A new piece by Ron Unz, in The American Conservative, is subtitled “What the Facts Tell Us About a Taboo Subject.” Excerpt:
Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90, while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much closer to the West German numbers.
These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded rise in East German scores of 7–9 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to explain.
And:
Next, consider Greece. Lynn and Vanhanen report two IQ sample results, a score of 88 in 1961 and a score of 95 in 1979. Obviously, a national rise of 7 full points in the Flynn-adjusted IQ of Greeks over just 18 years is an absurdity from the genetic perspective, especially since the earlier set represented children and the latter adults, so the two groups might even be the same individuals tested at different times. Both sample sizes are in the hundreds, not statistically insignificant, and while it is impossible to rule out other factors behind such a large discrepancy in a single country, it is interesting to note that Greek affluence had grown very rapidly during that same period, with the real per capita GDP rising by 170 percent.
And:
Interestingly enough, these rapid rises in IQ due to changes in the general socio-economic environment appear completely absent when we examine the international or domestic IQ data for East Asian populations, for whom even tenfold differences in real per capita GDP seem to have little or no impact on IQ. Missing this unexpected contrast between the impact of socio-economic factors on Europeans and on East Asians may have been a major reason that Lynn and Vanhanen failed to notice the serious flaws in their “Strong IQ Hypothesis.”
There is much more at the link, interesting throughout. Here is a short profile of Ron Unz, noting rumors that he has an IQ of 214. Here is his Wikipedia page. Here is Unz’s new website.
****storm in 3…2…1…
There surely is a genetic component to IQ/intelligence but I believe many on that side don’t give enough respect to environmental and cultural factors. Many of us forget how much culture matters when its convenient to our pre-existing worldview, but it absolutely matters a lot. And I may be wrong on this (I haven’t studied this topic THAT much) but the research/literature on how differences in early child-rearing, the health (think stress, nutrition, and other things) of the mother during pregnancy and early child-rearing, affects intelligence and future success is underdeveloped and incomplete. I have read a bunch of studies and arguments on g and some of it seems convincing but we don’t have the certainty to be able to conclude as much as some such as Mr. Sailer and others think.
Will this post get 250 comments? I think so.
+1
I suspect that IQs could play a modest but useful role in social affairs. On the other hand, remarks such as ” … he has an IQ of 214″ just make me guffaw.
…with at least 249 from Steve Sailer.
This seems pretty clearly supportive of the notion that, whatever IQ tests are actually measuring, it’s culturally determined.
Nope. Unless you read only the passages you wanted to.
It certainly does not cast any doubt on the large body of research disproving that claim.
@Tom T. – oh please!
What if transitory factors such as disease or dietary factors are “tamping down” genetic IQ?
And why aren’t Asian IQ’s changing when arguably Chinese culture, for example, was far more in transition than Greek culture during the period mentioned?
LOL, the profile you link to on Unz is from 1994 when he challenged then governor Pete Wilson in the primary. This is a long time ago and maybe his fabled IQ has now dropped into the “normal” range (whatever that is). Is it really surprising that post-unification IQs in the former East Germany have risen? Their standard of living and all of the other qualities of life have changed dramatically as well. Maybe the elimination of the Stasi is responsible for the IQ gain; this is as good a reason as any. I always get a chuckle over these debates (have been following it ever since the days of William Shockley) and it’s apparent that there is both a genetic and socio/cultural component to IQ but we really don’t know the weighting attributable to each. BTW, I think my IQ is > 0.
Unz has a way cool collection of periodicals on his website and is sponsoring a $10,000 history contest that requires the use of these source materials. It’s a rather eclectic set of journals and periodicals and he’s to be commended for collecting them in an easy to use format. I remember ‘The Reporter’ from my youth as my mother subscribed to it (went out of business in 1968 or so).
Unz’s piece is weak. He cherry-picks individual studies from L & V’s data, and makes up ad hoc theories about putative trends within countries. However, any apparent trends within individual countries are most plausibly attributable not to economic development but to random measurement error. Overall, there is no evidence for economic growth causing convergence in national IQ scores, something which Unz admits with regard to East Asia, but it is in fact true globally. It’s also notable that Unz uses data from L & V’s 2002 book rather than their more recent and more extensive compilations of global IQ data. Using the more extensive dataset from L & V’s 2006 book would have destroyed Unz’s argument:
Greece
Unz: 88,95
L&V2006: 88,97,95,89,92
Ireland
Unz: 87,98
L&V2006: 87,97,93,91
L & V computed average scores from several studies for each country in order to reduce measurement error that is apparent in many individual studies. Unz admits that the individual data points are unreliable, but then goes on to treat them as completely reliable.
Moreover, the reduction in the test score gap between white and Mexican Americans that Unz writes about has not in fact happened.
In the context of IQ a ~9 point variation seems huge to attribute it away to random measurement error.
Aren’t IQ studies designed with a 15 point Standard Deviation? A 9 point measurement error would probably make one of the two studies so crappy that it ought not to be included in the meta-analysis is the first place.
