Dec. 29, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:01:12
3164 Race, Evolution and Intelligence | Linda Gottfredson and Stefan Molyneux
Stefan Molyneux speaks to Dr. Linda Gottfredson about the differences in human intelligence, the gap in established knowledge between academia and the general public, the difference between general intelligence factor and IQ, disputing the Flynn Effect, the work of J. Phillip Rushton and the challenges of pursuing politically incorrect research. Dr. Linda Gottfredson is a professor of education and affiliated faculty in the University Undergraduate Honors Program at the University of Delaware. She currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Intelligence and is President of the International Society for Intelligence Research. She has been elected Fellow of three scientific societies (American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) and won awards for her research (American Psychological Association, International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, Mensa Research Foundation), science writing (Mensa Press Award), “extraordinary leadership and service” (UD Faculty Senate), and “courageous public defense of student and faculty rights” (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).For more on Dr. Gottfredson and her research, please go to: http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/Mainstream Science on Intelligencehttp://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstream.pdfResolute ignorance on race and Rushtonhttp://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2013Rushton.pdfFreedomain 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
This is a long, but I think incredibly powerful and essential conversation that I had with Dr.
Linda Gottfriedsen.
She's a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and the co-director of the Delaware Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society.
Her work has been highly influential in shaping U.S. public and private policies regarding affirmative action, hiring quotas, And race norming on aptitude tests.
She is on the boards of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, the International Society for Intelligence Research, and the editorial boards of the scientific journals Intelligence, Learning, and Individual Differences and Society.
On a personal note, I consider her to be...
Brave, heroic, and noble.
And the degree to which she deeply cares about successful resolution to social challenges in the realm of intelligence is deeply moving and inspirational for me.
And she talks about the need to understand what intelligence is and how intelligence shapes society and the degree to which it differs across various populations within society.
And it's a very powerful and important conversation for you to listen to.
Once you really start to understand intelligence and its bell curve distribution across populations, not only is it hard to look at society the same way again, you know, the old saying that says, a mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original shape.
Well, prepare yourself for some mind-bending information and for a way of looking at society that is not only more accurate, but in fundamental ways, much more compassionate.
So without any further ado, here's my conversation with Dr.
Linda Gottfriedsen.
So thanks so much, Dr.
Garfordson, for joining us today.
And people are obviously curious as to why I'm focusing so much on intelligence.
And I think it's partly because it seems to me there's this parallel universe, or two universes, when it comes to examining the somewhat or seemingly intractable social problems that almost all societies, particularly Western multicultural societies, are facing.
And my sort of history was, I read The Bell Curve when I was in grad school in the 90s and, you know, it kind of was like, wow, what a fascinating thesis.
And then because it's never or rarely referred to in the mainstream media, it just kind of blew like tumbleweeds out of my brain.
And then when I started researching why there was an economic crash in 2007, 2008, I was led back to the government's desire to get more minorities into housing and some of the results, negative results that came out of that.
And that kind of drew me back into the fold as far as looking at society through the lens of intelligence.
And I know from the experts that I've talked to and the research that I've done that that which is uncontroversial within the learned disciplines, within the academicians, is something that is deeply and shockingly horrifying to the general public.
And I really try to build these canals between academia and the general public because otherwise we're trying to guide society without anybody who knows how to navigate.
And that, I think, is a real shame.
So that was sort of my background.
And I think now that I've really immersed myself in the IQ stuff and the G stuff and the ethnic differences stuff, I'm trying not to become the one theory explains everything kind of guy, but I find it almost impossible to look at social problems without first asking myself, what is the intelligence ratios?
What are the intelligence differences that may be occurring in these disparate groups?
It's not the final answer, of course.
It's not the only place you want to go, but I'm finding it a pretty useful start.
So that's sort of my background, and I've No, for a lot of people, you know, I mean, I remember taking Psych 101 way back in the day, and we went through IQ stuff, but a lot of people have received their information about intelligence and IQ from the popular media, which is kind of like getting your cosmology from the 12th century Catholic Church, which doesn't really help.
So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about IQ as a whole, intelligence as a whole, and what people's misconceptions are about it.
Okay, it's not just the media that miseducate people.
It's also many different college disciplines.
Sociology, anthropology, English, just about any of the disciplines.
Education, which is where I'm launched.
So it's widespread, perhaps especially in education, because schools are supposed to be the great equalizers, right?
And the other thing I'd say it's important, not just between races, but within races, too.
There are huge differences within races.
And the differences between races are just a special case of that, where the middle of the pack falls.
It's just different along the same very long continuum.
I did a sort of segment on a show recently, which was sort of tongue-in-cheek, whereas, you know, when you see a tall person, you can see, hey, that person's really tall.
I'm looking up their nose, you know, the old joker, how's the weather up there kind of stuff.
But a smart person doesn't show up as immediately obvious to the layperson, yet it seems to me that the differences in human intelligence are so extreme.
You know, somebody with an IQ of 160 isn't just, you know, 60 points smarter in a sense than somebody with an IQ of 100.
They almost seem to me like a different kind of animal in terms of what they can do.
And the degree to which, as Charles Murray points out, we have this inverted pyramid of achievement within a civilization that the top, you know...
0.01% of the gifted people tend to move things along in a way that nobody else seems to be able to do.
And I think that lack of visibility of the effects of intelligence or the lack of understanding of the degree to which smart people are different from regular folk, it makes it hard for people to understand things like wealth inequality or disproportionate abilities in any particular discipline.
And then they generally come up with...
Kind of pseudo-scientific, you know, gender sexism or racism or, you know, it's the 1% where you just inherit your money and stuff like that.
And I think it's really hard for people to factor in the divergences in intelligence.
We see this in other areas, you know, when you think of singers, there are some people who are naturally gifted and great singers.
And, you know, everyone who takes singing lessons can probably improve a bit, but there's no substitute for having the physical equipment, at least as far as I read some of the IQ data.
Well, it's true.
There is no IQ stamped on your head.
There's no IQ, no intelligence, no G stamped on your head.
But I would point out that especially when you're dealing with general populations or mass institutions, Where you have people of all ability levels, the differences can be quite obvious, say in elementary school or in military induction, especially before they were screening out low-ability men.
Now, it is true that people segregate sort of by IQ, and as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein pointed out, People of high IQ often have no idea what people at other levels of intelligence can and can't do.
I remember giving a talk in Oxford once where I was describing the everyday, what are called, literacy tasks people can and can't do at different levels of literacy.
And, for example, describing five levels of literacy Measured by the U.S. Department of Education.
Very well done.
And at the lowest of five levels, a person, for example, has an 80% chance of finding one piece of information specified beforehand in a short sports article.
Now, the percentage of people, adults, who can't regularly do items that difficult in the general U.S. population is about 14%.
Well, what if you go up to the next level?
Can they find two pieces of information in a simple sports article?
There, that's where another 25% of people top out.
And it goes on and on.
And they simply would not believe me.
They said, that can't be.
I don't know anybody like that.
But if you look at the health field, there are many people...
Who cannot tell the time of an appointment on an appointment slip?
And that's a lot of people.
People just don't, if they don't associate with people like that, they don't know.
The other explanation is that I think a lot of high intelligence people are trying to justify morally their own status or And so they have to say, well, everybody could be like me, and don't blame me for getting ahead.
So there are lots of reasons, and it's just politically incorrect in virtually all fields to even say that intelligence exists, let alone differences.
It's often struck me that some of the more extreme forms of leftism, such as communism and so on, that comes out of an intellectual's horror at the idea of being, say, a lathe operator or part of the sort of factory assembly line.
And what happens is, if you're a really smart person, you look at that life and you say, well, that person must be miserable because you'd be miserable in that position.
I mean, I grew up fairly poor and worked with a lot of people who didn't have a lot of intellectual abilities.
Waiters and machine operators and so on.
You know, they'd go to work, they'd have fun, and they'd enjoy themselves.
And it was a different kind of life.
And I think the failure of highly intelligent people to understand that just because they'd be horrified by a particular occupation doesn't mean that it's innately horrifying and needs to be fixed.
I think that's a mistake.
I've always felt that it was totally unfortunate or inappropriate For people who go to college to say that college is the be-all and end-all, that people in working occupations, well, they're not really good occupations.
That's crazy.
And people should be in occupations that they feel like they do well.
And I know a lot of electricians who make a lot more money than I do.
So there's...
Many occupations that are really rewarding for people who aren't geniuses or aren't high level.
There's nothing worse than being in a job where you're over your head.
Oh, no, absolutely.
I totally get that.
So, people who hear the word IQ, of course, hear a lot of myths about it.
And we're going to say myths, which is begging the question, but we'll make the case.
At least you'll make the case.
The first myth is that, okay, so maybe there's a test that people are good at, but all it measures is their ability to take an IQ test.
