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Originally posted by arabegypt:
I think blacks are mentally incapable of building a civilization like Egypt.

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Posts: 455 | From: Tharsis Montes | Registered: Jan 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by arabegypt:
I think blacks are mentally incapable of building a civilization like Egypt.

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Posts: 3773 | From: unfinished thought | Registered: Nov 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

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Cole et al (1971) studied a tribe in Africa called the “Kpelle” in which culture was shown to have a rather humorous effect on interpretations of intelligence. In this study adult participants were asked to sort items into categories. However, rather than producing the kind of taxonomic categories (e.g. "fruit" for apple) typically done in the west, the Kpelle participants sorted items into functional groups (e.g. "eat" for apple). After trying and “failing” to teach them to categorize items taxonomically, the Kpelle were asked as a last resort how a “stupid” person would do the task. At that point, according to the researchers, without any hesitation, the Kpelle sorted items into taxonomic categories (Cole et al., 1971)! Demonstrating that not only where they able to do the presented tasks, but in their own culture, what was considered intelligent by western views was believed to be “stupid.”

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There are a great many things that "we" haven't been looking at in the most expedient (in a way ) way in terms of the sciences, and new discoveries are constantly challenging us to look at things from another perspective.

There are also many different ways to learn the things we already know in the maths, languages and sciences we teach (many teachers have different styles of teaching).

But that's only the tippy, and has no direct bearing on why IQ gaps would exist between different groups within a society.

This might do:

Given the long and rapid discussions here on the topic of "whether average NOMINAL IQ scores of sociological populations do truly reflect the NATURAL cognitive abilities of such populations or whether they are purely culture/environmenta driven" here's another interesting observation on the topic by Malcolm Gladwell -- author of the powerful book about the human mind Blink wherein a study is mentioned in which people were tested and blacks outperformed whites when they were told they would be competing in a "game" but were outperformed when it was referred to as an intelligence "test". Peep the bolded paragraphs below, it was posted here a while ago, it covers what you're missing.

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If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?

One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better.

Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.

Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.

For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the word “moron.” “The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places,” he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.” To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.

This is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when he told an English newspaper recently that he was “inherently gloomy” about the prospects for Africa. From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability. In the controversy that followed, Watson was defended by the journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion. To erase the difference between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote, would probably require vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind of corrective genetic engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. “Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.

The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a “crisis of confidence,” Flynn writes in “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22), his latest attempt to puzzle through the implications of his discovery. “How could such huge gains be intelligence gains? Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q. tests were not good measures of intelligence.”

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”

“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.

This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?

When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: “abstract.” Abstract could mean something like “whatever it was that was going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles back.” That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult, but it wasn’t: it merely required that we ask a slightly different set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions, and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone’s mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an abstraction, “the Unknown Soldier”—which allowed him legitimately and gleefully to answer “I have no idea” to almost every question. There were four of us playing. We gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father was teaching his three sons how to put on scientific spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let’s be clear about what this means. There’s a world of difference between an I.Q. advantage that’s genetic and one that depends on extended car time with Graham Gladwell.

Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in the I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again and again to the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil tests—and making sense of those scores, he tells us, is a messy and complicated business that requires something closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a philosopher.

For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them. The original WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as the WISC IV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.

This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to diagnose people as mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally taken to be the cutoff. You can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with that system. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But since kids—even kids with disabilities—score a little higher every year, the number of children whose scores fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the eighties. Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the percentage of kids labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya, Matthew Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of Americans labelled mentally retarded should have doubled.

That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental disability is one of the most stigmatizing of all educational and occupational classifications—and yet, apparently, the chances of being burdened with that label are in no small degree a function of the point, in the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to sit for his evaluation. “As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”

Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.

Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.

The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis, Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.

There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else’s—coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles. “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse,” Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and effects. “It is not easy to view the history of their achievements without emotion,” he writes. That is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it.

Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend stalled—and the question was why.

Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.

Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.

That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly the kind of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.

Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

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Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by unfinished thought.:
All humans have the same intellectual capability, black, white or other.

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Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Freehand:

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“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.