Many of the studies L & V use are indeed crappy in terms of representativeness. For example, the Buj study from 1979 that Unz’s argument hinges on is so bad that it shouldn’t be included at all. The correlations between Lynn and Vanhanen’s average national IQs for Europe and contemporary student assessment studies such the PISA are around 0.6-0.7, providing strong evidence of the validity of L & V’s data. In contrast, the correlations between Buj’s data and the same student assessment studies are around zero.
I’d noticed that all of the weird (surprising) study numbers were either done on children or from 1979.
>>”In the context of IQ a ~9 point variation seems huge to attribute it away to random measurement error”
If you work from the assumption that the IQ tests in question were originally intended to provide a snapshot of national IQ, then you are correct. If you realize that they were NOT so intended, then the remarkably large variations in a short space of time, both up and down, make perfect sense.
I can conduct an IQ test on 2,000 students in a certain area near me, and and arrive at IQ of about 90. A month later I could conduct another IQ test on another 2,000 students in a different area near me, and get IQ around 105. This would not mean that the national IQ of America had increased by 15 points in a month. It would mean that my samples were not nationally representative.
Agree. Another weak point in his article if the false dichotomy between genetic and environmental components of IQ. We can measure the genetic component by looking at adopted twins raised apart. And we can measure the environmental component by looking at adopted children compared to biological children from the same families. The problem is that these two components do not add up to 1, not even close. The genetic component, however, is very strong, of the order of 50-70% of variance, depending on the study.
IQ measurement. . . 24 carat BS. Because it’s reasonable to measure a person’s height in centimeters or weight in kilos, then it must also be possible to ascertain their level of intelligence, whatever that might be? Collectively, yet? If, for instance, better nutrition could be said to increase the average height or weight of a group of humans, it’s still impossible to use this information for any purpose except maybe the ergonomic design of furniture or car interiors. If East Germans are collectively more intelligent now than they were before unification, does that imply a change their taste in magazines and other media or perhaps more efficient and effective problem solving? Does the ice cream now manufactured in what was once East Germany taste better now that the ex-commies collectively score better on IQ test? I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve read and responded to this inane posting.
I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve read and responded to this inane comment. Why do people feel compelled to comment on things they are completely ignorant of?
There’s an article showing that Unz pretty much cherry-picked L&V’s data.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/has-ron-unz-refuted-hard-hereditarianism
Never understood the right-of-center interest in this topic, as it has no public policy implications, unless one wants to suggest that our wealthiest schools are underfunded.
This seems to be a common refrain by those who are convinced by the data (or afraid of being convinced) but wish to ignore it. “What does it matter?” is a nice way to avoid thinking about unpleasant things.
Employment law and educational policy are based on the assumption that there are no IQ differences between the races. Here’s an article on the topic
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-dead-end-of-disparate-impact
As someone who’s grown up in the United States, I’m amazed at how far people will go to deny that a race/IQ connection matters. First of all, wouldn’t you just like to know, to satisfy your own curiosity, why some countries are rich and others are poor, and why within each country some groups do better than others? And even if you are not into knowledge for its own sake, how could you grow up in this country and not hear every single disparity between blacks and whites blamed on discrimination/racism/whatever? Don’t you think society has an interest in hearing other explanations for “racial gaps”?
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a genetic link to intelligence. Right now I think research efforts are hamstrung by the problems defining intelligence and defining ethnicity.
But I don’t see how any discovery can drive public policy ever. Discrimination against an individual is wrong even if he belongs to a race of below average intelligence.
I think a lot of people would settle for NOT discriminating against populations of above average intelligence.
And “wouldn’t be surprised”??? Is that a joke?
Sorry – if people with high IQs make more money, how is this discrimination manifesting itself?
Affirmative action and the disparate impact doctrine are about discriminating in favor of less intelligent and less productive groups.
JL: Are they? Affirmative action redresses groups that were traditionally discriminated against. Was all of the discrimination against all of the discriminated-against groups justified because every one of those groups was less intelligent than the norm?
If not, could you guide me as to which specific groups were properly discriminated against? Are you hoping future research offers insight into making such a judgment?
And if research someday indicates that an up-to-now unspecified group lacks sufficient intelligence to hold the position it occupies in society, would you advocate starting to discriminate against that group?
RZ0, I don’t advocate discrimination against any group. I think the same criteria should be applied to everybody regardless of skin color. If cognitive ability is used as a primary criterion of social advancement, as it should, Jews and Asians will be more successful, on average, than gentile whites, who in turn will be more successful than blacks and Hispanics. I think this is okay, and there’s no reason to redress it.
Right now I think research efforts are hamstrung by the problems defining intelligence and defining ethnicity.
You are wrong. Those are not problematic. Intelligence can be defined in terms of performance on g-loaded standardized tests — which are the best known predictors of educational and job success — while race and ethnicity can be defined by self-identification. Self-identified race and ethnicity are very highly correlated with distinct genetic clusters in America.
Intelligence, really, is probably best described by peer review and prizes. Standardised tests are a not so good, because they do not represent the most useful aspects of intelligence (creativity).