It doesn't translate seriously.
We'll take these one at a time.
So they say it doesn't translate into real-world stuff and my understanding is that it's actually very good at predicting life outcomes and there's not a wide divergence between IQ tests and things like socioeconomic status or even health outcomes or level of education and income and so on.
It does seem to test something that translates at least into a relatively free market into a sorting and rewarding by intelligence.
It helps to predict, although at different levels, virtually everything we do in life that has any reasoning or learning involved.
And it might help to explain or describe what intelligence is.
Not define it as such, but what it appears to be with a lot of research.
And then we can go into that.
It's the ability or proficiency, differences in proficiency at learning, reasoning, abstract thinking, problem solving.
So it's very general.
I mean, try to think of a part of life where you don't learn, or you don't have to learn, or you don't have to problem solve.
Okay?
So it's...
And let me give you a very specific example of what it means...
More generally, it's the ability to process complex information.
It's mental manipulation.
And I'll give you an example where you and your viewers can feel what I mean.
Excuse me, I'm getting over a cold.
A lot of individually administered intelligence tests, and those are the gold standard.
They're not paper and pencil.
Have two subtests that are called digits forward and digits backward.
Digits forward, and this is to assess how much you can keep in mind.
Okay?
It's kind of working memory.
So, digits forward, you don't have to do it out loud.
I tell my students, you don't have to do it out loud, but do the following.
Okay?
Ready?
Digits forward, I'll give you five numbers.
And then, after I stop, I want you to repeat them in your head.
This is digits forward.
Four, nine, seven, one, two.
Piece of cake, right?
Okay, next one.
Two, five, seven, three.
Okay?
Usually, that one, my students, I see them looking at the ceiling, their eyes are rolling.
What was the difference between the two, Stefan, for you?
What was the difference?
Oh, it's really different.
One, of course, it looks like you're looking at a picture, and in another one, it feels like you're taking some model and shuffling it around in your head, which is much more taxing.
Yes, you have to remember it, then you have to flip it.
That's more mental manipulation.
And virtually everything that involves intelligence, well, it is the ability to manipulate information, especially more complex information.
More information, things that are more distant, more different.
So it's a general capacity for, as I say, processing information.
And so intelligence tests get at that, And all the subtests do it.
And I'll explain something that helps explain one of the myths.
Intelligence tests are the scores.
The scores are created by adding up the scores on, say, 11, 12 subtests.
Now, people think that, well, okay, intelligence is just like marbles in a jar.
Right?
You're just adding up different things.
But it turns out that no matter what test you give or subtest, they all correlate with each other.
If you're better on one, you're better on the other.
So what does that mean?
It means they're not independent abilities.
And you can use a statistical procedure to figure out the overlap between them.
So they're all getting something of the same thing.
And this was discovered over a century ago, so it's not like a new finding.
And if you find that common thing, it turns out to dominate most of what a test measures if you add up lots of items.
And that's what we call G for the general mental ability or general intelligence factor.
I'm sorry, just to interrupt, because people do get this sort of idiot savant thing where you're really smart at something or, as I think you've written or people have written, say, well, we all know somebody who's really great at math and, like, will never read a novel or something like that.
But that doesn't generally work out in terms of tests, that we don't have these isolated abilities.
I sort of think of G like your body's ability to, you know, pump power.
Oxygen through vessels to the blood, to the muscles, to make people run fast or whatever.
An athlete is not going to be really great at running and then really bad at jumping.
I mean, they may not be as good at jumping, but they're still going to be very fit all around.
And so G to me is like general fitness, and then you can train it for specific abilities.
Now, your example shows some of the reasons why people...
Misunderstand.
Your verbal ability is probably higher than your math ability because it's just from the job you're in, right?
And if you look at college majors, you find that some college majors, journalism, English, are dominated by people with a profile of abilities.
They're all bright, okay?
But those in the English and journalism are better Relatively in English to math.
You can see that on GRE tests or the SAT. So those differences do matter when you're selecting and pursuing different high-level occupations.
But all those people are bright.
They didn't get into college without being above average, I suspect.
So, if you're looking at other people who are bright, maybe that's the major difference is their math ability versus their verbal ability.
But you put them in the general population, and that's not the case.
They will be bright in both of those compared to the general population.
So, but if you, and this is an interesting fact, If you use a test of verbal ability to predict math ability and verbal ability, it does about the same.
Okay?
If you're using general population, because most of the math test is measuring G. It's general ability.
Most of the verbal test is measuring G. And what you find is that even in predicting job performance...
Adding all those special tests above a test of G doesn't make much difference in predicting job performance.
And you know what's interesting?
And I've mentioned this in terms of college as a whole, and I don't want to necessarily go on a big college tangent, but this idea that, well, if we get more people into college, they'll be smarter, that to me is like saying, well, if we put more people on basketball teams, they'll get taller.
That college pre-selects for intelligence, dumping more people of average ability into college is only going to make college have to be dumbed down rather than making people smarter in general.
And this, when I was an entrepreneur, we had, of course, the big challenge of being an entrepreneur, of running a company, is hiring people of, yes, possibility.
And we tried just about everything, interviews and written tests.
And anyway, we ended up developing, just on our own, a series of questions that were supposed to measure something that couldn't be memorized, the reasoning on the fly, and so on.
And we found that, like, bar none, that was by far the best way of figuring out who was going to be successful in the long run.
And it's always struck me that if you could just give an IQ test or some equivalent that maybe didn't need a professional, some IQ test of people coming in, we could save...
Billions and billions of dollars of, in a sense, wasted capital for people having to go to the IQ proxy test of a college degree.
But, of course, it's really difficult in the United States in particular, as far as I understand it, to just apply a simple intelligence test to people coming into your field.
You're absolutely right.
And I only know one intelligence test that's routinely used to screen, to a first screen.
And the NFL uses it, too.
It is the Wonder Luck Personnel Test.
It's a 12 minute, 50 item test that has some analogies, some math word problems, and it does about as well as one of these gold standard tests in lining people up according to their G or general ability level.
Now, going back to hiring, I... Did a lot of research in that area some years back.
And there were lots of controversies then.
It was a time when you couldn't use any mental tests without getting sued.
Because the way regulations stand and the law is that you're guilty if there's disparate impact In selecting, that's different proportions of different racial groups.
Prima facie case of discrimination.
And it needn't be an intelligence test.
It could be a basic skills test.
It could be one that they spent, you know, years developing.
This is an employer or a city jurisdiction for hiring firefighters, for example.
And...
But...
The better the test, the more, in terms of selecting for G, the worse the disparate impact.
So it became very difficult to jump the hoops to show, quote, job-relatedness.
You had to show job-relatedness, jump through a whole lot of hoops.
Well, employers have been able to do that now pretty well, the big employers, you know, the AT&Ts and so on.
But...
So, a funny thing happened then.
Right?
Because it was well known that tests that are not biased, and I don't know any professionally developed test that is, when the person taking the test speaks English, any kind of English, is that suddenly...
One eminent panel discovered that statistically they were still unfair.
So that you could race norm the tests.
That is, you give a bonus point to the lower scoring, members of the lower scoring races, but not to Asians who score higher.
And this was about to become law.
That you could do this.
It was quotas, surreptitious quotas.
Well, I helped expose that, and Congress banned it.
Okay, so now what do you do?
You can't use race norming, that is, adjusting the scores by race, just adding points to equalize them.
So the next thing that professionals tried, and I'm ashamed of my field, For some people doing this, is that they, what I call, gerrymandered the tests.
So they basically found pseudo-statistical reasons to get rid of all the subtests that measured G. So it was all personality.
And the only test of mental skill left was reading above the second percentile.
Now, you say this is a joke, but the Department of Justice was part of this team and was going to force this test on all police departments around the United States.
The idea was that if you can't have double standards, you have no standards.
And I think that's one of the points you were getting at earlier.
Well, that was exposed, and...
That project was stopped, but the same principles are being applied everywhere.
And this is something that, again, is well known within the professional literature and professional periodicals and so on, which is simply not making it out for a variety of reasons we could discuss, that there is a hierarchy that is currently recognized and...
I think you gathered together a list of 50 or so experts who repeated all of this stuff ad infinitum, still, again, not making it into general culture as a whole, which is that there is, you could roughly equate a sort of five-part split or divergence among IQs for particular groups with, I think, as Charles Murray pointed out, Ashkenazi Jews sort of at the top, 110, 115, and if you just focus on verbal, 120 plus.
Yeah, these are the averages where the middle pack falls.
Right.
And then I've heard a variety for Asians, 103, 106, and so on, but very strong in visual-spatial.
You know, the sort of myth or the stereotype of the Asian engineer versus the Jewish engineer.
Ashkenazi Jews actually score a little bit below.