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I think this quote sums up the inadequacy of IQ tests and their ability to measure intelligence. Firstly, IQ tests are inextricably linked to a certain style of learning, there is nothing 'general' about the knowledge that is tested in IQ. For instance, in developed nations, if you asked them to cluster four objects (ie. Mud, Clay, Spade and Knife) into two groups, the 'correct' answer in the IQ test would likely be:
Group 1: Mud, Clay
Group 2: Spade, Knife

Whereas a agriculturalist or rural person who has not had a city based education would choose:

Group 1: Spade, Mud
Group 2: Clay, Knife

Equally as logically (if not more so), but in the confinds of an IQ test, would be classified as incorrect.

Further to this, animals, and natural extractions common to Europe and America will not be common to a rural African, and hence lacking the formalised education structure, 'general' knowledge becomes that much more difficult.

Further to this, there was likely huge bias in the selection of who was chosen to represent 'blacks' (probably the most diverse ethnic group), and out of each nationality, the children that were chosen. I once taught in an inner city area in London, in an area filled with crime, abuse and paedophilia. These (working class white) people on average were EXTREMELY unintelligent, the school sent on average 1 student to university every 5-8 years! So, one wonders if schools like this were AVOIDED when formulating the European (English) cluster...

Add to this, your average diaspora African in the UK scores much better than your average Brit in the UK at both further education and post graduate education, and the IQ argument becomes even more weak.

Add to this that Nigerian immigrants are OFFICIALLY the most educated people in the US with 8% holding PhD's , you can quickly see that the whole IQ argument is a big farse. Trust me, NO African in the world is threatened by these statistics, we know that the African schooling system is far more rigourous and that African children on the whole, are the most intelligent children you will ever meet in your life, obviously the average literacy rate is still much lower than it should be, but this is linked directly to poverty, whereas, in the UK where low literacy is linked to dole-collecting-inbred communities.

Studies like the IQ/race study show how desperate and threatened the West are by Africa's extremely intelligent diaspora who seem to outperform them at every level. I don't see why people fail to understand that surveys can be clustered and interpreted to present ANY data that you want them to present. In fact, I'll perform my own IQ tests one day to prove that very point.

On a side note arabegypt you are aware that arab's scored next lowest on these biased IQ test's aren't you?

Posts: 365 | Registered: Dec 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by lamin:
[QB] But Arabegypt the IQ of modern Egyptians is some 82 points--less than that of African Americans--who are 83

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Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by SirInfamous:
[QB] @Sundjata

African Americans are 85

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Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
Africans both in the west and in Africa have had a difficult time adjusting to the modern western culture that now dominates the world. Low IQ, antiquated cultural constructs result in making it very difficult to move them into the modern world. Even in the west they make a mess out of everything they try to run. As one Pennsylvania legislator pointed out they seem determined in major cities to commit cultural genocide.

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On one hand TheAmericanPatriot has a point, look at this descrepency in the way white family and black family -adopted black children performed:

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"Compared mean IQ test performance and response styles to cognitive demands of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) among 23 Black children (aged 7-10 yrs) who had been adopted by middle-class White families (i.e., transracially adopted) and 23 age-matched Black children who had been adopted by middle-class Black families (i.e., traditionally adopted). Findings indicate that while the traditionally adopted Ss received normal IQ scores, transracially adopted Ss showed nearly 1 standard deviation Full-Scale Scoring advantage over them. A multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) indicated significant differences in the styles of responding to test demands demonstrated by the 2 groups of Ss, which were conceptualized as contributors to the difference in average test score observed between them. Multivariate analysis of the helping behaviors adopted mothers exhibited when helping their children solve a difficult cognitive task revealed significant differences between Black and White mothers, which were conceptualized as culturally determined. White adopted mothers tended to release tension by joking, grinning, and laughing, while Black adoptive mothers more often released tension in less positive ways such as scowling, coughing, and frowning. White adoptive mothers were more likely than Black adoptive mothers to provide positive evaluations of their children's problem solving efforts. It is concluded that the ethnicity of the rearing environment exerts a significant influence on children's styles of responding to standardized intelligence tests and on their test achievement.".

