← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Conservative
Thread ID: 7903 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2003-07-06
2003-07-06 06:54 | User Profile
The following was posted by Professor J. Philippe Rushton at [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/[/url] Please sign up for this excellent mailing list that deals with the genetics behind human intelligence, behavior, and personality. Also, see Rushton's university campus website at [url=http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html]http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html[/url] Anyway, the following are his comments:
C. Loring Brace has replied that the East Asian>White>African American>African differences in mean IQ scores found worldwide in hundreds of studies are all due somehow or other to "bigotry" and he recommends Prof. Leiberman's critique of my work on brain size that appeared in the 2001 issue of Current Anthropology. Here is the url for that article. My reply to it is on pages 85-86 of the same article (along with other commentaries). [url=http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html]http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html[/url]
As for the African IQ of 70 depending on giving instructions by signs, what nonsense! Studies of every age and region confirm the study using all kinds of different tests. In their book, IQ AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) reviewed over two-dozen studies from West, Central, East, and Southern Africa and found they yield an average IQ of around 70. For example, in Nigeria, Fahrmeier (1975) collected data on 375 6- to 13-year-olds in a study of the effects of schooling on cognitive development. The children's mean score on the Colored Progressive Matrices was 12 out of 36, giving them an IQ equivalent of less than 70. In Ghana, Glewwe and Jacoby (1992) reported on a World Bank study that tested a representative sample of 1,736 11- to 20-year-olds from the entire country. All had completed primary school; half were attending "middle-school." Their mean score on the Colored Progressive Matrices was 19 out of 36, which gives an IQ equivalent of less than 70. In Zimbabwe, Zindi (1994) gave the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) and the Standard Progressive Matrices to 204 African 12- to 14-year-olds, and reported mean IQ scores of 67 on the WISC-R and 72 on the Matrices. In South Africa, Owen (1992) found that 1,093 African high school students solved 28 out of 60 problems on the Standard Progressive Matrices, which is around the tenth percentile, or an IQ equivalent of about 80.
Studies published since Lynn and Vanhanen's (2002) review continue to find low scores. In Kenya, Sternberg et al. (2001) administered the Colored Progressive Matrices to 85 12- to 15-year-olds who scored 23.5 out of 36, an IQ equivalent of about 70. Again in South Africa, Skuy, Schutte, Fridjhon and O'Carroll (2001) found mean scores one to two standard deviations below U.S. norms on a wide variety of tests individually administered to 154 African high school students under optimized conditions. These tests included the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, the Stroop Color Word Test, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Bender Gestalt Visual Motor Integration Test, the Rey Osterreith Complex Figure Test, the Trail Making Test, the Spatial Memory Task, and various Drawing Tasks. On the WISC-R, the African students averaged -1.81 standard deviations below American norms (-1.58 SDs with the vocabulary sub-test excluded).
University students in South Africa also show low mean test scores. Sixty-three undergraduates at the all-Black Universities of Fort Hare, Zululand, the North, and the Medical University of South Africa were given the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) and found to have a full scale IQ of 77, 1.5 SDs below U.S. norms (Avenant, 1988; cited by Nell, 2000, pp. 26-28). A study at the University of Venda in South Africa's Northern Province by Grieve and Viljoen (2000) found 30 students in 4th-year law and commerce averaged a score of 37 out of 60 on the Standard Progressive Matrices, equivalent to an IQ equivalent of 78 on U.S. norms. A study at South Africa's University of the North by Zaaiman, van der Flier, and Thijs (2001) found the highest scoring African sample to that date -- 147 first-year mathematics and science students who scored 52 out of 60 on the Standard Progressive Matrices, equivalent to an IQ of 100. Their relatively high mean score may have been because they were mathematics and science students, and also because they had been specially selected for admission to the university from a pool of 700 on the basis of a mathematics and science selection test.
At the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Rushton, Skuy, and colleagues gave Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices in three separate studies under optimal testing conditions. Rushton and Skuy (2000) found 173 first-year psychology students averaged an IQ equivalent of 84. Skuy, Gewer, Osrin, Khunou, Fridjhon, and Rushton (2002) tested another 70 psychology students who averaged an IQ equivalent of 83. After receiving training on how to solve Matrices-type items, their mean scores rose to an IQ equivalent of 96. Rushton, Skuy and Fridjhon (in press) gave 198 African first-year engineering students the Standard Raven's and found they averaged an IQ of 97. (In contrast, the White university students in these three studies had IQs from 105 to 111; East Indian students had intermediate IQs, from 102 to 106.) See for example: [url=http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html]http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushton.html[/url]
Sincerely, J. P. Rushton
2003-07-06 08:06 | User Profile
one more stupid post on IQ and I will go on a killing spree
:gun:
2003-07-08 05:47 | User Profile
For the Rushton fans, here are some more of his posts at the Evolutionary Psychology mailing list:
[url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/25277]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/25277[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/25276]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/25276[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/25236]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/25236[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/25204]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/25204[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/25203]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/25203[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/25050]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/25050[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/24920]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/24920[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/24915]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/24915[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/23080]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/23080[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/23045]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/23045[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/23006]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/23006[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/21854]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/21854[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/21102]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/21102[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/20978]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/20978[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/20975]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/20975[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/20975]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/20975[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/20929]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/20929[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/19172]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...y/message/19172[/url] [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/messagesearch/20647?query=rushton]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary...7?query=rushton[/url]
And then, here is an interesting post by a White Nationalist on the same mailing list; he is rebutting the comments of a racial eganitarian:
On Sat, 24 May 2003, Quinlan, Robert J. wrote:
If race is socially salient, and there is racial prejudice, then <prejudice poses care independent risks that influence life-history. <Institutionalized racism also presents care independent risks and research <suggests that inequality (not just income) predicts life-history (e.g. <Wilson & Daly, 1997). Similar environmental arguments can be made for race <world-wide: At the very least, genes and environments are confounded in <race. A value-neutral approach would attempt to partial out the various <effects rather than prove genetic race differences.