Yeah, they score a little bit below the norm in visual-spatial, but of course, in terms of language skills, they're through the roof, which is why you see a lot of writers and directors and so on.
And so you've got Ashkenats and Jews, and then you have Asians, and then you have whites who are normed, Caucasians normed around 100, and then, if I remember the numbers rightly, sort of low 90s for Hispanics, and then 85, which is a full standard deviation below whites.
For blacks, and these differences have persisted for, I think, as long as the tests have been going on.
And the more G-loaded the tests are, the more they're trying to measure general intelligence, which is directly associated with physical structures in the brain we can get into, the more G-loaded the tests are, the more they tend to reaffirm this sort of five-point spread.
And so when you look at society, without seeing these differences in ethnicities and IQ, It really becomes hard to understand how society is and why it looks the way it looks without this.
Because I think a lot of people are still quite startled to hear that information, I just wanted to give that background and, of course, correct me anywhere I may have gone astray.
No, I would just add one more group, and that's African blacks.
The IQs of different groups of African blacks range more around 70.
So, I would add those as well.
So, there's a huge difference in, let's say, branches of the family tree as they've developed to this time.
Now, it also helps...
I remember...
I knew the average circumstances for a long time, but it really stunned me when I realized or learned that an IQ of 85, which is the average...
For American blacks is at the 15th percentile for whites.
And that's actually the level at which the military does not accept anyone.
So immediately you've ruled out about half American blacks.
There's other criteria too.
So...
It's a tremendous, I mean, a practical difference.
And to show this up in, you know, to sort of very much paraphrase Herrnstein and Murray, if you're looking at a particular ethnicity, say average income or average educational attainment or average health outcomes and so on, If you don't factor in IQ, you're not looking at things through a correct lens.
Everything's blurred and distorted.
And so the argument from the bell curve is something along these lines, that if you say, well, American blacks are doing worse than whites, well, that is a true statement.
But it is clouding the fact that if you look at everybody, whether they're Asians or whites or Hispanics, if you group everybody who has an IQ average of 85, they all do about the same.
And so what society is relentlessly sorting through the free market, through educational opportunities and so on, what society is relentlessly doing is sorting by intelligence.
And if you don't see that, then your only possible answer are the twofold usual historical answers for black underperformance in American society.
Which is historical racism and the effects and current racism and so on.
But without seeing the IQ differences, I believe that it is a very false and destructive answer because it doesn't identify the real problem when solutions may be possible.
You're absolutely right that the belief that there are no differences It has a tremendous effect on social policy, institutional policies,
because, and I saw this early on, the more you have double standards, let's say in a college or in a job, the more you bring in black individuals who might have done quite well elsewhere, Into a position where they're almost bound to fail.
And so the employment literature has found when companies do that, failure becomes color-coded.
It's the blacks who fail, which leads to lawsuits, among other things.
What it does, also, since none of us aloud can say that there's a difference, and many people truly believe there's no difference, what explains it, as you say, it's either blacks will say whites are biased and evil, and whites will say blacks are lazy.
So, and That is generating an enormous amount of resentment.
And it's like a general smashing this radio during a war or a battle.
If you won't listen to the information coming in, you're going to end up in a lot of trouble.
There is...
I'll do a tiny rant here.
I know you're a tiny rant here, if you'll indulge me.
Number one is the degree to which the really smart blacks get swept up in the problems of affirmative action.
Because, of course, in the past, before affirmative action, then any black who graduated with a degree was considered the equivalent, and rightly so, of anybody else who graduated with a degree.
But what's happened now, and you can actually trace this historically and statistically, is that fewer smarter blacks are opting to go to college because when they graduate, the employers don't know whether they were there from natural ability or from affirmative action.
So it's actually made the value of a black degree go down through affirmative action, thus resulting in lower opportunities for, you know, the legions and many hundreds of thousands of very intelligent blacks out there in society, which is a real tragedy.
And number two, I mean, I know I'm stepping way over the bounds of genetics here, which we can talk about in a few minutes.
But, oh, man, it's so frustrating because there are some actions that can be taken which seem to have a positive impact on IQ.
You know, early childhood, best diet possible.
you know, that's going to help a little bit.
From some of the experts I've had on, if you negotiate with your children rather than applying massive amounts of corporal punishment, there seem to be some positive effects on IQ. If you follow 18 months to 24 months worth of breastfeeding, that's going to have some positive effects on IQ. And these are things which everybody can do if they're told about it often enough and reminded about it often enough.
So just by blaming, you know, slavery and Jim Crow and racism and all this sort of stuff, we're actually not only not diagnosing the problem correctly, but we're completely bypassing a variety of solutions that could genuinely help the black community.
And that's what I think is so viciously destructive about this whole avoidance.
Well, those are, before getting onto that, I just want to go back to the college example.
Because of affirmative action in selection, say on the basis of SATs, in some schools, like University of California, Berkeley, as Bernstein and Murray showed, there's virtually no overlap in the abilities of the two populations.
They are just set up to be unable to compete with Which I think is cruel.
And it sets up the university for endless problems.
But to go back to things that could be done, right?
The things that you mention might help in childhood.
But those sorts of things, unless a child is at the extremes, I mean real extremes of deprivation...
They don't last.
What we find, and no one in the field expected this.
No one.
We all thought, as most people do, as the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune accumulate, the environment has more and more effect on you.
Turns out, and I'll link this in a minute to freedom of the market, that Heritability of intelligence is that we can measure it in infancy and toddlerhood is low, maybe 20%.
Later, in elementary school, it's about 40%.
You get to high school, it's like 60 or 70.
And by adulthood, middle adulthood, it's 80%.
That means that your phenotype...
That is your observed intelligence is correlated 0.9 with your genotype.
Now that's in Western countries.
So what is it that causes the environment, the shared environment to wash away?
That's one of the shocking things to all of us in the field, although I don't claim to be a geneticist, is that the The shared effects of an environment, of a family, that hit brothers and sisters to sisters equally, or more or less equally, they rival heritability in elementary school.
But they go essentially to zero by adulthood.
And what does matter is, which is a small part of Of the environmental effect.
It's what's called non-shared.
It's what hits one child separately from another child in the same family.
Maybe it's illness.
Maybe they pursued a different course in life.
So we still don't know why the heritability goes up, but it goes up for educational attainment, too, is that people, what I think of as their genetic compass, their inner compass, It leads them to pursue different things.
Some will pursue reading, some will pursue sports or art, and develop those abilities.
But we line up with our genes pretty much in intelligence by adulthood.
And you can see, when I teach intelligence in everyday life to college freshmen, I give them some compelling facts.
Now, they don't prove the large body of evidence I'm trying to get across, but they are very impressive.
For example, if you have adopted children, I mean, children who are adopted into a family, their IQs will...
By high school, correlate more with their biological mothers and won't correlate at all with their adoptive mothers.
And that fits with their intelligence becoming more heritable.
Or, I ask my students, who are still naive, what happens if you have...
And it helps if they're freshmen.
You get older students and they already have their notions fixed, I think.
But what if you had identical twins and you separated them and put them in different families?
They didn't know that they were even a twin, right?
Well, a colleague of mine, honor myself by saying his colleague, Thomas Bouchard, started collecting, so to speak, these people, oh, decades ago.
And he tested them.
On myriad things, including intelligence.
And it turns out, they're just about as like as identical twins who are together.
And they're a lot more alike than fraternal twins.
I mean, fraternal...
I mean, regular brothers and sisters together.
It's like they're taking the same person, taking the test twice.
So, how do you explain that with...
And they correlate about.8.
So, these are just a few of the compelling facts that by themselves don't prove anything, but they really make you stop and question the zeitgeist that environment explains.
You can take kids starving.
Starving kids in Indonesia, so they're East Asian, have them adopted into Scandinavian families.
It's been done.
And lo and behold, their IQs are higher than their sibs in the same family that were born to the mothers, the natural mothers.
So these are some ticklers, okay?
How are you going to explain them?
Go ahead, finish your thought.
I'll hold mine.
Go ahead.
Just so I won't forget it, okay?
But it follows up a point of yours about freedom.
And if you, the more, the ideal seems to be if everybody had exactly the same advantages, they would be alike in intelligence, or more alike anyway.
It turns out, and the more freedom you give them to be who they are, well, what's been found is that if you equalize opportunities or resources in school, or as Britain did, equalize access to health care in the 50s, what happens is that everybody may benefit, but who benefits more?
The brighter people.
So class differences increase in what they are called disparities now.
The disparities in health increase.
The disparities in educational achievement increase.
One colleague has called it the Matthew Effect.
He's written about it.
So it's like backfires in some sense.
And...
If you're going to raise the mean, you're going to expand the variance.
And variation among people.
And variation, a synonym of it in sociology and politics is inequality.
Right.
Right?
