Fascinating stuff from Reason. Charles Murray and James Flynn argue about whether the IQ gap between black and non-Hispanic white Americans has closed over the last thirty years. Murray is a libertarian and Flynn a socialist.
Flynn further observed that blacks generally do worse on vocabulary tests and he suggested that a cultural difference might explain it. The children of professionals hear about 2500 different words in a day whereas the children of welfare mothers hear about 600 different words every day. Finally, Flynn believes that the black adolescent subculture that devalues education is largely responsible for widening the IQ gap. “It is more probable than not that the black/white IQ gap results from environmental factors,” he declared.
Murray argued that general intelligence, so-called "g," a general factor that governs performance on all cognitive tasks, is highly heritable. He noted that g has a biological background in the brain. He cited differences in glucose metabolism, reaction times, and the volumes of specific grey matter in prefrontal cortices.
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4 comments:
IQ by itself isn't the panacea of potential. Street smarts and common sense make up the remainder of the toolkit.
Belt - indeed.
http://seattleblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/larson_gifted.jpg
I would like to see research that looks at the IQ of non-blacks raised in exactly the same environment as blacks. I suspect their IQs would be similar.
Mark, Maybe. But there are more proportionately more Blacks raised in poor environments with welfare mothers.
What affects IQ is highly controversial. A questionnaire was sent to 1020 scholars knowledgeable about IQ. The answers were;
*The difference is entirely due to environmental variation:15 percent
*The difference is entirely due to genetic variation:1 percent
*The difference is a product of both genetic and environmental variation:45 percent
*The data are insufficient to support any reasonable opinion:24 percent
*No response:14 percent
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