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- Moore 1986

The above basically shows that culture is crucial as TheAmericanPatriot suggests.

In the study, those Blacks raised with White families had a mean IQ of 117, while those Blacks who were raised in Black families had an IQ that was substantially lower.

This effect is evident in a paper by Willerman (1974), finding that mixed children with White mothers and Black fathers had an IQ 9 points higher than mixed children with Black mothers and White fathers. Even though today white men out perform black men in level of college education as well as careers and black women do as well as white women (if not better).

Society would predict that women play a larger role in nurturing children while building them the skills necessary to attain a high IQ. White women on average are obviously in a better socio-economic position to do that.

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"An experiment by Tizard and colleagues compared black and white orphans who had all been raised in the same highly enriched institutional environment. At four or five years of age, white children had IQs of 103, black children had IQs of 108, and children of mixed race had IQs of 106."

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Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by arabegypt:
I think blacks are mentally incapable of building a civilization like Egypt.

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Posts: 1106 | From: Puerto Rico | Registered: Aug 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by unfinished thought.:

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Originally posted by arabegypt:
I think blacks are mentally incapable of building a civilization like Egypt.

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You must have a low intelligence to believe that.

All humans have the same intellectual capability, black, white or other. I really believe that.

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Posts: 1106 | From: Puerto Rico | Registered: Aug 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
hummm, well, a person is not a racist based on the position they take on this issue. If you go to any integrated school in America and walk into an honors class you will find 18 white kids and 2 black kids. The lower the classes you attend the more black kids you will find. Now, that is not a racist remark, just a fact.
Most of the IQ studies before it became politically incorect to discuss race showed European Jews, Asians and euro American whites on top of the IQ heap in that order with blacks dead last.

Is there something to it, probably, but how much is cultural and how much is genetic is up for debate. Probably some of both.

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Source?......

Who am I kidding? You never have sources for your nonsense.

Like I said, plenty of studies refute the genetic hypothesis the most significant of them being Flynn's finding that the Black American IQ average has risen steadily over the past 30 years indicating that improvement in environmental conditions has improved Black academic performance.


It is often asserted that Black Americans have made no IQ gains on White Americans. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure trends in Black IQ. We analyzed data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These data suggest that Blacks gained 4 to 7 IQ points on non-Hispanic Whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of Black cognitive ability.

Source: Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence From Standardization Samples


Abstract

Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
All of the standardized test scores are avilable by state broken down by race. Black kids do very poorly in most cases. They may well have made gains, I have not seen the numbers from the 70's but they could not have been much lower.
The Asian kids are great to have in class at any level.

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Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Morpheus:


Segregation created the Socio-Economic disparity between Black and White Americans.

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This paper examines the argument presented in The Bell Curve. A central argument is that one factor--g--accounts for correlation across test scores and performance in society. Another central argument is that g cannot be manipulated. These arguments are combined to claim that social policies designed to improve social performance cannot be effective. A reanalysis of the evidence contradicts this story. The factors that explain wages receive different weights than the factors that explain test scores. More than g is required to explain either. Other factors besides g contribute to social performance and they can be manipulated.

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
Jesus Christ man, have you seen the TAKS scores for black schools? If had ever taught in an actual classroom you would not feel that way. They are nearly as smart as whites and asians, not the ones I have taught. The gap is huge. I agree some of it is cultural but not all.
The public school teachers I talk to say it is not much better.
Improvement? some. Significant improvement? no.

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Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by thegaul:
African immigrants also achieve the highest level of education than any other immigrant group. It's a fact.

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
[QB] Morpheus, I agree some of it is cultural, but not all.

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
[QB] Baloney. You simply refuse to educate yourself Sundjata. All of those standard scores are on the net....

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You are confusing standardized scores with mathematical correlation methods. lol... Did you even read the paper (Dickens and Flynn)? Surely your "racist spin" has nothing to do with why African immigrants score higher and achieve higher levels of educational attainment than Europeans (both immigrant and natural-born)..

You are such a goof ball which brings me to another question. Why do racists have such low IQs?