Really, there is no way that the tests under which Chris Langan or Marilyn Vos Savant come out on top are “the best” single measure, compared to the peer assessment of highly intelligent people.
IQ however, even though a flawed measure, is useful in that you can do lots with it, such as showing that pen and paper tests on abilities we are not formally trained on generally show a very strong correlation, and that overall scores on pen and paper tests on abilities we are not formally trained on have useful predictive value for things we do care about (such as making significant discoveries to some extent and earning lots of money to some extent) and of course, actually using them for predictive purposes.
Why so interested in differences by race? Statistically speaking, there are more differences within group than between groups, so we can forget about this whole notion of race for the purpose of analysing intelligence.
So what you’re telling me, is that after centuries of slavery beatings, demeaning treatment, and every form of abuse you could imagine and couldn’t, leading into the current century with ongoing social problem, job discrimination and laws (retarded pot laws) that put a quarter of blacks in prison young … now, what you want to do is say that they are doing poorly because they are stupid.
And in any case IQ is an incredibly poor measure or intelligence, so why on earth would you use race to explain something that we don’t even really understand anyways. Go back to basics, decide what intelligence is (not so obvious), and come back and let us know if you still have any energy left to prove that dem blacks es always wes stupid.
Ridiculous and wrong. Average genetic differences between populations are frequently greater than a standard deviation within those populations. IQ is a good measure of intelligence and highly g-loaded and quite predictive.
It has tons of policy implications.
Can you give me an example? Let’s say that, oh, a person of British ancestry is, on average more intelligent than a person of Russian ancestry. What public policy would take advantage of that fact?
Not making it illegal to use an IQ test for employment purposes?
Intelligence tests are used for employment all the time. Google is famous for them: http://www.mademan.com/mm/google-interview-questions.html
I’m an actuary and to sign an opinion I had to pass seven exams. Lawyers can’t practice without passing the Bar. Accountants have limited upside unless they pass the CPA exams.
Here’s a link to tests that firefighters have to pass: http://www.firequiz.com/
I haven’t done a lot of research here, but my impression is that the test has to be relevant to the job: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_testing
If I’m wrong, then a lot of people are operating blatant ripoffs, evidenced at: https://www.google.com/search?q=employment+testing+companies
Just to add that the military and police departments appear to use IQ tests on prospective employees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_performance
“The US military has minimum enlistment standards at about the IQ 85 level. There have been two experiments with lowering this to 80 but in both cases these men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs.
“Some US police departments have set a maximum IQ score for new officers (for example: 125, in New London, CT), under the argument that those with overly-high IQs will become bored and exhibit high turnover in the job. This policy has been challenged as discriminatory, but upheld by at least one US District court.”
I took some sort of cognitive test 20 years ago when applying for a job. Maybe that was administered illegally.
@ RZ0
E.g. Ricci v. DeStefano: “City of New Haven officials invalidated the test results because none of the black firefighters who passed the exam had scored high enough to be considered for the positions.”
Why should tests have to be blatantly related to the job? IQ is implicitly related to any job. All else equal, smart people are better at anything. I’d rather have someone with an IQ of 140 flip my burgers than someone with an IQ of 80. However, IQ testing fast-food employees would be ruled unlawful due to disparate impact.
I think a good example is affirmative action. If races truly are different (which I haven’t really been convinced of yet for the record), then this would undermine many of the arguments in support of affirmative action.
C-Money, I dont think that’s true. Affirmative action is an imperfect attempt to redress historical discrimination. That discrimination was real and it happened.
Supporters of affirmative action don’t assume that the IQ of one ethnic group is the same as any other. They assume that discrimination took such a virulent form decades ago that qualified individuals from one group were systematically shut out of labor markets, a fact that is hard to argue with unless one assumes that virtually all whites are smarter than virtually all blacks. And I don’t think there’s any research that will show that, say, George Washington Carver was dumber than every white person alive in 1890.
Affirmative action is an attempt to rebalance that scale. You or I may not be happy with how it is implemented, but that doesn’t deny what happened to bring it about.
The scales were rebalanced in favor of blacks a long time ago. This can easily seen from, for example, studies of ethnic/racial differences in job performance. It’s clear that US employers bend over backwards to hire blacks even when they’re incompetent. How long is this going to continue? The welfare losses for the national economy run in the trillions. Perhaps even more ridiculous is that Hispanics, most of whom are of recent immigrant origin, are also beneficiaries of the racial income redistribution system.
Welfare losses in the trillions? So if employers didn’t bend over backwards, how would society benefit?
Share of wealth has been accruing disproportionately to the upper ten percent for decades. Would policy changes result in even more wealth at the top?
Welfare losses in the trillions? So if employers didn’t bend over backwards, how would society benefit?
Few people have trouble understanding that when in the bad old days white men were hired over more competent blacks (or women for that matter), this imposed a cost on the economy. These days, the opposite happens every day, with more competent whites passed over in favor of minority applicants, but that this, too, is costly seems to be difficult for many to grasp.
Share of wealth has been accruing disproportionately to the upper ten percent for decades. Would policy changes result in even more wealth at the top?
