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Great stuff and a good debate, Keith, but I don't think
we can come together on this. As good Talmudic scholars or whatever, we
should now go our separate ways. As I'm sure you've gathered, my own view
is that manifest intelligence depends very much on what people have to do, how
many of them there are, and what they have to work with. I keep thinking
of the poor Tasmanians Jared Diamond describes in "Guns, Germs and Steel", cut
off completely from any cultural diffusion, down to some 4,000 people at the
time of European contact and having lost pretty well all of the skills they had
when they were cut off from the Australian mainland some 10,000 years ago.
I doubt very much that they would have done well on the Stanford
Binet. They were easily wiped out by Europeans, mostly convicts from
Britain.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 2:49
AM
Subject: Re: Thoughts on IQ scores (was
Re: [Futurework] Talmud vs. Science (or Censorship thereof)
Ed,
This is becoming as complicated as two
Talmudic scholars arguing against each other -- except that, in older days,
the exchanges would be months apart. With this new device, we have the chance
of solving the world's problems in double-quick time. I'll extract pretty
drastically, whatever the colours, in what follows:
At 16:51
27/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Keith,
what I'm referring to is the migration of Jews eastward from Western Europe
because of persecutions and expulsions (see: http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/christians&jews.htm
). These migrations would have begun in, probably, the 12th Century
and would have continued to about the 15th Century. Jews from Europe
would have moved as far east as eastern Poland and the Ukraine. The
Khazars ceased to exist as a distinct people in about the 11th or 12th
Centuries, and one has to wonder what happened to them. They may have
been aware of the movement of Jews into eastern Europe, and might have
tried, perhaps succeeded, in making contact and merging with them. I
have a friend of Jewish ancestry whose father came from Saratov in the
Ukraine. While he doesn't think he has Khazar connections, he doesn't
dismiss the possiblity. That's where I'll have to leave the matter for
the moment.
What I was saying (without expert knowledge
of all this) is that large scale migration didn't occur until the 14th century
when the King of Poland, impressed by their mercantile abilities, invited them
to Poland in order to raise the economic tone of the place. Of course, the
Khazar nation might also have been the result of a mass migration from the
Middle East also. Or it could have been a collection point from pockets of
Jews all over the Medierranean area.
But let me just diverge for a
point. There seems to be great similarities between Jews and Chinese. Firstly
in their respect for scholarship (set within a highly definied Confucian
culture) and secondly in their highly family-based society (itself set in a
highly self-conscious culture). The result, I suggest, is that both cultures
encouraged the migration of individual (or single-family) Chinese and Jews
when their homeland fell on hard times. They had this enterprise because they
were bright -- and they had the psychological strength of knowing that they
were still connected to a highly defined culturfe even though they may be far
distant. Small groups of Jews seem to have migrated all over Eurasia from
about 500BC and onwards. Chinese migration seems to have occurred a lot later
-- from about 1450 when China started descending into hard times due to the
edicts against direct trade from China. In both cases in modern times,
poc`kets of Chinese and Jews seem to be found in every city and sizeable town
in the world -- wherever there's a possibility of a business. I think this is
quite remarkable in the case of both of these groups.
(EW)
thinking about numbers and other abstract
concepts, others may have to think about getting out to the potato field or
cotton patch as fast as they can if they want to live another year. The
former would probably do very well on standardized IQ tests while the latter
would likely fail.
Keith: Yes, I sympathise with
your point but will the future of manking depends upon our skills in growing
potatoes or at other things? If it's other things, then IQ scores are
probably the best method yet of selecting people who perform them well.
I'm
afraid I find this a little too close to social Darwinism for
comfort.
For myself, I abjure these sorts of labels.
"Social Darwinism" as originally conceived is rightly to be dead and buried.
Bringing that label back into modern circumstances -- particularly in the
context of a much more detailed knowledge of genetics is not helpful.
My own family may be illustrative of what I'm trying to say. As
Central European peasants they were potato growers generation upon
generation all the way down. In Canada, in its first generation, the
family produced doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers and, alas, even
economists. We have many friends from the Caribbean here in Ottawa,
all bright and competent people. Just a few generations ago their
ancestors were plantation slaves.