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
Morpheus, I agree some of it is cultural, but not all. I noticed you throw in racism as a problem right off the bat. As long as you see it that way we can never make progress. Blacks always want to shift the blame from themselves to someone else.

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Sure Horemheb. Let's not blame institutionalized racism for why Blacks are disproportionately poor. Let's propose that they are intellectually inferior and simply don't possess the mental ability to succeed as you're doing.

Oh wait....it's part cultural and part genetic right? That changes things.

Anyway back to reality, here's a good study conducted on twins which demonstrates that Socioeconomic Status has a profound impact on the IQ scores of children which supports programs like Head Start:

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Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of iq in young children


Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were analyzed in a sample of 7-year-old twins from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. A substantial proportion of the twins were raised in families living near or below the poverty level. Biometric analyses were conducted using models allowing for components attributable to the additive effects of genotype, shared environment, and nonshared environment to interact with socioeconomic status (SES) measured as a continuous variable. Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.


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DEMYSTIFYING G


Ken Richardson
Centre for Human Development & Learning
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
United Kingdom


Abstract


Jensen's elaborate thesis on g can be shown to be based on several fallacious premises. IQ tests are merely clever numerical surrogates for social class. The numerous correlations evoked in support of g arise from this. His 'genetic' arguments are based on a highly simplistic, and outmoded, model of genes. And his model of "race" is based on evolutionary misconceptions.


I. WHAT IS G?

1. In this book Jensen (1998, 1999) pursues his well-known arguments about g, a 'general, cognitive factor'. But it isn't difficult to show that what is cognitive is not general, and what is general is not cognitive. Scores on standardised psychometric tests intercorrelate partly because they have been subjected to considerable construction engineering on the basis of common criteria. Jensen himself has noted how 'every item is carefully edited and selected on the basis of technical procedures known as "item analysis", based on tryouts of the items on large samples and the test's target population' (1980:145). Even so, because item designs tend to be intuitive, and the criteria for item selection statistical and pragmatic, rather than theoretical, there is sill much puzzlement about what the common factor actually is. Other cognitive theory might help us in this regard.

2. For example, a prominent line of study in recent years has shown how different patterns of cognition arise, not from individual computations, but from an internalisation of the cultural 'tools' (patterns of activity, knowledge and reasoning) dominant in the social world in which people grow up and/or currently operate. 'The structure of thought depends upon the structure of the dominant types of activity in different cultures' (Luria 1976: xiv-xv). Because test constructors come from a narrow social group, it follows that test items will contain information structures which will match the background knowledge of some children more than that of others. This cognitive match/mismatch will apply even more critically to non-verbal items than to verbal items.

3. Take, for example, the Raven's test which Jensen says is almost a pure measure of g. According to Carpenter et al (1990: 408), after an examination of Raven's personal notes, 'the description of the abilities that Raven intended to measure are primarily characteristics of the problems, not specifications of the requisite cognitive processes... he used his intuition and clinical experience... without regard to any underlying processing theory'.

4. Inevitably, Raven's 'intuition' will have included his own cultural tools, and illustrating their incursion in the test is not too difficult. Much of middle class culture is based on the manipulation of symbols (e.g. words, numbers) in two-dimensional array on paper. Typical cultural tools are record cards, tables with rows and columns of totals and subtotals, timetables, and so on. These nearly all require the reading of symbols from top left to bottom right, the induction of additions, subtractions and substitutions across columns and down rows, and the deduction of new information from them. These are precisely the kinds of manipulations (or 'rules') that found their way into Raven's items.

5. So although the symbols are experience-free, the rules governing their changes across the matrix are certainly not, and they are more likely to be already represented in the minds of children from middle class homes that in others. Performance on the Raven's is not a question of inducing novel rules from meaningless symbols, but ones which are culturally rooted; each item presents a recognition problem before it is a reasoning problem. The latter is easy when the former has been achieved.

6. This has been shown in a vast variety of tasks in which subjects can map the covariation relations in the task onto relations in their background knowledge (reviewed in Richardson 1999). These include the Wason selection task; computerised 'games' governed by complex 'rules'; pragmatic reasoning schemes; analogical reasoning tasks; class-inclusion and scientific reasoning tasks; categorisation tasks; and modified Raven's matrices. All of this explains why the Raven's (and other non-verbal tests), often referred to as culture-free etc., are, in fact, the most enculturated of all tests.