No, it would probably result in more wealth for the middle classes in particular.
No, it would probably result in more wealth for the middle classes in particular.
I don’t see how that follows, but I guess we can agree to disagree.
For one thing, racial and ethnic IQ differences have very obvious implications for the education debate. In fact, the real, hidden subject of the debate about the “crisis” of American schools is that low-IQ non-Asian minorities constitute a ever-growing share of the student population, with obvious consequences for the human capital level of tomorrow’s workforce.
That would be a remarkable fact, but what would be the public policy stemming from it? Should we spend less on education, because it will be wasted on the low-IQ crowd? Should we spend more on education, because we need to extract every ounce of intelligence we can from that crowd? Should we deport non-Asian minorities? Again, I struggle to see the conservative agenda flowing from the implications of the research that quite a few conservatives embrace.
RZ0, the answer to that is patently obvious despite the threadbare straw men you manage to erect. The most immediate policy change is actual immigration enforcement where illegal immigrants are not allowed to enter in the U.S. or remain in the first place. This requires no new laws but mere enforcement of existing ones. The next step is to take a close hard look at existing legal migration and refugee policies (and by this I mean cutting them by about 90% or more).
The United States already spends more on education per capita than any state in the world barring Liechtenstein. The law of diminishing returns has long since reduced any more meager gains that could be achieved with another few billion.
The acknowledgement of the reality of racial disparities could have fundamental changes on American society and economics. I envision that the most beneficial would be a return to actual educational standards for U.S. public primary education rather than reducing the quality to the lowest common denominator so that more marginal minorities can pass. Once this is done, it will increase the value of high school education and also decrease the incremental value of a college education. Doing so will break the back of the incestuous government/eduocracy/credentialist bubble and return the value of higher education to equilibrium. This will in turn increase the quality of life for all Americans by dramatically reducing education associated expenses.
Good to know, Duke. Now if someone asks, I can say it would let conservatives deport Mexicans, close the borders and slash spending on education.
Sounds like a plan.
actual educational standards for U.S
I thinks this is a myth. In the “good old days” there was lower educational attainment. Fewer people went to college, and fewer finished high school. Since then US average national IQ has been rising.
Lower educational attainment but not lower educational standards. Standards have been dropping for the very reason of increased educational attainment (wanting people to be able to pass). Increased IQ appears to be the Flynn effect, which is not g-loaded.
>Let’s say that, oh, a person of British ancestry is, on average more intelligent than a person of Russian ancestry.
If you can prove that some ancestries are better than other ancestries, it becomes easier to support a hereditary aristocracy, or even just plain racism. According to Barbara Fields, that was the justification for racism – and why some people were slaves for 7 years and others were slaves for life.
http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/fieldsideolandrace.html
>What public policy would take advantage of that fact?
Jim Crow. Apartheid. Elimination of estate taxes.
There is a world of difference, a WORLD of difference, between making the true statement that some genetic populations have a higher average IQ than other genetic populations, and saying that one ancestry is BETTER THAN another ancestry.
>>”Let’s say that, oh, a person of British ancestry is, on average more intelligent than a person of Russian ancestry. What public policy would take advantage of that fact?”
We should prefer British immigrants over Russian immigrants when it comes to immigration policy, for one.
A great deal of US racial policy is founded on the belief that all people are the same. If you have an engineering company in a city which is 20% black, then 20% of your engineers ought to be black, goes the thinking. The failure of this to be the case is taken as de facto prof of discrimination somewhere along the line. Obviously, if there are differences in the intelligence of different groups of people, then we should not expect to find them equally represented in intellectually challenging fields. In which case we really need to change a lot of US law.
@AH-the problem with your last paragraph is that there are so many confounding elements that any such attempt is likely to fall flat on its face. How do you account for differences in brain development during the critical early years (infant – age 6)? I could give a laundry list of factors that should all be considered which collectively makes any controlled study extraordinarily difficult to carry out. I highly doubt that collective IQ is a major determinant of why “some countries are rich and others are poor.”
You can say that about anything. If you say Muslim nations do worse than secular nations, there are a million confounding factors. Should we ignore studies of culture too? What’s then left to study? If an economic plan worked in country X but the same policy didn’t work in country Y, no matter what explanation you came up with, someone could say “confounding factors.”
The genetic IQ hypothesis makes some predictions. It predicts that the same groups that do well or poorly in international comparisons would have a similar relative position within an individual state. It predicts that children of low performing groups adopted into families from higher performing groups won’t close IQ gaps. It predicts that government efforts to close “achievement gaps” will fail. All of these are empirical questions, and ways to gather evidence for or against the genetic IQ hypothesis. The fact that there are always confounding factors is a red herring.
If you genuinely believe that achievement gaps will never close, but oppose government efforts to close them, it is best to shut up – a permanent achievement gap implies permanent redistribution on equality-of-opportunity grounds.
Most people don’t think like that. Those committed to reducing racial achievement gaps are the ones who most strenuously deny evidence for an inherent race/IQ connection. Those who don’t want government to equalize the races tend to embrace genetic explanations.