And how does racism explain the large disparity in IQ and behavior between Northeast Asians and blacks, disparity that predates the civil rights legislation of the 1960's? And why did Jews not underperform educationally and economically during Europe's long centuries of anti-Semitism if racism is so potent that even subtle expressions of it can have such far-reaching effects?
As long as people focus exclusively on "whites and blacks" it may be possible to sustain the 1960's social dogma that all racial differeces of intellect and behavior (and athleticism, body build, and skin color?) are the product of present, past, or unconscious ("institutional") racism, but when other racial and subracial groups are also compared, this becomes an extremely tenuous position to maintain. Also, how are we going to explain racial differences in non-human animal and plant species by "racism?" At some point it begins to seem ludicrous, unless we are going to say that man is somehow an exception to the usual workings of natural selection. Unless there is a compelling explanation for why man would be exempted from usual effects of evolutionary processes, we are close to transitioning from physical to metaphysical explanations for racial differences.
Ralph Holloway wrote:
Why is it impossible to get any autopsy data from Africa? [and other comparative racial data] Not everybody who would like to study these interactions have ulterior motivations, and it just might be some of us would simply like to know. Isn't that good enough?
Have you considered the possibility that some people don't want to know? The pattern we find in the existing data is consistent enough that many people may be afraid to collect any more data on racial differences. If most bio-egalitarians really believed their arguments, they would be the foremost advocates of collecting comparative racial data, since they would expect to find enough similarities that could not be significantly affected by racism to support the argument for equal frequencies of those genes which affect intelligence and behavior. For example, the evidence we have indicates that Northeast Asians have brain sizes at least equal to, and probably a little larger than, Europeans. As far as I know, this is true even for East Asians on relatively low protein diets. Yet African Americans, with richer diets than most Chinese in mainland China, are reported to have smaller brains. Since differential brain size is hard to explain by racism (especially if the brains of Chinese did not shrink when they moved to America), the only alternative was to dispute the accuracy of the measurements. When more accurate ways of measuring brain size became available, disputing the measurements was no longer a serious tactic, so now their is a strong reluctance to collect brain size data, or, it often seems, any comparative racial data. I think there is an intense desire to protect the viability of the bioegalitarian thesis, but an equally intense fear that this can be done only by avoiding further data collection. I think the not so subtle innuendo that those who want to evalute human racial differences by the same criteria as are commonly used for racial differences in other species are closet racists or have a hidden political agenda that prevents them from exercising objectivity on this question is a classic example of projection. I think the strong emotions, sometimes an almost palpable air of desperation, that surround the defense of racial genetic equality in western societies is explained by the fact that contemporary western societies are designed around bioegalitarian assumptions, and researchers into the question of genetically based racial differences are an implicit threat to the social and political stability of our societies. That means researchers like Rushton, Miller, Murray, Herrnstein, Jensen, et al. are de facto subversives, whether they intend to be or not. Of course, most genetic egalitarians are not consciously seeking to protect their civilization against potential scientific threats--a few are, but not most--but there is widespread awareness, which I think is not misplaced, that such research could pose a socio-political threat, and the awareness of this threat automatically triggers psychological defense mechanisms. I think the more closely one identifies with the culture of the western establishment and its core values, the stronger the psycho-emotional response to the perceived threat. I'm pretty sure this mechanism is the same one that accounts for fanatical social solidarity among nations at war, or religions or secular ideologies in conflict with their rivals. Unconsciously, the defense of genetic egalitarianism against "subversive" researchers is a defense of one's way of life; indeed, at some level, a defense of "the tribe."
This finally gets me to a question I have wondered about for some time. One thing that, at least on the surface, appears to contradict the fundamental tenets of evolutionary biology is the nonchalant attitude of the average westerner when, on rare occasions, some news story touches on the fact that westerners are in the process of being genetically displaced by immigrants from distant lands. Westerners seem to be very aware of this, but most of them do not seem to be much bothered by it. And for everyone who does seem to be bothered, there seems to be another who is positively happy about it! On the other hand, if the suggestion is made that westerners might fail to pass on their culture, and especially their language and their political values--democracy, women's rights, religious toleration, etc.--almost everyone seems to become very agitated. These contrasting responses to the respective threats of genetic and cultural dispossession strike me as diametrically opposite to what evolutionary psychology should predict. I believe this "pattern reversal" poses a fundamental challenge to EP's foundational assumptions. Can this anomaly be reconciled to evolutionary psychology? Does anyone care to take a crack at it?
~Alypius Skinner