7. So relative acquisition of relevant background knowledge (which will be closely associated with social class) is one source of the elusive common factor in psychometric tests. But there are other, non-cognitive, sources. Jensen seems to have little appreciation of the stressful effects of negative social evaluation and systematic prejudice which many children experience every day (in which even superficial factors like language dialect, facial appearance, and self-presentation all play a major part). These have powerful effects on self concepts and self-evaluations. Bandura et al (1996) have shown how poor cognitive self-efficacy beliefs acquired by parents become (socially) inherited by their children, resulting in significant depressions of self-expectations in most intellectual tasks. Here, g is not a general ability variable, but one of 'self-belief'.

8. Reduced exposure to middle-class cultural tools and poor cognitive self-efficacy beliefs will inevitably result in reduced self-confidence and anxiety in testing situations. There is a well-known association between IQ test performance and test-anxiety. In his meta-analysis of 562 studies, Hembree (1988) found that High Task Anxiety (HTA) subjects hold themselves in low esteem, fear exposure to negative evaluation, experience greater emotional reaction to testing situations, and more encoding difficulty and other cognitive interference when tested. It will not do for Jensen to attempt to dismiss the role of task-anxiety by reference to the old Yerkes-Dodson Law (which is about drive) and a study involving a small group of university students!

9. In sum, the 'common factor' which emerges in test performances stems from a combination of (a) the (hidden) cultural content of tests; (b) cognitive self-efficacy beliefs; and (c) the self-confidence/freedom-from-anxiety associated with such beliefs. In other words, g is just an mystificational numerical surrogate for social class membership. This is what is being distilled when g is statistically 'extracted' from performances. Perhaps the best evidence for this is the 'Flynn effect,' (Fkynn 1999) which simply corresponds with the swelling of the middle classes and greater exposure to middle-class cultural tools. It is also supported by the fact that the Flynn effect is more prominent with non-verbal than with verbal test items - i.e. with the (covertly) more enculturated forms.

II. OTHER CORRELATES OF G

10. Once we see g as a variable of class-cultural characteristics, instead of a mystical biological power, the many other correlations which Jensen reports are demystified. We also see the diverse ways in which correlations can be interpreted. It is not the least bit surprising that g also correlates with head size, brain size, stature, general health, and so on, which, through nutritional, endocrinal, and other aspects of social privilege/exclusion, are also correlates of social class.

11. Jensen relies heavily on the (weak) associations between performances on Elementary Cognitive Tasks and IQ. But such performance will be much influenced by task-anxiety, as numerous studies on speeded tasks have shown (Hembre 1988). Since HTA produces more erratic reaction times, this would explain why the biggest correlate of g is not mean (or median) speed of response, but response variation. It also explains the lack of correlation between Nerve Conduction Velocity (however crudely measured) and RT.

12. Although the correlation between IQ scores and school performance is one deliberately built into tests, it produces large 'knock-on' effects, such as a built-in correlation with occupational status. Further correlations are built in by the fact that g also reflects cognitive self-efficacy beliefs and self-confidence/freedom-from-anxiety. This will explain the (weak) correlation between IQ and rate of learning (or job training), and also why such associations crease with task complexity.

13. When we turn to job performance the picture becomes very murky, not least because of serious methodological problems and contradictory findings. The 'job performance' measure used in nearly all studies is that of supervisor ratings. But supervisors can be rather subjective, use widely different criteria, with 'halo', age-related, and other effects. In the Schmidt et al (1986) study, supervisor ratings had very low correlations (around 0.3) both with subjects' job knowledge and actual work samples! The (weak) associations between statistically abstracted g and job performance may, again, stem from differences in self-concept, self-confidence, anxiety etc., rather than from an 'ability' variable. This interpretation is supported by reports that, when workers have been in the job for some time, performance is completely uncorrelated with IQ (Hulin et al 1990). Jensen dismisses that idea, citing a meta-analysis by Schmidt et al (1986). But that study was conducted on military personnel, in which, as the authors themselves suggest, job performance involves 'standard operating procedures' routinized by 'thorough, detailed training programs'. Besides, the Manual to the Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPT) Test (which Jensen sees as a test of 'pure' g ) warns us that 'the predictive validity of the RPM... to success within an occupation... is relatively low' (Raven et al 1993, 41).