@AH ” It predicts that the same groups that do well or poorly in international comparisons would have a similar relative position within an individual state.”
As per the Lynn data Average IQ of India (as a nation) is 81 versus 100 for the US.
Now, median household income of an Indian American family is $90,000 (versus $53,000 for Non-hispanic Whites). Educational attainment based on completion of a Bachelors degree: 70% (Indian American) versus 30% (Non-Hispanic Whites)
I assume, you’ll invoke a selection effect to explain this away?
Your question is rhetorical but the answer is yes. Note that your median household income does not account for spatial, temporal factors. Nor does it account for household size or number of earners. One can draw an entirely different conclusion if you compare Indians in Dubai to the natives.
That’s precisely the point though: Indians aren’t some homogeneous IQ group and neither are any of the other nations that Lynn analyses. Context is everything. Substantially identical genetics can yet yields wildly variant performance based on environment (e.g. Indian in Dubai versus US).
Especially in the immigration context you’ll always have a selection effect. Ergo, arguments based on the median IQ of the native populations seem quite weak.
I think Rahul gets to the nut of the counterargument:
- Intelligence is extraordinarily difficult to describe, let alone measure.
- Ethnicity is extraordinarily difficult to define.
- The link, if any, is tortuously bound up with other factors, including some (income) that could be either cause or result.
I can understand why some people would want to study this. I’m quite curious about the results, too.
But most scientific issues that involve a tussle between left and right have practical implications (global warming, safety of BpA), something I don’t see here. Would a genetic-intelligence link substantiate something intrinsic in conservative philosophy?
Again Rahul and RZ0 engage in some very common logical fallacies, akin to simple Jedi hand waving of “these aren’t the data points you are looking for”. The problem of statistical imprecision and sampling bias is not cause to ignore all existing samples but to conduct more rigorous and methodologically sound ones. The law of large numbers eventually leads you to the truth. However flawed the varied tests reported by Lynn and Vanhanen are, they are supported by even more third party data. Using your example of India, the recent PISA 2009+ studies of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh reveal very low education outcomes for Indian students. Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc’s study of Indian pupils using the TIMMS test in Rajastha and Orissa again confirm similar findings. The all India study conducted by the Pratham ASER survey and the Azem Premji foundation study also reveal similar mediocrity at even among Indian elite pupils and predictable multi year long secular declines in educational outcomes as enrollment has expanded.
Intelligent is neither difficult to measure nor describe, it is only for those who practice the art of obfuscation so as to avoid the topic entirely. Ethnicity is even easier to define. Please read any number of genetics blogs all available for free. I would recommend starting with Razib Khan’s
@Duke
You might be misunderstanding me. I’m not disputing that Indians have a low score at all.
What I’m saying is that a large reason for this low score is that Indians live in India. Not genetics.
India is also extremely impoverished
Yet, if we’d been “genetically superior” we’d have had high-IQ in spite of being impoverished.
Isn’t that what the “Strong IQ Hypothesis” essentially says?
I don’t know what the “Strong IQ Hypothesis” is. IQ is highly hereditary, though. There is no question that environmental factors can reduce IQ, including extreme malnutrition and other developmental diseases.
The single largest flaw in any of these arguments is the assumption of one-way causes and effects. This is even worse than the assumption of single causes and effects.
Why is it so hard to think that genetics drives some part of IQ (or general merit) which drives some part of personal and national wealth, AND that said personal and national wealth drive some part of IQ/general merit? The effects are circular. Circular effects in a river of mixing – genetics, political economy, general wealth and circumstance.
True. OTOH that doesn’t make it impossible to model. Reminds me of a reversible chemical reaction network.
What might be of interest is to tease out the constants of proportionality in both directions of this this feedback network; i.e. the sensitivity of wealth to IQ changes may not be equal to the sensitivity of IQ to wealth changes.
OTOH maybe that’s demanding too much of a social sciences model? I can imagine that sort of parameter estimation being frustratingly hard with all the noise and confounding factors in these measurements.
One small complaint: it is feedback, but the reversibility of the process is a somewhat separate issue.
There has been some work on ‘gene-environment interaction’ and IQ scores (perhaps considering positive feedback), but since we are talking about Ron Unz instead of those studies I will suppose they weren’t very conclusive for the reasons you describe.
He uses the WORDSUM score to argue for IQ increase in Mexicans but I’m pretty sure that the initial numbers of Mexicans that didn’t speak English very well would tend to make the initial assessment a poor measure of IQ
Also he seems to cherry pick individual samples from L&V while ignoring the big picture of the all the samples in the aggregate. A blogger has a critique here: http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/no-mexican-flynn-effect-or-ron-unz-is-no-longer-credible
How do you measure an IQ above 190 with any degress of precision or accuracy?
You don’t.
Easy. You get few billion of people in your norming sample.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzz………. zoning out of endless discussion of irrelevant stats in 5, 4, 3, …uh… uh….. I forget what comes next.
