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No, the Racial IQ Gap is Not Shrinking
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Race; Posted on: 2008-04-26 12:16:01 [ Printer friendly / Instant flyer ]
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Misology in America
By Ian Jobling
Portrait of a Racial Neurotic
In my post on blogger Robert Lindsay, I omitted an analysis of his attempts to prove that there are no permanent racial gaps in IQ, or that, if there are, they are smaller than most race realists think they are. His main point is that IQ differences among black and white children are smaller than those among adults. This is a well-known phenomenon that has been addressed by race realists. It does not mean, as Lindsay believes it does, that the racial IQ gap is declining.
As Arthur Jensen says in The G Factor: The Science of Mental Ability, the most authoritative work on the measurement of intelligence:
"Between ages three and five years, which is before children normally enter school, the mean White-Black IQ difference steadily increases. By five to six years of age, the mean difference is about 0.70 standard deviations (eleven IQ points), then approaches about one standard deviation during the elementary school years, remaining fairly constant until puberty, when it increases slightly and stabilizes at about 1.2 standard deviations."
Jensen offers no explanation for this phenomenon, but several come to mind. First of all, the younger people are, the greater the influence of the environment on their psychological traits. As psychologist Nancy Segal says in Entwined Lives her book about twin studies, unrelated children raised together show modest correlations in IQ of about 0.3. However, by the time they are adults, the correlation shrinks to zero.2 So environment matters in childhood, but less so as time goes on. That means improvements in education and child-rearing could raise black performance on IQ tests in childhood, but the increases would be temporary. Just as differences between the sexes are small during childhood and assert themselves with age, so it is with racial differences as well.
Also, blacks mature more quickly than whites. Black infants learn to sit up, crawl, and walk before white children.3 Greater maturity could plausibly lead to smaller IQ differences between whites and blacks in childhood.
Lindsay also cites a paper by William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn that purports to prove that the racial IQ gap is shrinking. However, a response to this paper by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen argues that Dickens and Flynn’s paper is based on a selective evaluation of the findings and that there is no strong evidence that the IQ gap has shrunk over the past century.
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News Source: Ian Jobling
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