14. Although a multitude of imponderables remain in correlational data of this kind, it seems reasonable to suggest that IQ predicts little that isn't already built into the test directly or indirectly by virtue of its being a surrogate for social class. It should also be obvious that people who, from a very early age, have reduced self-expectations and self-esteem, and fewer chances of self-fulfilment, are also, in the long run, going to exhibit more social pathology.

III. GENES AND G

15. It is very worrying to find a simplistic 'Mendelian' model of independent and additive genes still being urged upon us by Jensen. The 'genetic beanbag' view is clung to because it furnishes the only paradigm in which Jensen and coworkers can work 'genetically'. In particular, it furnishes the famous 'expected' correlations for relatives (e.g. monozygotic versus dizygotic twins) which form the basis of 'heritability' estimates, even though doubts about the model for complex characters have frequently been expressed (see e.g. Barton & Turelli 1989).

16. Indeed, recent molecular biology has shown better than ever how genes for evolved characters have become intricately tied in with adaptable regulatory systems across the genome as a whole. Under these regulations, variable alleles can be utilised for common ends, or common alleles utilised for divergent ends, as developmental needs dictate. Up to 90% of genes are regulatory in function, and not structural alleles at all (Jensen's claim that humans have 100,000 polymorphic genes seems ridiculous). Phenomena such as canalization, divergent epigenesis, exon-shuffling (which modifies gene-products to suit current developmental needs), and even developmental modification of gene-structures themselves, now make a nonsense of the idea of a one-to-one relationship between incremental accumulations of 'good' or 'bad' genes, and increments in a phenotype (see e.g. Rollo 1995). This makes the objective of most twin and adoption studies surrounding IQ a red herring, because it is attempting to 'prove' a genetic model that no one can seriously believe in.

17. Jensen argues that g has evolved as a 'fitness' character. Yet it is the logic of natural selection that fitness characters come to display little if any genetic variation. This has been repeatedly confirmed in artificial selection experiments, and in the wild. The self-defeating logic of Jensen's argument is obvious. Indeed, I find it amazing that, at the end of the twentieth century, complex, sophisticated edifices like this are being constructed on such patently erroneous foundations.

IV. RACE

18. Jensen argues, in effect, that cognitive 'races' exist because genes related to human cognitive systems will have been subjected to diversifying selection in the same way as some superficial physical or physiological characters. He suggests that northern migrants would have faced particularly difficult conditions. As a result, groups of African descent will have lower frequencies of genes for superior cognitive abilities, compared with those of Caucasian or Mongoloid ancestry.

19. This completely misses the point. Our African hominid ancestors themselves evolved as a social-cooperative species in order to deal with conditions of extreme environmental uncertainty, as the climate dried, forests thinned, and former forest dwellers were 'flung out' onto the open savannah or forest margins. It is crucial to point out that when even as few as two individuals cooperate they create a new, social environment that is vastly more complex than anything experienced in the physical world. It is that complexity on the social plane which rapidly impelled the tripling of brain size and furnished the unique cognitive capacity for dealing with complexity in general - in the physical world as well as the social.

20. The uniquely adaptable, highly selected, socio-cognitive system that resulted was a prerequisite, not a consequence, of human migration patterns. Although inhabiting every possible niche, humans have only a quarter of the genetic variation of highly niche-specific chimpanzees (Kaessmann et al 1999). The system operates on a completely different plane from blind genetic selection - one which can 'model' the world conceptually, and anticipate and change it. If our heads get cold we invent hats, rather than wait for natural selection to reshape our skulls and increase the size of our brains (which is what Jensen suggests in one particularly questionable y line of argument). As Owens & King (1999) point out, what minor genetic differences exist are 'quite literally superficial... the possibility that human history has been characterised by genetically homogeneous groups ("races") distinguished by major biological differences, is not consistent with genetic evidence'.