So, it's, and the more inheritabilities go up when people are free, if you don't allow people to be who they are, you know, you don't allow them to follow you know, you don't allow them to follow their inner compass or develop who they are.
Heritabilities will fall.
But that's not what we're hoping for.
No, I mean, if you ban singing, then great singers don't make a lot of money.
I mean, I think that freedom and all that.
And I tell you, I mean, Linda, it's...
I have this emotional resistance to the genetics.
And I'm sure I'm speaking for a lot, you know, because I feel it's like...
Let me give you something that will help.
Well, I feel like a stick insect trying to climb a waterfall.
You know, I'm sure I can do it, but then this data just keeps coming down and knocking me away and putting me back down in the pool.
Because we all like to think that it's a solvable problem.
And the degree to which...
The problem between what?
The disparate intelligences and average intelligences between ethnicities.
Because we've got this multicultural society.
And if we have, in general, again, we're speaking statistically overall.
I have to put these caveats into every show.
You know, this is all big picture stuff.
You know, 15 to 20% of blacks are smarter than the average whites.
I've been heavily influenced by some very heavy-hitting black intellectuals, Tom Sowell and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and so on.
So this is all big picture stuff.
But if overall there's kind of a doomed underclass or two and a bunch of overlords, so to speak, in a free society, so I feel this resistance to it.
But as the evidence, and I've had Dr.
Flynn on and Dr.
Turkheimer on and so on, other people who are more environmentarians or whatever you'd want to call them, And I just feel that the evidence can't be resisted, and again, until we have incontrovertible genome And it becomes, you know, at some point, if it's valid that it's genetics, it's going to be irresistible.
But when I hear things like, you know, blacks adopted into white families end up with the same intelligence range as those who weren't.
And people say, oh, well, it's expectations.
Everyone expects the blacks aren't going to do as well.
And then you find out that there are black kids who were so pale that everyone thought they were white, even though they're largely black genetically.
And they still end up with the same IQ. And when you find out that Blacks from the highest 20% of socioeconomic status still underperform whites from the bottom 20% of socioeconomic status.
And when you find out that genetic proximity and intelligence is dose-dependent, that your siblings are more like you and then your cousins a little bit less and it fades away to the 17-point IQ difference with strangers, although you've got 12 between siblings.
It seems like it's one of these just straw that breaks the camel's back because none of these things are final, but together they accumulate, to me at least, to portray a worldview that is emotionally difficult, which, you know, is just something to admit.
It's not obviously something you can guide your conclusions by.
But I really am having a tough time getting up that waterfall of the environmental side.
And it's tricky because, of course, environmental, it's sort of like the difference between boys and girls' heights.
Boys and girls start out about the same.
You know, my daughter is seven years old and when I see her playing with other boys, you know, there's tall boys and short boys and tall girls.
But then, of course, by the time everyone's 20, you've got a disparity.
And it's really confusing to people because it starts out more malleable, right?
As you pointed out, the Head Start program, which I think over $100 billion is poured into the sinkhole of trying to alter or close ethnic differences in IQ and achievement.
And there were some changes and everybody was cheering and saying, aha, vindicated.
And then it's like you throw a ball in the air and it just falls back down towards the genetics over time.
Because it's so tricky and the fact that it's not stable throughout early childhood, the fact that environment is so much more stable and the fact that people love testing everyone when they're 12 and saying, aha, look, it's malleable and it's closing.
And then they avoid everyone who's 30 because that is where the genetics tend to play out a lot more.
It is such a manipulable field for people who want either conclusion that, at least for me, as a decently well-versed layman, it's like stepping into a kaleidoscope or Timothy Leary's brain on an acid trip because it feels like people can find what they want.
And that's part of the frustration.
You know, when I was talking to James Flynn, and I know you've got something to say about this, there was a study, of course, of black servicemen and white German women ended up basically a hair's breadth away from the average IQ of the whites in Germany.
And of course, there's no racism in Germany, So this was an example and Tom Sowell and other people have pointed to that to say, ah, you see, well, it's toxic black culture and it's got nothing to do with genetics.
And yet, I'll let you do the rebuttal on that one because this is put forward continually by the people who are more into the environment.
But I think that there are good responses around it genetically.
Yes, it's one of a handful of studies that have been put forward to ostensibly disprove the possibility or probability that there are genetic differences, accounting for the average phenotypic differences between blacks and whites.
And people obviously haven't read it very carefully.
They compare the children of unions with German women for white servicemen and black servicemen.
Now, there's the assumption being made that both the German women and the two sets of servicemen are representative of their populations.
None of the three probably is.
We know that the black servicemen are definitely not representative of the black population because many were screened out.
But really the kicker for me is that people don't meet randomly.
If there's one...
Now, these are just liaisons, presumably, but...
The assertive mating among people, men and women, their intelligence correlates about 0.4 among spouses.
Now, I'm not saying that these are representative spouses, but we don't know who those two women were, who were having sex with the different servicemen, which servicemen, okay?
So we don't know the mother's IQ, and you have to know the mother's IQ. You have to know the father's IQ. So it tells us absolutely nothing.
Just like you were saying, the black children adopted into white families, they don't tell us anything either when their outcomes are lower IQ because it could have been for many reasons.
But then when you get Asians in the mix, that really throws a monkey wrench into the environmental explanation So Scandinavians must have been really favoring the starving adoptees over their own children, but that doesn't happen.
So I lost my train of thought here.
Oh, you just asked me about the Eifert study.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
So, yeah, I mean, if you're a black serviceman in Germany in the post-war period and you end up having a girlfriend who's white, we would assume that they would have things in common to chat about.
And it's hard to have long conversations or even medium-length conversations when there's wide disparities in intelligence.
So you have a selected group of blacks who are obviously half the population of blacks in the United States is cut off from the armed forces because of the 85 cutoff.
And they're decided to stay.
I'm sorry?
Half were not cut off then.
Oh, okay.
More recently.
But yeah, you have a higher IQ population who are interacting with a higher IQ population.
So the fact that they would have higher IQ kids does not seem to me to be the final case closed as far as environmentalism goes.
It's absolutely ambiguous if it's the best thing you can say about it.
Right.
So...
Now, another question that I have is, as far as the physical structure of the brain goes, IQ is...
Obviously, it has these correlations to outcomes in life as a whole, but I think as you've pointed out, it also seems to have significant correlations to very specific parts of the brain, the efficiency of the brain, the speed of the brain, the speed of reflexes, glucose levels and transmission levels between neurons and so on,
that it seems like, and this has been, I think, really over the last 10 or 20 years, that with the increased capacity to peer into the brain and see it working, that we can start to see a correlation between between the IQ and the physical structure of the brain which of course wasn't around you know in the 90s and so on nearly as much I wonder if you can talk a little bit to people don't feel like you're we're measuring magic ghosts in the brain or something but that it's actually a map of the topography and speed of the brain as well and size to some degree well
it's let me back up if you if intelligence or G It is so fundamental.
And it is fundamental in the personal sphere, in affecting performance, and in the social sphere.
But I should point out, it doesn't have an equal influence, because just as important as your level of G is the complexity of the tasks you're facing.
And if there's hope, this is where the hope would lie, that if you're performing, like on an IQ test, if you're performing the simple items and you correlate your scores on that with some outcome, it's going to be low because those items weren't very complex.
Or if you're predicting the easy items, let's say, on the functional literacy test, Well, everybody pretty much has the ability to do those, so you're not going to find a correlation.
But once you get, let's say, above, well, you're going into higher grade levels, the material is more difficult, then you start seeing higher correlations between...
Intelligence differences and performance, as long as you have the same group of kids there.
Once you get to high school, you're losing lots of them, and so it's a much more select group.
Different kinds of jobs.
This was very important for me early on, because I was trying to figure out, does it really matter?
I didn't start out as a G-believer.
I started out as a multiple intelligence person, basically, before it even became a term.
And I was interested in what particular abilities, verbal, spatial, whatever, were important in different jobs.
And I discovered, that's when I discovered the literature that showed that G basically predicted performance in all jobs.
But why would it, but if it were actually intelligence or G, You would not expect it to correlate equally well in all jobs because some jobs are more complex, much more complex.
And so I looked at whether the correlations, and this is what a good theory should do, give you predictions you don't know the answer to, you can go out and find the answers, found that Indeed, the correlation between G or any kind of intelligence test and jaw performance, especially objectively measured, went up with the difficulty of the jaw.
So, the more complex the task, the bigger the difference any IQ gap will make.
Okay?
Very important.
So, You give people a more intellectually tasking thing to do, more mental manipulation.
You're going to be spreading the people out in terms of performance.
And that's exactly what you find.
And if you have, say, an employment, to go back to employment, or education, if you know the complexity of the material that people have to the job, And you know the differences, the average differences in IQ in a population, you can predict, like clockwork, what the differences in performance will be.