I didn't remotely
suggest that those who have been potato growers through force of circumstances
did not retain sufficient ability to flourish in times of more opportunity.
However, I would be very doubtful whether your ancestors were nothing but
potato growers generation after generation. Two or three centuries of this and
there would almost certainly have been selective effects towards physical
strength and away from mental ability.
(EW) I
must say too, that Lynn and Vanhanan are, in my opinion, highly suspect
researchers. In praising the book, here's what one source says about
them:
- IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a
brilliantly-conceived, superbly-written, path-breaking book that does for
the global study of economic prosperity what The Bell
Curve did for the USA. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen examine IQ
scores and economic indicators in 185 countries. They document
that national differences in wealth are explained most importantly by the
intelligence levels of the populations. They calculate that mean national
IQ correlates powerfully—more than 0.7—with per capita Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). National IQs predict both long-term and short term economic
growth rates. Second in importance is whether the countries have market or
socialist economies. Only third is the widely-credited factor of natural
resources, like oil.
High praise
indeed, except that putting anything in the same box as The Bell Curve
immediately raises suspicions.
Once again, there's a
lot of labelling and prejudice going on here (not yours but mainly the temper
of the last 50 years in sociological/philosophical circles. I wouldn't damn
Lynn and Vanhanen on the basis of similarity to Murray's Bell Curve.
Adding to these, the
praise is extended by one Phillipe Rushton, a Canadian who achieved some
noteriety a few years ago by publishing material similar to that of Lynn and
Vanhalen. One of his findings, if I recall correctly, was an inverse
relationship between IQ and the racially determined length of the
penis.
His main finding, however, is that IQ has a very
high correlation with brain size when comparing, say, Africans, Chinese and
Caucasians. Nobody has been able to refute this. It is palpable even though
it's uncomfortable. The degree of antipathy towards people Rushton and Murray
is reminiscent of the hunting of witches in the medieval days. Fortunately,
they have broad backs (selected from other professionals who haven't had the
courage to face the onslaught!) and also they are quietly supported by the
professionals in evolutionary science.
Other
reviewers are not as kind to Lynn and Vanhalen. Thomas Volken
published the following abstract in the European Sociological
Review:
- “Recently Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen
have presented evidence that differences in national IQ account for the
substantial variation in national per capita income and growth. This
article challenges these findings and claims that, on the one hand, they
simply reflect inappropriate use and interpretations of statistical
instruments. On the other hand, it is argued that the models presented by
Lynn/Vanhanen are under-complex and inadequately specified. More precisely
the authors confuse IQ with human capital. The paper concludes that once
control variables are introduced and the models are adequately specified,
neither an impact of IQ on income nor on growth can be
substantiated.”
I simply
don't accept the Lynn and Vanhalen thesis. Applying a single
standardized test to a large, economically and culturally diverse, variety
of peoples does not make much sense to me.
I have
reservations about the Lynn and Vanhalen thesis, too. Firstly, I think that
most of the figures for most of the smaller countries are based on much too
low numbers tested and there's too much interpolation (of those countries for
which there are no tests). But for the larger groups in which there's been a
great deal of testing (e.g. Caucasians, American-Jews, Chinese, etc) I think
the IQ scores can be relied upon as meaning something (that is, a strong
correlation with ability in life generally). Secondly (as in my long screed of
the other day), I think there's a much greater cultural contribution to IQ
development in the individual (in the post-puberty to 25 year age) and,
correspondingly, a much large contribution of culture in the development of
economies.
I therefore agree with your first sentence below.
Ever so many factors enter into human productivity and development,
especially, as the foregoing points out, the development of human
capital. At the most basic level, however, if people are treated like
dogs and forced to live like dogs, they will behave like dogs. If they
are treated like human beings, they will behave fully
human.
I agree in spirit with your latter two
sentences, but let's not confuse these emotional sympathies with what I feel
are very real differences in abilities (physically and mentally) between large
population blocs which have lived in entirely different environments for
thousands of years.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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