21. Owens & King also point out that 'Of course prejudice does not require a rational basis, let alone an evolutionary one, but the myth of major genetic differences across "races" is nonetheless worth dismissing with genetic evidence' (453). This culmination of Jensen's thesis, then, is as hollow as the conceptual foundations on which it based. It really is time this negative and fatalistic model of humanity was put behind us once and for all.

LINK

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Posts: 647 | From: Atlanta | Registered: Jan 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
Sundjata, You are looking at a small universe when you look at African immigrants. If you look at Africans who stayed behind you get a totally different picture. Until you people start looking at the problem the way kit is things will only get worse. The social stats for the black community are terrible. We have 12% of the population that makes up 65% of the prison inmates, teen pregnancy rates double the white population, drug abuse, gang problems etc. You know the facts but simply want to lean back on blaming the white population while your communities suffer. You could start by banning rap music and doing away with that entire culture.

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Posts: 455 | From: Tharsis Montes | Registered: Jan 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Four weeks after conception, the embryo's neurons are already forming at an astonishing rate: 250,000 each minute. By 8 months, a baby's brain holds 1,000 trillion synapses, the vital junctions that connect neurons. By age 10, those synapses drop down to about 500 trillion, under a "use it or lose it" principle that prunes away underutilized connections to make the most active ones stronger. The brain is thus sculpted by experience: researchers found that when mothers spolke to their infants often, their children learned almost 300 more words by age 2 than did children whose mothers rarely spoke to them.

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In my experience, babes just need to feel alot of love and appreciation. And attention, and interaction. For todds and older children aswell, this lyric is so true! I've seen many kids act that lyric out:

"I am, whatever you say I am, if I wasn't, then why would you say I am?"

Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Asians cheat more

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partly genetic, partly cultural

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Originally posted by rasol:
The basic problem with attempting to link brain size and intelligence is that the brain is not a muscle, it's a staggeringly complex organ whose underlying functionality is only poorly understood.

For example, Neanderthal man had a brain that was on average, larger than the modern human brain.

Yet his vocal cords were primative, suggesting that Neanderthal may not have had the same physical ability or mental dexterity to speak a true language.

This in turn leads anthropologist to suggest that Neanderthal's big brain size may have provided insulation against the extreme cold of ice age Europe, and may not have been indicative of any particular intellectual adeptness.

It is a fact that Neanderthal is the most fully cold adapted hominid in history, having evolved in Europe over the course of several hundred thousand years - yet Neanderthal was apparently completely replaced by tropically adapted Africans [homo sapiens is and african species, neanderthal is a eurasian species] ... who had evolved in tropical Africa during the same several hundred thousand year timespan.

African homo sapiens had migrated into Northern Eurasia only a few thousand years hence.

A further problem with a simplistic equasion of 'big brain' equal 'smart', is that many diseases which effect the brain cause 'hypertrophy' or increase in brain size.

In these cases abnormally large brains indicate such conditions as retardation or even cancer.

There is no proof that brain size variation within homo sapiens is and indicator of superior intellect.

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Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by SirInfamous:

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Originally posted by TheAmericanPatriot:
Sundjata, You are looking at a small universe when you look at African immigrants.

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LOL! Your stupidity has no end. Your attempt at creating some "racial" disposition to failure is sliced, diced, and disintegrated by these facts concerning African immigrants (since they are BLACK and culturally distinct from African-Americans), who perform at higher levels both here and abroad. America is a small universe and so is Britain, and to study any cultural group we work with models that take into account sample sizes and relative proportions. You are talking like a red neck who just doesn't understand what's going on, but is desperately trying to hold on to his white supremacist fantasy.

From the first article, a Jaimaican immigrant stated that:

"I'm too busy working two jobs to care about the white man's racism"

Which unfortunately affects African-Americans disproportionately as being bred into this culture.

See: Perceived Racism and Career Self-Efficacy in African American Adolescents

Man, you are so obtuse..

Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged |