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A few comments, Ray.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 10:35
AM
Subject: Re: Thoughts on IQ scores (was
Re: [Futurework] Talmud vs. Science (or Censorship thereof)
Why would you think convicts from Britain would
know anything about the people they destroy? Especially if they couldn't
speak the language. Would you trust an American soldier in the
second world war to describe the culture of the Japanese or even the
Germans? Perhaps you should see the movie about the
interrogation of Wilhelm Furtwangler after the war if you don't understand of
what I speak. The winners are often the ones who are the least
sophisticated. Then some academic comes along years later and uses
them or someone like Anne Coulter who has a political agenda revises history
about people like Senator McCarthy even when his abuses are well documented in
the society. My education gave me a healthy skepticism about such
things as did my family about "tests."
The British convicts didn't just destroy, they did it
in the most brutal of all possible ways. They are alleged to have done things
like dash kids' brains out, cut bodies up for dog meat, hunt people from
horesback, tie people to trees and use them for target practice, and set
steel traps and poison food out for them. Of course all of this happened
very far away, at the ends of the earth, so it would not have got much
attention at the time. Even if it had, so what, the Tasmanians were
regarded as animals, nothing more.
I've heard stupid folks in the midwest say that
Indian people had languages of just a few words and that they didn't speak
much English either. (a single Cherokee verb can
have thousands of variants and the language is verb
rich.) But the ignorant folks thought they were stupid
because they were in a lower class and therefore had fifteen or twenty
word total vocabularies. I would also point out that stupidity
amongst the wealthy intellectuals is just as hard to eradicate as amongst the
other classes. Note that it was Princeton graduates that had
the highest rate of prejudice in business against minorities of any
University in America a few years back and Jack Kennedies academics gave
us Vietnam. Reminds one of the roots of the word
"barbarism." It came from the super "intelligent"
Greeks.
I know a little about the richness of aboriginal
American languages. I also know about the tragedy. In northern
Canada, languages which have been spoken for thousands of years are dieing out
(have died out for all practical purposes) because nobody uses them any
more. The Athabaskan languages (Navajo, Apache, and the various northern
Dene languages) are still formally known as the Athabaskan-Eyak
languages. Try to find and speakers of an Eyak language
now.
But how can we make such a mistake in the 21st
century. That could constitute proof in itself of a lack of
progress in human thought across the millennia. But that is nonsense as
well. Children can learn prejudice in a generation and
ignorance is the beginning of every human individual. If they
write or some academic listens to them and sticks it in his paper then we have
prejudice and ignorance codified as knowledge. I prefer the Aztec
solution to such things. If a person represented themselves as
Tlamatanime (an educated person) and they weren't, it was a capital offense
for education was the future of the nation. They too were
brutal, intelligent and stupid about the emotional life of people with so much
blood on their hands but they were not good at tolerating nonsense that hurt
their own for short term gains. Physical tools are often refined
or done away with when language becomes extremely complex.
For example the Chinese who tied their hands and feet were not very good tool
users but they were erudite and rich and could make others do it for
them. This is the perfect example of Harry's "people doing what
they need with the least effort." But Keith's need for novelty
always kicks in and people develop their minds according to the
necessities. I believe that it is more an issue of
complexity.
Nothing is complex if you learn how to do
it. Complexity diminishes in the first generation after newborns
come if they are taught. What happened in Russia under the
Communists and with your ancestors can be explained just as well by the
studies of educational psychologists too numerous to mention, but you could
start with Piaget. That does not mean that I believe that
psycho-metric research is unimportant. My father's doctor's degree
was in psycho-metrics and I found that their tests were both
self-limiting and that they had an investment over time in proving that the
low end stayed low. I would call that prejudice. It
effected my Dad but emotionally he knew better since he finished his
degree in his fifties. Education can diminish experience and the
psycho-metric use of math is particularly pernicious that
way. I certainly have found that Charles Murray,
(Herrnstien's dead) has over time self-limited his thought and that the
remaining thought has constituted prejudice rather than science.
That type of prejudice is tolerable when talking about archeology but
when taken into the present it is a source of bigotry which I
reject. That is, to my way of thinking, a political use of
science.
I tend to put my ancestors in a potato patch, but
that probably wasn't really the case. They did what they had to do to
live in their times, and their times were not easy. Repression, wars and
famines had to be dealt with. The German side of the family left
southwestern Germany in the early part of the 19th Century, wound up in the
Ukraine in about 1860, then central Poland in 1890 and then
western Canada a couple of decades into the 20th Century. It seems
that they were forever trying to find a place in which they could
survive. The Polish side of the family may have spent a little more time
in one place (at least a thousand years, my mother would say), but had to
watch out for Cossacks, priests and bullets.
I've had some exposure to Piaget. My ex has a
Masters in Education, and Piaget figured very prominantly in her
courses.
Keith mentioned big
brains. According to that theory the most brilliant
people on earth are the Dinke and the Osage since they are giant
peoples. They were also developed as nomads not in schools
or cities. The Dinke are still herdsmen. The smallest
heads have been amongst peoples with poor diets in cities and ghettos like the
Chinese and the Jews. Some things are just too obvious to answer
but they still are written in books and people believe them. Even
intelligent Englishmen. But that doesn't make it
true. I think the answers to people's potentials are to be
found elsewhere. Tests, on the other hand, can be used to
judge how we are doing at educating the young or whether we are abusing
minorities in order to keep them in the service sector. But
as indicators of potential they are miserable. Their advocates sound
more like rich folks justifying their wealth than scientists exploring an area
of human knowledge. The possibility of abuse, or a self-fulfilling
prophecy, is just too great in a sector that benefits from proving people's
intellectual value. I find the same true of doctors who are
"for-profit". They benefit too much when I am sick to be
trusted to keep me healthy. Wall street
bankers claim their expertise qualifies as "human value" as
well. Is there no shame amongst these people or did all of their
mother's drink when they were pregnant?
I don't know if the size of the
head or the brain matters all that much. Some people have smaller brains
than other, but that doesn't mean their brains have fewer cells, or are less
complete. What, IMHO, we tend to do is to mistakenly assign every
human trait or characteristic a purpose or meaning. Gee -
those guys have bigger heads than those other guys! They must be
smarter! It ain't necessarily so. It may be nothing more than
meaningless genetic accident that head size varies among racial
groups.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 6:28
AM
Subject: Re: Thoughts on IQ scores (was
Re: [Futurework] Talmud vs. Science (or Censorship thereof)
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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