue of Commentary. But, of course, he isn’t given credit by Nisbett).
3) We have no evidence that Jews have cultural practices that boost intelligence, but it is plausible.
And that’s it! That is literally all that Nisbett offers in that short chapter. That is the “state of the art” rebuttal to genetic explanations of Ashkenazi achievement.
alice munroe is insufferable….
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