History of the race and intelligence controversy
More recent work by James Flynn, William Dickens and Richard Nisbett has highlighted the narrowing gap between racial groups in IQ test performance, along with other corroborating evidence that environmental rather than genetic factors are the cause of these differences.
"[11] During the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste Belley, an elected member of the National Convention and the Council of Five Hundred who had been born in Senegal, became a leading proponent of the idea of racial intellectual equality.
"[11] However, in 1791, after corresponding with the free African-American polymath Benjamin Banneker, Jefferson wrote that he hoped to see such "instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any difference in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends.
On this basis, scholar and diplomat Alexander Hill Everett argued in his 1927 book America: "With regard to the intellectual capabilities of the African race, it may be observed that Africa was once the nursery of science and literature, and it was from thence that they were disseminated among the Greeks and Romans.
[46][47] In the 1920s, psychologists started questioning underlying assumptions of racial differences in intelligence; although not discounting them, the possibility was considered that they were on a smaller scale than previously supposed and also due to factors other than heredity.
He wrote that in the past, "the backward branches of the tree of mankind" had been lopped off as "the American Indians, the Black Australians, the Mauris and the negroes had been driven by bloodshed from their lands", unaware of "the biological rationality of that destiny".
In 1938, after newspapers had reported on the segregation of Jews into ghettos and concentration camps, he commented that the rise of Germany "should be welcomed by the religious man as reassuring evidence that in spite of modern wealth and ease, we shall not be allowed ... to adopt foolish social practices in fatal detachment from the stream of evolution".
Shockley subsequently claimed the most competent American population group were the descendants of original European settlers, because of the extreme selective pressures imposed by the harsh conditions of early colonialism.
He also pointed to Marxist origins in this shift, writing in a pamphlet, Desegregation: Fact and hokum, that: "It is certain that the Communists have aided in the acceptance and spread of egalitarianism although the extent and method of their help is difficult to assess.
Although earlier in his career Jensen had favored environmental rather than genetic factors as the explanation of race differences in intelligence, he had changed his mind during 1966-1967 when he was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
According to Jencks & Phillips (1998), in his article Jensen had argued "that educational programs for disadvantaged children initiated as the War on Poverty had failed, and the black-white race gap probably had a substantial genetic component."
The current system puts minority groups at a marked disadvantage, since it overemphasizes g-type thinking.Jensen had already suggested in the article that initiatives like the Head Start Program were ineffective, writing in the opening sentence, "Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.
The attacks on Wilson were orchestrated by the Sociobiology Study Group, part of the left wing organization Science for the People, formed of 35 scientists and students, including the Harvard biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin, who both became prominent critics of hereditarian research in race and intelligence.
Serious considerations of whether genetic as well as environmental factors are involved has been taboo in academic circles", adding that: "In the bizarre racist theories of the Nazis and the disastrous Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, we have seen clear examples of what happens when science is corrupted by subservience to political dogma.
In an interview with Nation Europa, he said that some human races differed from one another even more than some animal species, claiming that a measurement of "genetic distance" between blacks and whites showed that they had diverged over 46,000 years ago.
After a committee set up by the American Psychological Association drew up guidelines for assessing minority groups, failing to confirm the claims of racial bias, Jackson (1975) wrote the following as part of a response on behalf of the ABP:[132] Psychological testing historically has been a quasi-scientific tool in the perpetuation of racism on all levels of scientific objectivity, it [testing] has provided a cesspool of intrinsically and inferentially fallacious data which inflates the egos of whites by demeaning Black people and threatens to potentiate Black genocide.Other professional academic bodies reacted to the dispute differently.
[92] Subsequently, the association issued an official clarification, stating that, "The shabby misuse of IQ testing in the support of past American racist policies has created understandable anxiety over current research on the inheritance of human intelligence.
[140] Snyderman & Rothman (1987) announced the results of a survey conducted in 1984 on a sample of over a thousand psychologists, sociologists and educationalists in a multiple choice questionnaire, and expanded in 1988 into the book The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy.
In the same year, the evolutionary psychologist Kevin B. MacDonald went much further, reviving Garrett's claim of the "Boas cult" as a Jewish conspiracy, after which "research on racial differences ceased, and the profession completely excluded eugenicists like Madison Grant and Charles Davenport".
[146] In 1994 a group of 52 scientists, including Rushton, Lynn, Jensen and Eysenck, were cosignatories of an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal written by Linda Gottfredson entitled "Mainstream Science on Intelligence".
[154] In 1999 the same journal Intelligence reprinted as an invited editorial a long article by the attorney Harry F. Weyher Jr. defending the integrity of the Pioneer Fund, of which he was then president and of which several editors, including Gottfredson, Jensen, Lynn and Rushton, were grantees.
Gottfredson had previously defended the fund in 1989–1990, asserting that Mankind Quarterly was a "multicultural journal" dedicated to "diversity ... as an object of dispassionate study" and that Pearson did not approve of membership of the American Nazi Party.
[158]Rushton found himself at the centre of another controversy in 1999 when unsolicited copies of a special abridged version of his 1995 book Race, Evolution and Behavior, aimed at a general readership, were mass mailed to psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists in North American universities.
He explained these differences in terms of evolutionary history: those that had migrated to colder climates in the north to evolve into whites and Asians had adapted genetically to have more self-control, lower levels of sex hormones, greater intelligence, more complex social structures, and more stable families.
"[165] Richardson (2004) argued, citing the Flynn effect as the best evidence, that Lynn has the causal connection backwards and suggested that "the average IQ of a population is simply an index of the size of its middle class, both of which are results of industrial development".
[5] A subsequent review led by Richard Nisbett and co-authored by Flynn, published in 2012, reached a similar conclusion, stating that the weight of evidence presented in all prior research literature shows that group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin.
However, a 2017 systematic review notes that other researchers have dismissed Rindermann's findings on the basis that "the meaning of variables shifts when you aggregate to different levels; a conceptual, methodological point that is well-established in the field of multi-level modelling.
[183] Wicherts, Borsboom, and Dolan (2010) argued that studies reporting support for evolutionary theories of intelligence based on national IQ data suffer from multiple fatal methodological flaws.
For example, they state that such studies "... assume that the Flynn Effect is either nonexistent or invariant with respect to different regions of the world, that there have been no migrations and climatic changes over the course of evolution, and that there have been no trends over the last century in indicators of reproductive strategies (e.g., declines in fertility and infant mortality)."
[184] In 2016, Rindermann, Becker & Coyle (2016) attempted to replicate the findings of Snyderman & Rothman (1987) by surveying 71 self-identified psychology experts on the causes of international differences in cognitive test scores; only 20% of those invited participated.
