Author: Graham Laight
Date: 02:32:27 04/20/98
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I apologise for contributing to an off topic discussion. I haven't read the original "The Bell Curve", but I have read "The Bell Curve Wars", edited by Steven Fraser, in which about 15 different contributors give their view about the well known best seller. I found it to be a compelling read - I recommend it (though I wish that more use had been made of mitochondrial DNA evidence, which shows that humans have only been diversifying for 150,000 years, which is too little for any groups to have gained a big evolutionary hardware advantage in intelligence. I think that the mitochondrial DNA evidence was brand new when "The Bell Curve Wars" was written). It seems that although IQ tests have good predictive power within a culture, they are very poor when used between cultures. Two stark examples illustrate the point. Firstly, American Jews achieved low IQ scores around 1915, when the US army first conducted racially categorised tests. Now, however, the US Jews achieve the highest scores, and are rated in "The Bell Curve" as being the most intelligent group in America. In the intervening years, the jews have not interbred significantly with other groups, so the IQ increase seems to be culturally based. It seems to be a general trend that when a group is new in a society, it scores lowly on IQ tests. Over time, it catches up. This is supported by the fact that black Ameicans (who score below average on IQ tests) have been consistently catching up to the average over the last 40 years (the period during which they have been allowed to start integrating into society). Black children in orphanages with white children actually scored significantly higher at age 5 than their white counterparts. Secondly, the average african scores 75 on the american IQ tests. In the USA, anyone who scores below 50 is regarded as being seriously mentally retarded, and unable to look after themselves. Since 20% of the African population are patently not in this situation, there must be something wrong with the IQ tests when used between different cultures. One of the contributors to "The Bell Curve Wars" was Stephen Jay Gould. He said that after reading "The Bell Curve" several times, he thought the book contained a lot of "Scholarly Brinkmanship", in which the authors' keep selecting pieces of evidence which imply that black's might be genetically intellectually inferior to whites, but the authors themselves keep repeating that they're agnostic on the issue, thus maintaining their apparent neutrality.
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