| | I've read the Bell Curve, it was required reading for one of my college courses, which the professor took an adversarial stance against the book.
The authors of the Bell Curve have established a variety of correlations with respect to IQ test scores, but the question remains if such a correlation proves a causal link for innate intelligence, which is what the authors of the Bell Curve fail to establish. They claim they can isolate environmental factors and the remaining variation in IQ test scores between races should account for innate intelligence. One way they tried to do this was to compare IQ test scores between African-Americans and native Africans, indicating that African-Americans scored higher than native Africans did. They theorized this was do to a "mixing" of traits with European genes, since most African-Americans have some white ancestry. They then compared South African blacks that also have some of this "mixing" in their ancestry and found the average IQ test score was similar to African-American test scores. Europeans scored on average 10 points higher than native Africans did. So they draw the conclusion that genetic inheritance is a necessary causal link to explain this discrepancy.
Convinced yet? I'm not. In not one instance has this successfully isolated environmental factors such as cultural attitudes or the state of education in a country. No one in their right mind would think Africa is on par culturally or educationally with America or even with South Africa. Yet Herrnstein and Murray think the only possible explanation is a variation in innate intelligence between races. The only way to isolate environmental factors as a variable in order to measure 'innate intelligence' is to take two individuals that experienced a history of identical environmental stimulation, teach them both a set of concepts, then test both of them to see how well each scores. The problem is no two people have identical sets of environmental stimulation, so it would be impossible to test this.
Environmental stimulation is an extremely important factor for performing well on an IQ test. Take for example the case of "Genie", an abused child referred to as a "feral child" that received no environmental stimulation until she reached the age of 12 due to severe child abuse she suffered. Which entailed being strapped to a "potty chair" and kept isolated in a room with no social contact for almost her entire life. After social services had learned of this, she was rescued and then rehabilitation was attempted. Genie could not talk nor could she walk upright. She had to be taught how to walk, and while attempts were made to teach her language, the best that she could do was memorize vocabulary, she could not grasp grammar at all. It's theorized that during early child hood the brain undergoes lateralization, which is a process where children are able to grasp concepts like language syntax and its critical for children to learn this during this time. If this is missed, an individual may never recover and learn grammar. Genie had no physical or mental deformities to speak of (another words she did not suffer from Down Syndrome or any other genetic defect) yet she would score lower on an IQ test than someone with Down Syndrome. It begs the question of how much intellectual stimulation a child gets during lateralization that can profoundly influence how quickly and efficiently that individual can pick up concepts later in life. A dull uninteresting environment will yield a dull and uninteresting individual.
Take also the IQ test itself. Is it a fair measure of intelligence? The question itself is a floating abstraction without a contextual basis for what one means by "intelligence". Intelligent in what way? Mathematics? Biology? Law? Philosophy? Mechanics? Music? Painting? The authors use "g" as a measure of "general intelligence" but this has no concretization to reality beyond just an IQ test score. Was Michaelangelo more intelligent than Mozart? Was Albert Einstein more intelligent than Ayn Rand? The questions become absurd once you realize each one of these individuals were geniuses in their own respective fields of study. You couldn't give them a test that could accurately measure one being more intelligent than the other since they both exhibit their intelligence in wildly different ways.
Some of the IQ tests that the authors use in their data include aptitude tests given to military personnel, which include trigonometry questions. I don't care how smart you are, if you've never learned trigonometry, you will never answer any trigonometry questions correctly on an aptitude test. There is no such thing as a "trigonometry gene".
Also consider that the brain is a physical organ, like your heart, lungs, kidney, liver, muscular system, etc. The most noticeable difference between humans are outward appearances such as skin color, hair color, height, weight, etc. Yet these seem to be the most variation you would ever find between any two humans. Everything else has an extremely limited genetic variation between humans. A stomach is not drastically different from another stomach, nor is a heart all that much different from another individual's heart. People look at height differences and presume that other traits must have just as significant a variation between humans, but there is no evidence for this. The brain as a physical organ shouldn't be that much different in that regard. In fact there is less genetic variation in humans than there is with any other animal. Elite athletes only slightly vary in ability. The difference between first and last place in many Olympic events such as swimming or running is down to a matter of a couple of seconds. The military is an excellent example of a random sampling of the human population, after only one month of physical training, the variation in the "military run" is less than 20%. The variation keeps getting smaller and smaller as more months of training go by. The fact is genetically were are extremely similar to each other, but with regard to ambition, desire, values and environmental influences, the differences become more apparent.
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