Sept. 14, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:40
3074 The Bell Curve: IQ, Race and Gender | Charles Murray and Stefan Molyneux
In continuing our discussion on Human Intelligence and the predictive powers of IQ, Charles Murray joins the broadcast to discuss the latest science regarding ethnic and gender differences in intelligence. Charles Murray is a political scientist, author, and libertarian. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of "Losing Ground," which has been credited as the intellectual foundation for the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, "The Bell Curve," coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein, sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America's class structure.The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Lifehttp://www.amazon.com/dp/0684824299/?tag=freedradio-20For More of Charles Murray’s books and writing, go to: http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Murray/e/B000AP5UJQ/?tag=freedradio-20Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Devan Moller from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So here we have an interview with Dr.
Charles Murray, who is a world-famous political theoretician and essayist and author who has been active in stimulating and tickling the collective mind of the world from the 1980s onwards.
He wrote a book which we've actually talked about In this show called Losing Ground, which was a critique of existing welfare state policies, he has written, of course, The Bell Curve, which we'll be discussing a little bit more in this show.
And The Bell Curve basically is an argument that he did with Richard Herrnstein, who tragically died a few days before the book came out, which is that intelligence is very important in life.
intelligence is a single prime determinant on how your life is going to turn out and that there are differences in intelligence between various ethnicities, between Scottish people and Turkish people, between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.
And he and Richard Hernstein were agnostic as to whether these differences in intelligence were environmental or genetic.
Now, we did have on this show Dr. James James Flynn, who made the case for the environmental causes for difference in genetics.
And to balance out the conversation, we have invited Dr.
Marion to talk about some of the evidence for genetic bases for differences in intelligence in various groups around the world.
So without further ado, I am very, very pleased to have this conversation on this channel.
You might want to check out, of course, the debate that he had with Dr. Flynn, which you can find on YouTube.
And without further ado, Dr. Charles Murray.
Dr. Murray, we had James Flynn on the show recently and had a good jawbone fest regarding race and IQ.
And of course, as you know from your debates with him, he comes, I guess you could say, a little bit more leaning on the environmental side.
and we wanted to have you on.
Very much so.
I'm trying to be as diplomatic, I suppose, as possible.
But I was wondering if you could make the case for where you see the genetics of race differences, IQ differences, and where that stands.
Because, of course, in the 20-plus years since the bell curve, there has been huge movements in the genetics field.
Yeah, there has been.
And it's a work in progress.
I will tell you the kinds of things I have been watching to try to understand what the direction of the findings are, because I want to emphasize none of what I'm about to say is set in concrete.
First, there is the gradual understanding of the degree to which People's genes are differentiated by ethnicity.
I use the word ethnicity instead of race because I'm not talking about just blacks versus whites.
I'm talking about Scots versus English in the southeast of England.
I'm talking about the difference between Flemish and Italians.
I don't know if you're familiar with the terminology, and I will try not to get too technical about it, but if you take basically a set of markers, genetic markers, which is to say these are genes that have different alleles, alleles so the gene can take different forms, and you don't know what these genes do, okay?
Well, there's no understanding of what their function is in the human body.
But suppose you just select 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 of these genetic markers, and you tell a statistical program to sort these into the most parsimonious set of clusters.
You can tell if two clusters, three clusters, four clusters, five clusters, whatever.
What it will sort them into are the groups that correspond to self-identified race.
So that if you give it five clusters, it will correspond to the continents.
Well, this does not prove that these genetic differences are important by themselves.
What it does say is this, that contrary to what Richard Lewontin famously argued, the natural way to sort human beings does seem to be by their ethnicity.
My assumption is that if you have that degree of differentiation by ethnicity, when you look at the genes, you're going to turn out to have a lot of important substantive differences as well.
Well, and of course the argument has been made that if you were a doctor who practiced ethnic blindness when it came to treating his or her patients, you would probably get sued for malpractice because you need to take into account genetic differences among ethnicities in order to be an effective physician.
So where it shows up in practical terms seems to be something that people, when it comes to larger sociological questions, they seem to be averse to something that is essential in the medical field.
Exactly.
It's driving doctors crazy.
Because they are at risk also of being accused of being racist if they try to write about the importance of different treatments for different ethnicities.
There's another set of data that I've been following that's very interesting which is we don't have a lot of genes for which we know the function yet with regard to mental abilities but we do have some.
The ones that are either associated with educational attainment or with other Aspects of brain function and so forth and so on.
Now, we're talking about at this point still a handful, maybe a dozen or so the last time I looked.
You can then ask the question, well, does the occurrence of the allele associated with the outcome, does that differ by race?