Because G is such a core, powerful among abilities.
It overshadows them all.
It carries the freight of prediction, as people say.
And this we saw, I think, relatively recently when Google released its diversity numbers.
And if I remember, this is off the top of my head, but it was something like 30 or 40 percent of the engineers were Asians and 2 percent of them were blacks.
And, of course, most people jump to the conclusion, well, everyone's the same and therefore the disparity can only be because of racism.
Right, right, right.
But the reality is if you're looking for people with, say, visual spatial abilities above 120, then, yeah, you're going to get 30 to 40 percent of Asians and about 2 percent of blacks.
And so it's not actually...
It's an objective measurement of a difference in a population.
Yeah, you could even see...
Well, it certainly accords with the difference.
Oh, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I calculated what percent of blacks and whites would be, as I put it, eligible for different jobs...
Because they have different IQ ranges associated with them.
You're not going to be able to get in them and do them basically unless you're above a certain minimum threshold.
And those thresholds march upward, as has been known since the middle of the last century.
And what I found was that blacks would be overrepresented at the bottom end, as they are in special education by about three to one, But at the top end, where you're dealing with executives and engineers, per capita, it would be one black for 20 whites.
Per capita.
Okay?
But the numbers aren't actually that disparate.
So other things clearly are mattering.
And at that time, I don't...
Affirmative action wasn't as strong.
So other things do matter.
I mean, you can be bright and feckless.
As I tell my students, you know, you're all bright, but there's many ways that you can fail.
And you can lie in bed and imagine how smart you are, but it's not going to get you anywhere.
So many ways to fail.
And in fact, I characterize people in the top 5% as that you're to lose people.
In terms of intelligence, and many people do screw up.
Well, as far as I understand it, IQ is not related to one of the primary drivers of success, which is conscientiousness.
As I'm continually telling my daughter, the secret to success is to learn to do boring things.
Because a lot of the stuff that people do is, even very smart people who are operating at the highest levels of intellectual achievement, you've still got to do your taxes, you've still got to buy your groceries.
There's a lot of dull stuff even in every field that you have to do.
A lot of number crunching and stuff like that.
You're absolutely right.
People argued for a long time that, well, you could select on personality, right?
And that would substitute for differences in ability.
Nothing substitutes for differences in ability.
Nothing can substitute for the ability to learn and reason.
Being an extrovert doesn't substitute.
Well, it may help you in sales, right?
But the one thing that helps in all jobs, and even, like, intelligence probably had thousands of studies that And personality, hundreds.
But it's conscientiousness.
You just got to show up and you got to do it.
As personal psychologists say, there's the can-do traits in being able to perform a job, abilities.
And then there's the will-do in conscientiousness and not stealing and so on.
Well, and of course, the studies that have shown or followed these groups, I think they're called the termites for reasons I'm not exactly sure why.
Termin, because the head of the man who started the study was Louis Termin.
Oh, sorry.
I completely misread that.
But they followed these very high IQ people and they found that at the end of their life, or close to the end of their life, I think the last study was when they were around 80, that they looked back and they said, I really failed to achieve my full potential.
Even Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps arguably the most accomplished human being in history, looked back at the end of his life and he said, oh, I regret only that I made such little use of the gifts that God gave me.
And someone said, man, if you can't be satisfied, what chance do the rest of us have?
And so if you have high ability, of course, that leaves you more prone to worry, perhaps more neuroses.
But if you have high ability, then your capacity for regretting underachievement goes up considerably.
And that, of course, is the double-edged sword.
Everyone thinks, oh, smartness is just, oh, it's wonderful.
Who wouldn't want it?
Well, you know, a bit of a double-edged sword at times.
I don't know, because a colleague of mine who studies extremely gifted children, they score as well as high school students.
Incoming college students on the SAT at age 12 and 13.
And he studied them up to like 1 in 10,000 of the population.
They are so smart.
They turn out to be healthier psychologically and physically than other people.
So it's not the case that smart people are, you know, weak.
Now, a lot of people are weak.
Neurotic, okay?
People differ, but I don't think that bright people are more neurotic.
Although one thing that should be kept in mind that you brought up earlier is if you're really bright, and it's certainly found among kids, is that you feel like a freak because you are so different from everybody.
Think of a child at 140.
That's comparable on the other end to an IQ of 60.
And clearly, or kids that he studies, or my friend, IQ around 160.
That's like an IQ of 40 on the other end.
And those people at the other end, they're not even educable mentally retarded.
So they're very different.
People at both ends of the spectrum feel out of it socially.
So it can be very hard.
And bright kids, it's like...
Their eyes grow wide.
You put them in a special class for gifted, these programs that are created especially for these high scores, it's like they feel normal finally.
So there could be some of that.
Yeah, I mean, when I was younger, I was an assistant teacher at a program for gifted kids, and it was just a whirlwind of possibility with what these people were able to do, and it was humbling, of course, as it usually is.
And the other thing, too, you could argue is, since there has been such a focus over the past years, A decade and a half or so on trying to drag up the low achievers, a proportional amount of less attention has been given to the potential high achievers.
And I think that the high IQ children have been left even more high and dry than they used to be under, at least in the American educational systems.
Oh, yes.
The funding is paltry for gifted children.
And there is a great antipathy in the American school system to having classes for the gifted children.
To the extent that the schools have them now, and I haven't studied this in the last couple of years, but I did intensely earlier, is that the programs for the gifted, the criteria started to shift.
It was broader.
No tests, maybe.
And for some of the programs, either your parents could nominate you or you could nominate yourself.
And they focus less on academic things, more on citizenship, helping the community.
Now, those are all worthy things, but they're not intellectual giftedness.
They're not reloaded activities, right?
No, no.
And the notion is that, well, they can take care of themselves, or they can take care of their compatriots in school through peer tutoring.
Which I think is a form of exploitation.
But they could go so much further.
And the way gifted children are handled now, I think, for the most part, is letting them go to college, take college courses during high school, summer programs, essentially escaping from high school, at least for part of the day, to do things that are more challenging.
Because that's also easier for schools.
They don't have to set up gifted programs and explain why they have gifted programs.
And then face disparate impact and selection into them.
Yeah, that certainly happened in my school.
I was in grade 8 and was put into a grade 13 English class just because it just jumped me up rather than that.
Sorry, I should be correct.
It was more of a teacher's aide or whatever.
Now, there's two other doctors I'd like to touch on, and I'll let you choose which order we go in.
Dr.
Flynn, of course, who's been on the show, and Dr.
Rushton, unfortunately, who can't be on the show because he passed away a few years ago.
I'll let you choose which note you want to end on, because they're both, of course, fascinating people to talk about, and we've talked about the Flynn effect quite a bit, and I've mentioned Rushton here and there, but I think a further explication of his theories is definitely in order.
I will begin with James Flynn because I only want to say a little bit.
Phil Rushton was an excellent researcher, and I think, and I want to point to some of the things that he has done that are really a model for other researchers, regardless of whether they're dealing with race or not, which many won't.
But James Flynn...
I guess he's a philosopher who originally worked in the South here.
He's very interested in civil rights, moved to New Zealand.
Some decades ago, he discovered, although others had discovered it beforehand, but he made a lot more of it, more detailed information, that successive IQ tests...
Let me back up.
IQ tests have to be re-normed when their new versions are put out.
They have to be updated and modernized.
Okay?
And...
Can I back up just for a minute?
Totally.
On the IQ tests, people have this notion that their paper and pencil...
I said before that the best ones are...
One-on-one will take maybe an hour, hour and a half.
I used to let my students play with them, so to speak.
I didn't give them to them, but they could see what they were, and they just had a great time.
There's blocks that you're supposed to copy a template.
There's like a Five, picture completion.
I don't know if they're still on the more recent versions.
It's like a cartoon where you have five panels and you put them in order to create a story.
You have number series, like two, four, six, what's the next one?
And they get really complicated.
And they just had a wonderful time.
And most people enjoy taking them.
So it's nothing like the stereotype that people have of intelligence tests.
Anyway, an important thing about these tests, though, is that they have different subtests.
Because they're supposed to get at different aspects of cognition, because you want to sample widely in order to get a good, well, we would say now, to get a good sampling of G in different formats, numbers, letters, pictures, doesn't matter.
And...
But to get the IQ score, you add them up.
You know, 10 from this, 15 from that, and then you get an IQ score.
Well, he discovered, James Flynn, that when you renorm the tests, like if you give the new test to people, a set of people who also take the old test, right?
And if you find that they score better on one test than the other, Well, if they score worse on the new tests, which they usually do, then worse than the old one, then you have to reassign where the 100 goes.
So what you find is the 100 creeps up.
But how do you know that it's the G that's gone up?
When the IQ scores have gone up.
