Thoughtless for the Day: Race and IQ Part II (Electric Boogaloo)

While plenty of people are content to act like dicks, nobody wants to be called a dick, or Dicky McDick-a-Lot, or Sir Dick of Head, or The Incredibly Strange Creature Who Stopped Living and Became a Mixed Up DICK, or...well, you get the idea. Maybe that's why it socially acceptable to ask why men commit more violent crimes than women do (which just only goes to prove that women are only good for one thing...OK, two, if you count cooking), but it's taboo to ask if there is a link between ethnicity and IQ.

As we saw in the last Thoughtless, on average, groups score higher than others on IQ tests. But why?

Theory Number One: IQ Tests, just like society, are loaded with racist, culturally and economically biased bullshit
On the surface this seems like a slam dunk, until one descends form one's soapbox and actually looks at the data. If the tests are racially biased then why do American Blacks outscore Blacks living in Africa? For that matter, why do Asians outscore Whites? And if you toss trans-racial adoption into the mix you'll find that find that the pattern of Asians* outscoring Whites, Whites outscoring Hispanics, and Hispanics outscoring Blacks still holds up.

As for economic bias, well, white children from households earning below the national average income outscore black children from households earning above the national average income. This, of course, does not explain away Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

So environmental factors don't play a part in IQ scores? No, I didn't say that.

The overwhelming majority of people who study IQ agree that as much as 50 percent of the variations in IQ between groups are cause by nutritional, disease, and educational factors. Malnutrition alone may cause an individuals IQ score to drop by as much as 10 points (that's five trips to the net). Government spending on social programs over the last 50 years may help to explain why the gap between average White and Black IQ scores in the US has decreased:

So there, are you happy now you Liberal tree-hugging fans of the Nanny State? It's clearly environmental, not genetic, factors that play the key role in determining IQ.

Or maybe not.

Next time we'll take a look at Theory Number Two (he-he, "Number Two") and hopefully wrap this thing up so we can get back to important stuff, like little, plastic soldiers.

* Driving test sores for Asians were unavailable.

Comments

I'd just like to add a personal anecdote that may or may not have implications for debate. They say that SAT/GMAT scores can be translatable to IQ scores (http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Default.aspx).

As we know, there are services for the SAT to increase scores (they do, in fact, increase scores) and other standardized tests. I have a brother who scored slightly above average on a GMAT test (a graduate school test). He spent the next 6 months studying every night after work until he was exhausted enough to go to bed. He managed to make a 780 (800 is perfect, with 1 in 13,500 people). This isn't to say that my brother became smarter (or maybe he did) but that this little anecdote has implications for first-worlders that may have the means to study for tests that are culturally familiar. Perhaps a long history of IQ tests in African countries, along with the environmental factors that Rodney mentioned, would level things out.

Additionally, it seems that psychology is put into a vacuum when discussing IQ. One of the articles linked to on this blog, mentions Asians having more academic throughput (or something of that nature) for their estimated IQ than for whites. We can assume that whites are "lazy" or that IQ testing isn't perfect.

Posted by: Direlect | December 1, 2007 02:13 PM