And the answer is out of the dozen or so that have been identified, yeah.
Just about all of them have rather substantial differences across the races.
Again, let me emphasize to the listeners, this is a work in progress, but I'm looking at it this way.
Suppose you're told that there's a jar that has 100,000 marbles in it, colored purple and white, and you reach into the jar and the first dozen you pull out Nine of them are purple.
You still don't know what proportion of the entire jar is purple, but you better bet that it's a pretty big number.
As I look at the ongoing genetic findings, they're all pointing in the directions that the human race is divided genetically into all sorts of interesting combinations.
Well, and the argument that is often made by people on the left that evolution has sort of stopped for the last 50,000 years or so seems to me virtually incomprehensible.
I mean, the brain, of course, is our most expensive organ.
It's 3% of our body.
Mass takes 20% of our energy.
And the idea that the brain would not be subject to forces of evolution in widely differing climates and environments is, I mean, you'd have to reject the entire theory of evolution if you thought that all human ethnic brains were the same.
I just, I don't quite understand how people can sustain that from a remotely scientific standpoint.
Well, there's a very good book that was written, published last year by Nicholas Wade, who was for a couple of decades one of the leading science writers at the New York Times.
You know, that well-known right-wing rag.
The book is called A Troublesome Inheritance.
It is an outstanding non-technical introduction to the ongoing findings of genetics and race.
He specifically avoids trying to focus on IQ. He's talking about a much broader thing.
But what we do know, and at this point, I hate to use the phrase subtle science because it's so misused.
But we do know not only that evolution continued after human beings left Africa, it probably accelerated, that there have been very important evolutionary changes since then.
We also know for sure, because geneticists have figured out these very clever ways of finding out which genes are under selective pressure, we know for sure That the genes that have been under selective pressure differ drastically by self-identified race.
So that we not only know that evolution has been continuing, we also know that the genes that are under different kinds of pressures are different by race, and there is no reason whatsoever to suggest that the brain is any different from every other aspect of human physiology in being subjected to evolution.
Now, Dr.
Flynn was talking about the degree to which some of the black-white differences, I think in the U.S. is the major data set that's studied.
Some of the black-white differences narrowed in the 70s, the early 80s, and others, and if you can go a little bit into G, that would be helpful for my audience, have not closed off.
I'm wondering if you could break that apart a little bit.
Well, actually, I wrote a technical article published in the journal Intelligence, Looking at the black-white difference and its changes over time.
And my conclusion, which is actually consistent with other data that Flynn and Dickens have published, is that if you look at birth cohorts, there was a substantial narrowing of the black-white difference in IQ, including G, the general mental factor, up until the 1960s.
Putting down the precise magnitude of the narrowing is problematic, but it was substantial.
Let's say at least half the standard deviation.
Then what happened is that for children born since the early 1970s, there has been no narrowing of the black-white difference.
We have pretty good data on that.
Because we have a variety of longitudinal surveys that have done lots of testing with the kids.
That to me suggests...
It suggests to me that there was an important environmental component to the black-white difference that a great deal of that environmental component has been narrowed and that we may be looking...
At a residual difference, which is much more intractable to incremental improvements in the environment than in the past, I will once again say I'm making all these statements as provisional.
That's the way the pattern looks to me.
Well, and of course, it's also important to remember that you can't change any individual by group characteristics.
But when you take a wide enough sample, it is important to remember if there are different group characteristics to take that into account by looking at general social outcomes.
And that, I think, is difficult because people think, okay, well, if I'm looking at an abstract, at an aggregate, well, there's these judgments that would be based upon general trends.
Then they don't understand that, of course, individuals you can't possibly judge.
I think, as you pointed out, you judge people with a few minutes' conversation rather than looking at some statistical abstract.
Exactly.
This is the thing that people seem to find it impossible to hold in their heads, that there can be a group difference that has implications on a broad social scale and that is virtually no help to you at all in deciding whether the person across the table from you is one way or another and that's true not only of IQ it's true of any human characteristic.
I think one of the challenges that people have with race or IQ, or as you say, ethnic differences, is that naturally when we see a problem in society, we want to rush in and solve it.
And of course, because we've had the giant fiscal hammer of the state for, I don't know, a hundred odd years, the sort of pass laws and get social programs and affirmative action and so on is what people want to do.
And the idea that there could be some sort of genetic component It means that the state isn't going to help.
And I think when we look at Head Start and the other programs that have failed, we can see sort of why that may have been the case.
I think it's very hard for people to look at a problem that everybody recognizes as tragic and dysfunctional and say, gosh, we don't really have a solution.