Because G is within all of those subtests.
Some of them, a great variety of excellent measures of G, from block design to verbal reasoning.
And they're very different.
One's verbal, one's not.
And what he found was that only some of the, and other people too, have found that only some of the subtest scores went up.
So how can that be?
If G permeates all of them, why don't all of them go up?
Now, this is a very big mystery.
At first, I would have argued that it's merely something to do with the test or the construction of the test that's not related to G. But height has gone up as well.
And it's gone up about the same amount in Western countries.
So there's something biological going on.
Well, and as you've pointed out as well, when height goes up in the bell curve, the distribution doesn't change.
So everybody marches up.
It's not like it compresses.
Everybody marches up.
So the height has gone up, but the distribution in the bell curve of height from very short to very tall remains about the same.
That's hard to tell for various reasons.
But I should also point out, and Flynn would too, that this secular increase is stopping.
You know, it seems to start, and then it levels off, and then there's some regression.
I mean, it goes down again.
So we don't know what it is.
A lot of people have been studying it, and some of it is artifactual, as we say.
It has maybe to do with guessing, parameters, you know, and so on.
But if there's a biological explanation, I have two theories, but...
That could be tested.
One is that with lower race, less infectious disease, our bodies are freed up to invest more in the brain.
But not necessarily all parts of it.
Some of those subtests are going up.
And you asked before about parts of the brain.
G seems to be spread throughout the brain.
No matter what you measure, it seems to correlate with G. White matter thickness, how much gray matter you have, many, many other things.
It's hard to find anything that isn't correlated with G. But there are parts of the brain that contribute to verbal and to spatial.
I mean, there are lobes of the brain, Brogman's area, and so on.
So it could be that some of the particular elements The specificity, they call it in the test, is somehow being biologically affected.
But a lot of people jumped on the idea that IQ scores are going up to say, well, then we don't have to pay any attention to all this other genetic stuff.
We don't have to pay attention to anything else.
It has saved us from this huge network of data that links everything from the genes to the brain physiology to very simple tasks like how many milliseconds does it take you to notice the difference between two lines,
statistically presented to elementary cognitive tasks, test scores, Things out in the world, jobs, education, they all fit together in an extraordinarily consistent, consilient picture.
Now, one study, Eifert or somebody else, isn't going to undo that.
It goes down to the genes.
For example, the structure of intelligence, which is G at the top, special, broad abilities, Adding a little bit to our complex collection, you might say, of mental abilities.
That structure is replicated genetically.
My goodness.
And the predictions you make, you can make on a lot of things, like the size of differences.
So...
They turn out to be upheld.
And so the evolutionary differences.
So this one piece of faulty or ambiguous information is being used as blinders to this information.
And it's because people don't want to believe it.
Now, we should get back to why should we pay attention to it?
But so James Flint's, I mean, it shows there's some puzzle there we need to solve.
And of course, the people who want to believe that intelligence is more fluid and malleable in a sense that the brain is not a rock but it's clay that you can mold are going to be much more drawn to the Flynn effect because it seems to indicate that there would be no genetic or biological basis to anything that would change so much in such a compressed amount of time that evolution couldn't possibly explain it.
Yeah.
Well, now we should talk about Phil.
He's one...
He worked in Canada.
He actually studied in England.
He was an evolutionary psychologist who started out studying altruism, which was the big issue then.
How can a species survive if it's being altruistic?
Or how do individuals survive if they're being altruistic to other people?
So he did a lot of work on that, was very well known and highly regarded for that.
Then he started wondering, why are the tribes of man so different?
You know, and that's an evolutionary question.
And I should say at the outset, he has been so utterly maligned for reasons that you might expect, because the news for some people is bad or unacceptable.
It's unthinkable.
And that trumps evidence and the truth.
So there are really three things, I guess, I could mention.
One is if you think of the tribes of man as having diverged evolutionarily, what would you expect to find?
Not just in intelligence, but what evidence should there be, if you're right, And he took a theory of mating strategies that's used in non-human animals of all levels to see if it applied to humans and within human groups.
And that's the RK theory.
And briefly, RR theory.
Populations or species that reproduce fast.
Lots of eggs, not much parental care.
You know, you throw out a lot and see how many survive.
And you hope with the numbers, you know, many survive, or some do.
The K approach, some animals, you think of the elephant.
Okay?
Very, very few offspring.
Very long gestation.
Long rearing period.
And like with humans, a pair of bonding...
You have a big-brained baby.
You need parents to provision for long periods of time.
You're going to need a social network, you know, not just lone couples here and there, but a social network.
So we're a very social species.
So he made predictions about, based on that theory, and applying that if that That difference in mating strategy shows up to even a little degree among humans and distinguishes evolutionary earlier from later branches of the human tree,
the races, then we should find those differences.
And he made very specific predictions.
Who would expect twinning?
To be related to race, right?
And it's not even close.
Like the twinning capacities in Asians is relatively tiny and of course in whites is in the medium and I think it's in Africans or blacks it's 16 per thousand.
I mean the evidence of twinning is very, very, very different between the races.
It's not linear at all.
And you've got maturation time, black babies are born earlier.
Gestationally, Asians, you know, what he found, and I can go through some of the various things, but they were from the head through the entire body, and out into society, kinds of personality, kinds of social organization, sizes, secondary sex characteristics, and you might wonder how he, and delinquency or crime, you might wonder how he gets all this data.
Well, the military gives hat sizes.
Okay?
The World Health Organization apparently has condom sizes.
I mean, you've got...
Interpol has crime rates.
They don't...
By the way, after his research, they don't report them by race anymore.
At least they didn't for a while.
So, you find all these things.
Age of...
First intercourse.
You know, all sorts of things.
And...
As well as physical characteristics, which I'll get more into in a minute.
And they all fell out in the same order.
Blacks, Caucasians, East Asians.
Brain size was one.
And he was ridiculed for years for saying that brain size was even related to intelligence.
Well, that's been settled.
And that's the result in particular of MRI scans because I think it was.4 was the correlation between brain size and intelligence.
Skull size.
Skull size and intelligence.
But I think that's been further refined with better brain imaging techniques to have a higher correlation.
You can get the whole volume.
You can get the volume of the frontal lobes.
You've got so many different possibilities now.
Now, people objected to him saying that the races, on average, had different brain size.
Some of the arguments against him were, well, there's no such thing as race, right?
Or at least it doesn't affect above the shoulders.
And sorry, I just want to mention something about this because, again, for the people who are outside this particular information stream, it's all very, very shocking stuff.
But if you just think about it for a moment, right?
So if the race is diverged, you know, 50, 100,000 years ago, depending on which race, Trinity, you're looking at, the brain is, what, 6% of her body mass, but consumes a third of our overall resources.
It is by far our most expensive organ.
Like three pounds of our...
How many?
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy just how disproportionately consumptive the brain is.
And so the idea that a widely divergent environment, everywhere from Siberia to Central Africa, the idea that a divergence of 50 or 100,000 years or more would have no evolutionary impact on the most expensive organ that we possess...
It's so anti-scientific and anti-evolutionary that it makes the Earth as 6,000 years old look like the pinnacle of scientific achievement.
So I know it's startling for people, but when you think about it evolutionarily, it would be impossible if you accept the theory of evolution, which I think every reasonable person has to do.
It is impossible to imagine that ice and fire, the two, you know, a desert or a jungle and the steppes of Siberia, Would not have an evolutionary impact on the most expensive organ.
That is literally like saying it doesn't matter if you're in The woods or in the Arctic, the bear's coat is going to be the same.
No, we adapt to our local environments, and our most expensive organs tend to adapt the most to local environments, and you can't think of a more disparate environment than that between, say, Africa and Siberia, or Africa even, and Northern Europe, where you, of course, can't get food for four to six months of the year, depending on where you are.
So I just, sorry to interrupt the flow, but I really wanted to pause and just have people understand that You can reject this if you want, but then you have to go back behind the young Earth creationists in waiting for your science degree.
One of the things that his data illustrate in showing that there is a divergence is that brains don't evolve alone.
They evolve with the rest of the body, right?
And the rest of behavior.
And so he showed...
That these differences, they come, they evolve, they co-evolve.
It's not like one evolves and then another evolves because the organism has to be an integrated whole and to have fitness, as they say, to survive and leave genetic offspring.
And there's trade-offs.
Now, for example, the gorilla.
It's the ratio of brain to stomach.
His stomach is much bigger than his brain, right?
Our is a digestive system.
Ours is sort of the opposite.
So we have to learn how to eat non-toxic foods.
So we learn to cook and so on.
But Phil also showed the...
And people can relate to this.
The physical differences among...
We'll take the three major races, and then he put in two chimpanzees, and then in an evolutionary timeline.
By the way, you can...
There are clocks for measuring time of divergence in different races.