Potato
IQ scores that high, even if true, are quite meaningless. Remember, IQ tests are normalized; to be calibrated, they must first be given to a large group. The WAIS-IV, for instance, was normalized on 2,200 Americans. For a group that size, we would expect one person to be 3.5 standard deviations from the mean (above or below.) An IQ 3.5 std above the mean is a little over 150. Even ignoring the reasonably large fluctuations between tests that occur for IQ, anything in the 150+ range is just that.
Here’s my review from way back in 2002 of Lynn & Vanhanen’s first book on the wealth and IQ of nations. I think you’ll find that it puts a lot of things in perspective. The quality of the discussion at Marginal Review would be higher if commenters would simply read this review first to at least get up to speed with where the discussion was at over ten years ago:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/a-few-thoughts-on-iq-and-the-wealth-of-nations
I loved this quote from your piece:
“In 1952, on the fifth anniversary of independence, the Indian government commissioned a survey to find out if the average Indian villager had heard yet that the British had gone. The study was quietly cancelled when early results showed that the average villager had never heard that the British had ever arrived!”
I believe I heard that on NPR. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down a more authoritative source in the years since.
IQ of 214??
That’s patent nonsense, and anyone with an IQ above say, 90, knows it.
With a sigma of 15 a 214 IQ would be about 7.5 sigmas above the mean. It’s unlikely that anyone who has ever lived was that much smarter than average, even if the notion were meaningful, which it isn’t. Certainly Ron Unz isn’t that smart.
If I use height as an analogous genetic trait: American current mean = 5’10 and a Standard Deviation = 3″.
7.5 sigmas would give a height of about 7.8. Igor Vovkovinskiy (tallest living American) is exactly that height.
I can’t see why 7 sigma would be so unbelievable……..
It’s not that it is unbelievable – it’s that it is immeasurable. IQ tests are normed – and their scores are valid only within the representativeness of the norming sample. How many people with an IQ of > 190 are you going to have in your norming sample when it is expected to occur ~ 1/10^9? With the N used for norming most official IQ tests, somewhere above 3.0-3.5 sigmas the only proper estimate is to say “very high”.
That’d be a generic argument that we’d never be able to quantitatively score the highest performers on any metric.
Almost axiomatically, there’s never going to be a large sample in the tail of a distribution.
Correct.
We’d also have to having a working definition of intelligence to start with. If you ever told me someone was 10 standard deviations above average intelligence, my first guess was that you had a very narrow definition of intelligence, leading to fake results.
The interesting problem with an IQ of 214 is that it’d probably require the designer of the test to design questions that they themselves didn’t know the answer to, since there just isn’t enough room for that many smart people around:)
Recent relevant books on Nature/Nurture:
The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture – Evelyn Fox Keller
the Epigenetics Revolution – How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance – Nessa Carey
Identically Different – Tim Spector
Epigenetics is something less than a revolution.
I know Ron Unz, to some extent. He does not have an IQ of 214. At least, the emails he writes belie that. That is not the same as saying that he is dumb.
As for the idea that there are significant differences in intelligence between human populations, differences that show up pretty much the the same everywhere and everywhen, that nobody yet knows how to change much, shit, of course there are.
Anthropologist Peter Frost, who provided comments on an earlier draft, here are his comments on the published version.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/ron-unz-on-race-iq-and-wealth.html
Also, blogger “Chuck” who analyses this type of data regularly has a rather critical post.
“Unz’s claim: “Thus, almost two-thirds of the IQ gap between American-born Mexican-Americans and whites disappeared in two decades, with these results being based on nationally representative American samples of statistically significant size.”
Unz bases his claim of a gap narrowing on two data sources, the General Social Survey and the NLSY 97. I was unable to replicate the cited GSS findings. Below are the results of my own analysis, with search variables noted. Based on the results, the gap in the 2000s is no less than 0.7 SD. In the first table, Mexicans were identified with the “Specified Hispanic” variable, for which there was only data since 2000; the gap was 0.77 SD. In second table, Mexicans were identified through the country of origin Variable “Ethnic.” For this variable, there was data from the 70s through 2010. The gap in 2000 was 0.67 SD. This GSS gap of around 0.7 SD is approximately the same size as that found between non Hispanic Whites and 2nd generation Mexicans in the nationally representative ADD health (1994-1995) sample, which can be analyzed online. That gap was approximately 0.72 SD…
Other data comes from Jason Richwine’s analysis of the 2003 New Immigrant Survey (Richwine 2009) – which was based on a nationally representative sample of immigrants. In this sample, 2nd generation Mexicans performed 1.2 SD below non-Hispanic Whites on the very culturally reduced backwards digit span (which was given in Spanish for those wishing so).
There are other data points to consider. Based on Roth et al.’s 2001 meta-analysis, the Hispanic –White difference, between 1970 and 2000, was .72 SD (N>5 million). Mexicans comprise 2/3rds of the US Hispanic population and the other large Hispanics groups (e.g., Puerto Ricans) score little worse than them, so this is probably a fair index of the Mexican IQ between those time intervals. With regards to Mexican IQ in particular, Linda Gottfredson reports several large studies in the Appendix section of “Implications of Cognitive Differences for Schooling Within Diverse Societies.” We have: 0.63 SD in 1974 from Jensen’s California school district study; 0.55 SD from GABT job applications from the 1940s to 1970s; and 0.65 from the 1966 Coleman report.