That's very tough for a lot of people who are very activist and proactive in these areas.
Well, there's another development that's occurred in psychology and psychometrics over the last two decades that speaks to this.
It's called the distinction between the shared and the non-shared environment.
There have been lots of studies, especially the twin studies, not twins raised apart, but comparing identical twins versus paternal twins, which gives you a very powerful method of trying to segregate the genetic from the environmental sources of differences.
Anyway, there have been thousands of these studies and there was a recent meta-analysis It was published that basically analyzed all the studies that have been done in the last half century.
It confirmed something that has been building up in the technical literature for a long time, that most of the environmental effect is not what we expect it to be.
Let's talk about IQ specifically.
Why is the environment conducive to IQ? Well, it's books in the houses, it's parents talking to their toddlers, It's being sent to good schools.
It's living in affluent neighborhoods with lots of resources, etc., etc.
All of these things fall into what's known as the shared environment.
The kids, two siblings, have similar kinds of experiences.
Here's the kicker.
The shared environment is actually relatively unimportant.
The non-shared environment, which may consist of differences that happen in the womb, It could be differences in accidents or injuries that distinguish between siblings.
It could be peer groups.
The non-shared environment is much more influential on most intellectual and personality characteristics than the shared environment.
Well, there's no way you can systematically affect the non-shared environment.
The things we know how to affect or we think we know how to affect are make the schools better, get parents to talk to their kids more, that sort of thing.
That plays a very small role.
People have a hard time accepting that.
There was a very good book called The Nurture Assumption that came out about 10 years that laid out a lot of that data, but the overall conclusion seems clear.
So when you talk about the things we know how to manipulate, that might affect not just something like IQ, but something like aggressive behavior, criminal behavior, drug-taking propensity, all that kind of thing.
We've got a very small Environmental body of things that we have any hope of affecting.
Oh, I don't know about your experience, but when I first started learning about this assumption that parenting has little to do with overall personality and particular intelligence outcomes, it was kind of like a boomerang because, you know, for like 30 years I've been saying to people, oh, you have to listen to the data, put aside your personal feelings, accept the data.
And then, you know, finally I came across something where I was like, that can't be right.
That's got to be wrong.
That can't be correct.
I'm a stay-at-home dad.
I've got it.
And I actually now really understand what people, how they feel when they hit data that just goes very much against...
I've got to tell you, I went through exactly the same process.
I mean, I'm the father of four children.
And I like to think I made a big difference in their lives in ways besides passing on my genes.
I'm like you.
The data just do not seem to give much wiggle room.
I have accepted this reluctantly over the years.
I'll tell you what.
In the meta-analysis I just mentioned, there are a few ways in which the shared environment does make a big difference.
For example, the religiosity of children.
The shared environment plays a big difference.
In terms of parent-child interactions, the shared environment makes a lot of difference.
But we parents are not entirely bereft of influence when it comes to things like cognitive functioning and whether our children are generous and trustworthy or untrustworthy and sly.
We don't seem to have much effect at all.
And by the way, I'll tell you one way to come to grips with that if you are a parent is think about the differences between your children, among your children and ask yourself, is there anything that you ever thought you could do To make your children more like each other?
And the answer is no.
The answer is you look at your kids, you look at the differences in their characteristics, and it was quite obvious from the get-go that these were in those kids in ways that you were not going to do much about.
It is one of these shocking tragedies of life.
And the way I sort of view it is that you can do a lot to break children, but you can't do a lot to make them.
Like, if you don't give them enough food, they'll grow up stunted.
But if you give them more food, they just get wider, not taller.
That's a very good point.
And also, if you want to talk about cognitive and psychological things, you lock a small child in a closet for days on end.
Yeah.
You can have an environmental effect on that child that is huge.
We know how to destroy children through the environment.
We don't know how to enhance it.
The way I think about it is this, that parenting only has to be pretty good.
Once it gets to be so you aren't abusing the child, you aren't actively making the child miserable and psychologically screwed up, once you're just an okay parent, then You've done 90% of what you can do environmentally to help your kids.
Now, I know we're kind of tight for time, and given that we want to leave no controversial stone unturned, I've found that your arguments regarding female achievement in terms of the sciences in particular to be quite fascinating because, of course, there is a lot of complaints among female advocacy groups about the dearth of women in the sort of top tiers of the sciences.
You have some, I think, very interesting arguments based both upon biology of the brain and biology of the womb regarding why there may be a few sort of baby-holding shadows against the walls of higher academia.
I wonder if you could run through those for the audience.
Well, you start out with a few really obvious things.