And what you do...
Is to take neutral genes.
That is genes that do not affect your fitness.
And so they change only by happenstance or mutation.
But they don't make a difference.
And you can look at how they change over...
across the different groups.
And if you use that genetic clock, it's very interesting...
You can distinguish different European groups, different Asian groups, different Middle Eastern groups, and it flows from Africa steadily through these individual groups all the way over to Asia and then to Oceania and the Americas.
So there's no doubt that there has been evolutionary divergence using that clock.
But if you use other genes, like the...
One's for physical structure.
And most of the differences are between groups rather than within them.
And so Phil, he didn't know that.
We didn't know that until recently.
But Phil took information.
Have you watched any CSI events?
Crime scene investigation shows that your viewers have.
Bones is my...
That's my drug of choice when it comes to this stuff.
Perfect, perfect.
She can tell the race, the age.
Like a finger.
It's crazy.
And often their occupation, the injuries, the illnesses they've had, cause of death is what she's looking for.
But...
There are textbooks on how forensic anthropologists can distinguish skeletons and decompose remains.
And they depend on the dentition, the shape of the jaw, basically the orientation of the bones, the weight, length, shape, and they distinguish the races quite well.
Well, Phil took that information from various textbooks, and there were dozens of them, you know, orientation of the pelvis, the size of the pelvis, where do the muscles attach?
You can see that in the bones for the jaw, how big the bones of the jaw are, the prominence of the brow, all sorts of, of course, coal size.
And then he put them...
Looked at them, compared them.
He compared them to living chimpanzees, Homo osteopithecus, then a later hominoid, Homo habilis, tool man, and Homo erectus, man who stands up.
And there was a gradient from Homo erectus to blacks.
Now, there's a big difference, but Caucasians and East Asians.
Now, the one thing that ties them all together is a term called robustness.
The bigger the brain, essentially the more delicate the frame.
So you rely not on strength anymore, but on strategy.
And he found...
Very consistent.
So once again, the same ordering.
Then he took...
And this focuses on intelligence, and this is one thing that I really like in his approach, and I wish more people would take it.
He looked at the entire body of evidence on racial differences, not in just what I just described, but...
In education, he had ten things, bodies of evidence.
One was the evolutionary, one was the test scores, one was actually the success of interventions for raising intelligence, adoption studies, and so on.
And he looked at it.
And he asks a particular question.
Is this body of evidence more consistent with a 50-50 view, 50% genetic, 50% environmental hypothesis of the average differences between races, or is it 0% genetic?
Which is what a lot of people seem to be arguing.
And if you line up all the evidence...
Some of it's ambiguous, like some of the adoption studies, but if, you know...
And what predictions do they make?
Are they borne out?
It's clear, in a way, more consistent with the 50-50.
And in fact, it's more consistent with the 80-20 hypothesis for genetic differences between the races.
So, a favorite strategy...
That's the one thing that...
Is it okay?
There's no proof positive, and there will be no proof positive.
That's one of the arguments, one of the strategies critics use.
The perfect evidence...
Which is often impossible to get, by the way.
And which they don't require for evolution.
The god of the gaps applies equally to evolution as it does to so many mental constructs in sociology and psychology and so on, but they don't apply it to everything except which they find emotionally difficult.
No, no, no.
So, if you stand back and look at how broad and consistent the evidence is from, as I say, from the genes out into social structure, Which ones are more consistent?
Which fit together?
Can you really predict from your theory?
Are the predictions fulfilled?
Well, environmentalists would predict that you equalize environment and you equalize intelligence.
Nope, doesn't happen.
And, sorry, it's not like what Charles Murray says is that it's not like there's some big trick that we haven't tried yet.
I mean, if you look at the amount of resources that have been poured into equalizing ethnic differences between IQ, it is one of the biggest, if not, you could argue, the biggest social engineering project that the species has ever undertaken.
And it has come up, snake eyes, it has come up with virtually no capacity to budge any of the IQ scores over time.
Charles did a very interesting study after publishing the bell curve to answer the environmentalists, which I don't think anybody, any of them pay much attention to, but their notion is that the family shapes the person, right, environmentally.
Well, what if you take two children in the same family?
Now, what a lot of people don't understand is that That natural siblings differ two-thirds as much as strangers do in IQ because they may be 50% like their parents, but the sibs get different genes, and they typically differ by 11 or 12 points.
So he took cases where the children did differ and asked, okay, Did they have the same outcomes nonetheless?
Because these were advantaged families.
I mean, the parents were married, you know, the father worked.
And he found that they were about as different as any other unrelated kids of the same IQ. And there are ways to test, there actually are ways to test whether the black-white difference, mean difference, What proportion is genetic?
No one will do it.
I do know someone who did it for education, and of course he found genetic differences, but it's very handy that people are so scared, especially geneticists,
to do the analyses that are perfectly possible to determine The percentage of the phenotypic difference of the genetic...
I mean, that would be a very interesting thing to do.
But sometimes they've been done, and then the publication that the advisor yanks it back, you can't publish that.
So there's an avoidance of evidence.
There's...
Now...
So Phil...
He was a very honorable man.
He, like a lot of people like me who get in trouble, cared about the truth.
You know, just dog it.
I've got to find the answer, right?
And then you're kind of shocked when, you know, you get shot from a corner you didn't expect.
But he was theoretical.
He used theoretical doesn't mean armchair.
It means trying to explain a pattern of evidence and predict from it what's going to happen so you can confirm.
You always have to change it, but not this ad hoc.
Well, maybe we'll try this.
Maybe it's that.
The environmental side has lurched from one explanation to another over the decades.
They keep maintaining that...
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the racial differences have been closing.
When I was in graduate school, umpteen years ago, back in the 70s, I was reading that it had closed to third.
Next decade, it's closed to third.
Next decade, it's closed to third.
Okay?
So, and it hasn't.
So, a lot of wishful thinking, a lot of ignoring the body of evidence and Phil, in particular, got some of the worst smearing...
I mean, we don't have to go through it, but it was really terrible, worse for him than many others, although Arthur Jensen needed police escort for a while.
His mail opened by the university police to make sure there weren't any bombs in there.
Things like that, but no, it's...
But if people...
If just the average scientist would say, well, what's your evidence?
Or, hmm, or I saw this, or add intelligence to their studies.
I mean, even little things...
And not criticize people who do provide the data, or criticize them in ways that aren't really criticisms, but they look devastating to the layman.
It would make a huge difference.
Everybody can do a little.
Now, why?
Some of my colleagues I've debated with say, but it's harmful.
How can you possibly morally...
Condone talking about racial differences, especially if they're genetic.
There's a fear of genetics, first of all, that's totally wrong-headed.
This is a diversion again, sorry.
But my students, they all think that environmentalism is going to save us.
I say, okay.
Imagine that your IQ, everyone's IQ, is totally dependent on the environment.
You think that what would happen?
You think that all social processes and institutions are going to jump on the bandwagon?
All people are going to jump on the bandwagon and say, we've got to equalize everything so everybody comes out equal.
You think?
People have conspiracy theories now about the government.
And so you want to put your child's intellectual future in the hands of politicians?
Genetics, because of the difference in In the genetic makeup of children and parents, you are guaranteed to have social mobility.
Okay?
Environmentalism doesn't guarantee any social mobility.
Genetics does.
And how would we have ever evolved a big brain if it was so subject to every little environmental thing, from insults to You know, less reading instruction.
No.
It's resilient.
People, children have been locked in closets and come out not able to speak, but then they catch up.
Maybe not as much as they would have.
Kids who are starved, you know...
Or Helen Keller.
Yeah.
So, it's...
Thank God for a genetic component...
both socially and we wouldn't be here if it were so Yeah, because I also wanted to remind people who don't know about this, of course, this is the issue of regression to the mean, that you're not going to end up with some super cast of genius with these giant blue space alien heads, that smart people have generally smarter than average kids, but less smart than themselves.
And people who are below average intelligence may have below average intelligence kids, but still smarter than themselves.
There's this washing machine churning that goes on in the realm of genetics.
And so, my husband was from lower social class and grew up in an orphanage.
And he's brilliant.
And he was picked out, this is called evocative gene correlation, where his teachers noticed it, and he ended up in Bronx High School of Science.
He had never thought of going to college, let alone graduate school.
And then he eventually became a professor at Johns Hopkins.
I mean, there's...
I know black colleagues who've been in the same position, white colleagues who grew up in the projects, and thank goodness that, for them, that there was regression to the mean and that people paid attention to their talents.
Now, the problem comes, what about the people who regressed down or who were low to begin with?
Or groups that are lower than average?
That is a really tough question.
And that, I was, I won't say disillusioned, but very worried decades ago about that.
Because it does seem intractable.
But there are things that can be done.
And one is to do less harm.