The various studies are summarized below. For comparison, Lynn and Meisenberg (2010) give a Mexican national IQ of 88 based on 6 IQ samples and 6 international tests. As can be seen, the Mexican in the US Flynn effect has yet to occur.”
http://tinyurl.com/cw9hj53
The best part about this comment thread is that the same people who complain about how evil progressives were 100 years ago because some believed in eugenics and white supremacy are the same people who believe in eugenics and white supremacy themselves. Fascinating.
I don’t think they are the same people. Perhaps you are just lumping all libertarians or all people who disagree with you together. I don’t think anyone believes in white supremacy, though.
No, Benny, I’m pretty sure they’re not the same people.
At times it’s like he’s schizophrenic. He only responds to things the voices in his head told him
Unz refuted:
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2012/07/ron-unz-on-race-iq-and-wealth.html
.
Interesting how many who disparage (correctly) climate change deniers who ignore the facts then ignore the facts indicating that IQ varies by race.
Perhaps there are other factors explaining differences. For example, if you go to South Africa, I’d disparage you from the start because black kids don’t get food, and this causes developmental problems that are potentially permanent. It is a disgrace that some folks are more interested in sitting around disparaging blacks for having some fraction of a standard deviation different intelligence score, when in many cases it is easy to see that those average results are driven by extreme deprivation among the most unfortunate (and most typically black) communities.
Yes, I am sold by the argument that this should not be taboo. Blacks have slightly lower average results an some seemingly arbitrary definition of what intelligence is. It seems perfectly natural for me to assume that they are essentially about as intelligent as us, and that any discrepancies point to a need to redefine variables or tests (have you ever written an intelligence test in ebonics?) , or find out what’s wrong. Or if the average result is 0.5 points different on some seemingly arbitrary scale, then who really cares?
The difference in intelligence is important insofar as the resultant outcome differences are; most of the so called racial “disparities,” inside the US and out, can be accounted for by the g differential. Genes, in turn, are important insofar as both the g differential and its cause are. It’s all pretty simple.
I outlined the issue here. I have yet to encounter anyone who has been able to consistently environmentally explain the US gap. Give it a try. (In regards to your explanation above, the depressing effect must be fairly uniform across the Black population — if otherwise the Black heritability would be substantially depressed relative to the White — so your account fails; whatever is depressing the Black IQ relative to the White must affect wealthy, high IQ Blacks no less than poor, low IQ Blacks.)
I wish the results were only slightly lower, or that IQ was less important.
Well, I have mixed feeling about contributing to this very long and perhaps less than useful discussion, but let me focus upon a single experimental datapoint, of which there actually exist a considerable number.
Lynn provides three Irish IQ samples: a 1972 sample of 3,466 yielding an IQ of 87, a 1993 sample of 1,361 yielding an IQ of 93, and another 1993 sample of 2,029 yielding an IQ of 91. These are all very large samples. There is also another minuscule 1979 sample of 75 which (unsurprisingly) yields an outlying value. All these results are Flynn-adjusted by Lynn.
Furthermore, in a recent interview Lynn himself stated that his Dublin research in the late 1960s convinced him that the Irish were a low-IQ people, and that only a strong campaign of eugenics could solve the country’s problems. His opinion is very consistent with the (independent) test scores I have given above.
However, in America Irish these days have IQs slightly above the white average, and in Europe the recent PISA scores for Ireland are also right around those for Germany, France, and Britain.
Now my hypothesis is that the huge recent rise in Irish IQs is probably due to changes in urbanization and socio-economic factors. But perhaps I’m entirely wrong. So, then, what is the alternate hypothesis explaining these wildly different Irish IQ scores across just a 35 year period?
Maybe you should have posted in response to one of the very first comments:
“Using the more extensive dataset from L & V’s 2006 book would have destroyed Unz’s argument:
Greece Unz: 88,95 L&V2006: 88,97,95,89,92
Ireland Unz: 87,98 L&V2006: 87,97,93,91
L & V computed average scores from several studies for each country in order to reduce measurement error that is apparent in many individual studies. Unz admits that the individual data points are unreliable, but then goes on to treat them as completely reliable.
Moreover, the reduction in the test score gap between white and Mexican Americans that Unz writes about has not in fact happened.”
However, in America Irish these days have IQs slightly above the white average
Based on what data? There are very few reliable data on the IQs of white ethnicities in America, not least because most white Americans have ancestry from multiple ethnicities.
the recent PISA scores for Ireland are also right around those for Germany, France, and Britain
If you look only at the performance of the native population in the PISA, Ireland is clearly below Germany, and somewhat below France and the UK.
the huge recent rise in Irish IQs
The evidence for this supposed huge rise is lacking.
>>”Based on what data? There are very few reliable data on the IQs of white ethnicities in America”
There are no direct IQ tests. However, we have census data which describes the educational level attained and income level of different white ethnic groups. This is a pretty good proxy for IQ level. And Irish-Americans graduate high school, graduate college, and earn money at somewhat above the overall white average.