One really obvious thing is that it has been widely documented that peak productivity For people in the arts and sciences occurs somewhere in the range of late 30s and through the 40s.
It also occurs after a very intensive apprenticeship.
Except in a few fields like math, you do not have prodigies that do their great life's work in their 20s.
It usually happens after mastering a craft that takes Enormous time and effort.
And there's another thing that's very widely documented.
Great accomplishment is not done with your left hand.
The one common factor about people with great achievement is they work like crazy, relentlessly, obsessively.
Alright?
Guess what?
If a woman wants to have a child, as women naturally want to do, The years in which that apprenticeship occurs are going to have something else going on in it, which is the raising of a child.
And now we start to get into psychological differences that it seems to me idiotic to deny.
Women are more nurturing of children than guys are, on average.
I put it this way, right?
My wife has put it this way.
I'm reporting what she says.
She says, it's possible for you to go out to your office when the child has a cold and not think about that all day.
I mean, the child has a cold.
It's not life-threatening.
I'm not going to worry about that.
It is not possible, she says, for me to not think about that during the course of the day and focus obsessively on work.
I think that almost any woman with children and for that, men with children We'll observe that difference and say that's going to have an effect.
There are all sorts of other ways when you get back to evolution in which you have the same problem that you have with racial differences.
It is one thing to say that the races developed under different environmental conditions, particularly after humans left Africa and therefore probably had differences in their profiles.
Think about the differences shaping men and women.
Women bear children.
They are vulnerable, very vulnerable during the time they are nurturing those.
What kind of women are most likely to pass on their genes?
Women who take really good care of their babies and also women who get men to commit to the support of those babies.
And what kind of men are going to pass on their genes?
Well, I'm not going to spin it out in more detail except to say the Evolutionary pressures on males and females are so radically different because of the fact that women are left holding the baby that of course there are profound psychological differences.
Of course there are major differences in their cognitive repertoires.
The idea that these would not exist is, to me, nonsensical.
Well, and it seems one of the effects seems to have been, of course, less testosterone for women, and those who want high achievement need to be driven by the mad rage of male ambition to some degree.
And also the bell curve for women tends to be taller.
Men are sort of scattershot across the intellectual capacity dimensions, whereas women, again, this doesn't mean you can judge any individual, but they tend to be a little bit more centered, which means fewer homeless and fewer geniuses.
Yeah.
Well, this is a characteristic that seems to separate The sexes over all sorts of dimensions, which is the variance in women is smaller than the variance in men.
We guys, we have more at the extremes of both good and bad, and there are evolutionary explanations for that, but these have large implications at the tails of the normal distributions.
So the means can be the same, but even a small difference in variance It means if you're talking about the extremes of IQ, for example, that you will get large disproportions at the tails of the distribution.
And by the way, you'll get large disproportions at the lower tail of the IQ distribution as well.
And finally, let's mention one difference between men and women, which is testosterone.
Testosterone, and there's lots of scientific work that's been done on this, really has a lot of effects.
Which science is now documented and that males and females have known about for millennia.
Those testosterone differences account probably for a substantial amount of all the wars that have occurred, all of the crime that occurs in which men predominate overwhelmingly, and it probably also accounts for some of this obsessive drive that is associated with great achievement.
Yeah, I think evolutionarily we could say that there's significant advantage to taking risks when you're a hunter-gatherer, but not if you're a parent.
Now, you've done a lot of work recently just on helping younger people to figure out their 20s and figure out what they should do to be sort of well-rounded human beings, particularly if they have good intellectual capacities.
And I appreciate that because, of course, a lot of people growing up without dads, they don't have those father-son chats that they used to have.
But what's up next for you?
What are you going to be working on now and into the future?
What can we look forward to?
Well, I'm 72 years old and I'm asking myself if there's anything that I really want to do that badly to make a book out of it.
A couple of things are on the horizon right now.
They're both gleams in my eyes more than anything else.
One of them is I want to track for laypeople the progress in understanding the genome that is going on.
The progress is so rapid that even though we have a very good book in the form of A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade that I mentioned earlier, there will have to be major revisions to that understanding over the next few years.
One of the things I'm going to be doing is following that and asking myself whether I'm the right person to write a book about it.
Another thing that has caught my interest recently occurs because of the fact that my Harvard class of 1965 just had its 50th reunion.
It was a very good thing.
Well, Harvard, like other universities, as has its alumni, submit reports every five years of what they've been doing and that they're voluntary, but a lot of people do it, and especially at the 25th and 50th anniversaries, they usually supply very complete reports.
All at once it occurred to me, That when you have Harvard classes, you basically have this highly selected class of people that are supposed to be very able, but these selection criteria have been changing over the decades.