>>”my hypothesis is that the huge recent rise in Irish IQs ..”
I’m curious as to what, if anything, it would take to make you accept the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong, and that Irish IQ has NOT rise sharply in a short period of time.
Using the same reasoning and data which you employ to conclude that the Irish IQ has risen by about 10 to 12 points since 1970, it is easy to show that the IQ of several European countries has dropped by up to 10 to 12 points. For instance, the Lynn data shows the IQ of Portugal dropping 13 points in just eight years. Do you believe that this actually happened?
You seem to be quite unaware of the fact that the IQ tests mentioned by Lynn were never intended to be used to derive a national IQ figure, and that accordingly the people who conducted them made no effort to ensure that they had a nationally representative sample.
>>”Lynn provides three Irish IQ samples: a 1972 sample of 3,466 yielding an IQ of 87, a 1993 sample of 1,361 yielding an IQ of 93, and another 1993 sample of 2,029 yielding an IQ of 91. These are all very large samples.”
Were they nationally representative samples? Were they ever even supposed to be nationally representative samples? You assume a lot of facts not in evidence.
Comments by ‘Chuck’ on the East Asian exception:
“One problem with Ron Unz’s new theory of Mongoloid fitness (i.e., that East Asians developed a novel genetic resistance to cognitively depressing environments), invoked to explain the “Asian Socio-Economic exception,” is that East Asians aren’t particularly exceptional when it comes to the relation between National IQs and socio-economics. Generally, the “socio-economic” explanation suffers from the following problems: National IQs predict growth rate not just wealth, national wealth is unable to explain the covariance between IQ and educational scores (so one has to problematically propose that wealth increases National IQ by acting through the g-nexus), the IQs of oil rich Middle Eastern nations are no greater than those of the poorer Greater Middle Eastern nations (the “Middle Eastern Socio-Economic exception”), and longitudinal studies show that National IQs are antecedent to national wealth. And there is, of course, the whole issue of the biological, ecological, and historic cognitive correlates of national IQ. (These correlates preclude a simple contemporaneous Wealth –> contemporaneous National IQ hypothesis for the obvious reasons that neither differences in contemporaneous wealth nor contemporaneous National IQ can induce differences in these evolutionary markers and that the correlation between these markers and National IQs is greater than that between National IQs and wealth or between these markers and Wealth. Right? — try creating a plausible path model yourself.)
The other problem, of course, is parsimony. It’s possible that Mongoloids evolved a unique genetic system which buffers their cognitive ability against environmental depressors. But a much simpler explanation is that they simply evolved higher IQs. With the former, you have to invoke between race gene x environment interactions — in the classic biometric sense, not the pseudo Turkheimer sense — which don’t exist within populations or, at least, have yet to be detected. In effect, you have to propose a dissimilarity in racial developmental processes, one which has not been found. With the latter, you can just call upon the garden variety within population factors to explain between population variance. Of course, proposing the latter, that there was increased selection of beneficial IQ alleles in the Northern Asian populations, might lead some to wonder if there was selection in other northern populations. And it’s appreciated that the point is to introduce the larger topic in a politically acceptable way.”
East Asian Exception?
Unz on Race/IQ: Rejecting the Ostrich Response
fyi. This blogger has broken down National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, TIMMS, PISA and GSS results for third generation Hispanics compared to third generation Whites.
“The differences ranges from 0.35 SD (GSS) to 0.77 SD (TIMSS grade 8 science). The average of the differences comes out to 0.61 SD or, when averaging PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS tests scores per year, per grade (e.g., PISA 2009 MAth + Reading), 0.59 SD. This is not largely different from the general intelligence difference reported by Roth et al. (2001), which is notable given what was said about Spearman’s hypothesis. On re-analysis, Ron Unz’s claim concerning the difference in the GSS sample was upheld; this claim, though, was contradicted by all other samples.”
In terms of the GSS he notes Murray (2007)
The decline in the B–W difference in the GSS vocabulary test for persons born since mid-century is entirely attributable to a decline in white performance,…
http://tinyurl.com/bqa3cx3
For a man with an IQ of 214, Unz is remarkably ignorant and foolish. He cherry picks date quite shamelessly to get the result he wants.
“Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range.”
But in many other studies cited by Lynn (but NOT mentioned by Unz, the high IQ result comes first followed by a low IQ result about ten years later. Unz gets around this problem by not telling his readers about it.
One example is Portugal, sort of a “reverse Ireland”. Lynn mentions two studies eight years apart. The first found the Portugal IQ to be 101, the second, 88. his might be awkward for Unz – if he bothered to take note of it.
Unz on Race/IQ: The Rural/Urban Divide
Unz seems like a normal graduate student …
http://inspirehep.net/search?ln=en&p=find+a+unz&of=hb&action_search=Search
I think the claim that East Germans and West Germans are identical therefore genetics cannot account for it is not backed up by epigenetics. People who suffer traumas carry that trauma for generations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
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