A variety of other things have been changing, and if I got a whole bunch of these other classes information, I could do a reconstruction of life histories and fertility, of residential patterns, and a whole bunch of things which would, I think, clarify some issues about class stratification in the United States.
So I'm also looking into that.
But I know this for sure.
The only projects I take on at this point are going to be ones that really fascinate me.
At this point, I'm not going to do anything because I think I ought to do it.
I'm just going to do it because I really want to do it.
Right.
Well, I know we're out of time and I just really, really wanted to thank you for taking the time.
The differences in genetics is something that kind of rises and falls in consciousness.
You know, it erupts when new information comes along, and then a lot of frightened and upset and angry people sort of beat it back down.
I think we're kind of in a lull, but I think there's going to be a new storm coming, as you say, as the Genome Project continues to make these...
Let me just run over time a little bit with making a couple of summary comments about this, because I think that the listeners need to realize...
We are talking about a coming revolution in the social sciences that is going to be profound.
E.O. Wilson wrote a wonderful book called Consilience in the late 1990s where he foresaw the conjoining of the social sciences and biology over the course of the 21st century.
Everything he wrote in that book has been vindicated in the years since.
The process is going on and by the end of the 21st century a great deal of social science is going to be permeated by our understanding of the role of genes in explaining all sorts of things that we have tried to explain without appealing to genes.
Here's the problem.
The reigning orthodoxy throughout the social sciences right now Is to cover your eyes, close your ears, and refuse to think about the role of genes.
Are there a few exceptions?
Yeah, but only a few.
So you have a reigning orthodoxy which says, no, no, no, no, no.
There can't be important genetic explanations for these social problems.
It's bad institutions.
It's inequitable economic systems.
It's this, that, and the other thing.
They say this kind of thing frantically.
And they attack, frantically, people who try to deny that.
Alright, that dominates academia.
It dominates the political debate about social issues.
Within the course of the next decade, that position is going to be proved definitively to be absolutely wrong.
How is this reigning intellectual orthodoxy going to make the U-turn It's going to have to make.
My worry is that I don't think that people are going to say, well, we were wrong about that, I guess.
Too bad.
We'll have to start to rethink things.
Usually when cognitive dissonance is resolved, and that's what we're looking at, Ralph, cognitive dissonance, where people are emphatically saying that X is true when we actually have increasing reason to think that Y is true.
And when people resolve that difference between reality and what they protest is true, when people resolve that, it can be very ugly a lot of times.
I don't know what One of the missions, I think, of social scientists who are willing to think about genes must be to try to lay the groundwork for coming to grips with the reality that the geneticists are plunking down in front of us.
Well, I mean that's a huge topic.
I'll just share one or two thoughts, which is that I come out of the entrepreneurial world, and of course you've written a large number of books for a mass market audience, and so I think we're both in that same market-driven world.
And if you're in a market-driven world, if you deny reality, you are severely punished economically.
But in the social sciences, given that they come largely out of the academic world, which is immune to market forces to a large degree, to accept reality is to be socially and professionally punished.
By your peers and by promotion and tenure opportunities.
So we're operating in these two opposite worlds.
The denial of data in the entrepreneurial world gets you toasted economically, whereas the acceptance of falseness in the social science or academic world gets you promoted and gets you positive responses.
So I think those two worlds can't coexist for too long because the data is just becoming overwhelming.
Yeah, I think the response to a troublesome inheritance, I expected the response to a troublesome inheritance, Nicholas Wade's book, to be as heated as the response to the bell curve.
It wasn't.
The book barely made a ripple.
It's as if all of the people who looked at it and saw how threatening it was just refused to acknowledge that it existed.
It was very interesting that the book did not get the attention that it deserved Because the only reason it did not get that attention must be a refusal to come to grips with what is plainly documented in the book.
But he didn't go hard into IQ.
I'm not saying you did, or you and Richard Harnstein did, but he didn't go that hard into IQ.
No, he didn't, but he did go very hard into the important differences in genetic differences that cut across the races in all sorts of characteristics and the fact that the more we learn about it, the greater the differences appear. but he did go very hard into the important differences So anyway, we're in for interesting times, as the old Chinese curses supposedly says.
Well, and I appreciate the huge amount of effort that you've put into forwarding the debate and taking that Copernicus versus superstition approach to bringing facts to a very contentious social issue.
It's certainly been illuminating to me, and I would certainly recommend we'll put a series of your books below this interview so that people can go and get to the source.
An engaging and entertaining writer, always thought-provoking.
I really want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and I hope we can talk again.