Okay, by ignoring the differences.
Another is to understand how the complexity of the environment really...
It's making us all stupid, okay?
It really is.
Go on.
But, you know, I won't give any personal examples, but we can all think of some ourselves and our children showing us how to do certain things.
But even the most mundane things, like bus schedules, all the bureaucratic paper that comes over the computer, if you have one, or in the mailbox, they're mystifying for many people, and they get a lot of things wrong, and in health.
That's where my concern is now.
And we don't have time to talk about it, but people are literally dying because medicine doesn't pay attention to differences in intelligence.
And they don't even need to call it intelligence, but reasoning and learning.
The prescriptions or the treatment regimens for things like diabetes are incredibly complex.
There is complex as many jobs, middle to high level jobs.
You don't get any training.
To speak of.
You don't have any days off.
And you're certainly not paid for it.
You don't want that job.
But it's constant problem solving and dealing with ambiguity.
And people, unless you understand that some people need a lot of, you know, they don't have cognitive access.
We talk a lot about economic access to health care.
Cognitive access, you might as well not have.
Economic access.
No one's talking about cognitive access.
Now, that affects a lot of people of all races, but if you're worried about blacks, it affects many, many more blacks proportionately than whites.
So if you care, you really should pay attention, is my argument.
And I am tired of arguments saying that, well, I'm evil, you know, I don't care, You know, whatever the argument.
It's self-delusional and self-congratulatory, as I see, for many people to say, but you can't talk about that.
That's social harm.
And they don't even look at it, you know, or they somehow think that if you talk about it, the American people will somehow be seized with these urges towards genocide.
Are you kidding me?
But all they do to scare researchers off and medical people say Hitler, Nazi, genocide.
And it shuts the discussion down.
And I think it is so reprehensible.
Okay, so I'll turn the text on.
You tell me why it's good.
To have the differences.
I mean, I agree with you.
And there was, of course, a long intellectual tradition, particularly in the West, all the way dating back to Socrates, who said, when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.
And it used to be the case, like I remember when I was a kid, learning how to be a good sports person.
You know, it was important.
You know, if you lose the tennis racket, you don't pound it on the ground.
And if you lose the chess match, you don't douse it with gasoline.
You set fire to the whole thing.
I mean...
You have to learn how to lose gracefully.
There's no such thing as chess.
You automatically lose by slandering.
And when that understanding seems to dissipate from society, it leaves intellectual pioneers vulnerable to the most horrendous poison arrows in the mainstream media in particular.
And people get then deluded and the entire intellectual conversation of the species, which is fundamentally how we progress, it becomes completely twisted and tortured because people don't see that the slander is a concession of an inability to rebut the data.
And until we can somehow restore this ancient dictum that when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser, we cannot have intelligent discussions.
And it bothers me no end the degree to which If the black community, and we can focus on any variety, it could be a Hispanic community and so on, and you could even talk about the Jewish community.
If everyone says to Jews, oh, you can't be engineers because of Hamina Hamina, well, it's a bell curve.
Of course some of them can be fantastic engineers and some blacks can be fantastic intellectuals.
But if the edifice of giant monolithic white institutional racism is held up like a giant wall in front of the entire black community, then it does not encourage those who have every conceivable ability to do anything they want in the world If they don't understand the bell curve and that it's not just this big giant wall of white racism like a glacier bearing down on their civilization, but they have every potential to achieve as much as they want.
If they understand the bell curve, then they're not trapped in this, well, you know, we're oppressed and they all hate us and then you get this very aggressive response.
I mean, the idea that not talking about this stuff is somehow promoting social peace is one of the greatest delusions that requires a complete avoidance of all media reports of racial incidents for the past 200 years.
Sorry about the rant, but it's just the idea that we're not doing harm by avoiding the facts.
How can you even think that?
No, I agree completely.
Your rant, as you said, was so impressive that I just washed out of my mind the point I was going to say.
I know we've got to finish up, but I want to put Rushton's theory in context a little bit here.
We'll put links below.
A lot of his work is available online, which is, of course, much to the benefit of people.
And look, if you disagree with it, dig into the data, rebut it.
Don't just sort of petulantly scream racism, eugenic Nazi Hitler.
That is just setting fire to the chessboard and think you're Boris Kasparov, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, if I understand this rightly, his general proposition was that when you move from more resource-rich environments where the predations are random, and of course, in Africa, it would be, you know, largely twofold, other people and everything that's alive that's not other people, like...
It could be lions or it could be, of course, the big problem was infectious diseases and so on.
Things you can't really do much about.
And when you're in an environment where the mortality of your offspring in particular It comes about for things you really can't do anything about, then your goal is in our selected mechanism to have as many kids as humanly possible to overcome the random predations of hostile environments where you're not limited by the amount of food but just random predations and happenstances.
When you exit that environment and you go north in particular, the further north you go, the more controllable the mortality becomes because you can domesticate animals more peacefully, You can, of course, more opportunities for agriculture, which you have to have in order to survive.
You can't hunter-gatherer your way through six months of the Siberian winter.
And so you have more control of your environment and the deferral of gratification, which is necessary, of course, for agriculture in particular.
You've got to hoard your seed crop.
You can't eat it.
You've got to plant it.
You've got to all work together.
Social organization and cohesion and in-group preferences become stronger.
You're less susceptible to disease, although there was, of course, a spike with that, with the domestication of animals.
But the winter kills off a lot of the bugs and insects and so on that would prey upon you and cause disease for you.
And because your environment has become more complicated, the deferral of gratification, which seems to go hand in hand with the development of higher intelligence, rewards and relentlessly selects for more in-group preference, higher intelligence, and also, because your environment is more complex, pair bonding where you teach your children all of the complicated mechanisms for survival that are needed.
Animal husbandry and agriculture and so on.
You have this relentless selection.
And then you have in this RK model where you have the random predation but excessive resources available to live, lots of kids, little parental investment, little in-group cohesion.
And then as you go further to whites and then, of course, to East Asians who were up around the Siberian region.
You really have this relentless selection towards intelligence.
And as you get the bigger brain, you've got to divert some of the resources from a bigger body.
So you end up with a smaller body and a bigger brain.
And I think Rushton documented about 60 physiological differences that the RK theory would predict, which to my knowledge were fairly consistently borne out.
And again, we don't have to go into all of them.
context, and I hope I'm not completely mutilating what is a very impressive theory, but so people can put that in context, that there are evolutionary pressures which are predicted in the theory, and the physical manifestations over time of those evolutionary pressures were very well documented and and the physical manifestations over time of those evolutionary pressures were very well documented and predicted by the theory, and I don't think he found any significant exceptions to what he was anticipating, which has I mean, in the social sciences, that's like physics as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, well, some people argue, well, there's no such thing as race, so none of it matters, which, of course, or we're 99.9% alike, but that leaves 3 million base pairs that are different.
We're 80% alike to earthworms.
What does that have to do with anything, right?
99.5 to chimpanzees.
But, yeah.
So, it's...
His theory has...
No one's attacked it empirically, as far as I know.
Not the whole thing.
You know, people will pick around the edges, or I don't like how you aggregate studies, or you shouldn't aggregate, or silly things, and then the other people call him a hierarchicalist, if that meant anything.
So, no, and he weathered it as an absolute gentleman.
He answered in, never in kind, but in data.
Um...
And so we're fortunate that he, and there are others like him, who are just relentless in looking at the data.
And they've, like me, they've had to give up early ideas about what's what.
I would add another point, that while there's a monolithic view for ideology or mythology, About intelligence in the media and certainly in political pronouncements and in much of academe.
It's not...
These things are not unknown in the general public.
For someone who's been attacked publicly in the media, you know, I... People...
I get to know who I am, and I get letters from people still, all the time, and emails saying, this makes so much sense.
Or, thank you.
Or, what do you think of this?
And people have used their common sense.
And I remember my husband and I were asked by a black pastor back in the 80s to speak to his fellow pastors.
This isn't an unknown thing among blacks either.
It's something that maybe none of us would wish for, and it complicates our view of fairness, but we're dealing with a democratic dilemma.
Okay?
People differ in intelligence.
If we treat them fairly and there's an open system to get ahead, there will be, quote, inequality.
The only way you can do away with inequality is to block, like the Handicap Regenerals story that you may have read by Kurt Vonnegut.
The pretty people you make ugly, the smart people you wear earphones that muddle their brains, You block upward ascent by people with talent and you bring up people who don't have talent as if they did.
So that's not...
You want to do something good, you've got to pay attention to what nature says.
I mean, Mother Nature...
Has given us, for better words, has given us some constraints, political constraints and social constraints.
But pretending that she doesn't exist isn't going to do away with the constraints.
It's just going to mutate or the...
I can't think of the word right now, but the solutions, they will be iatrogenic.
So that's my soapbox.
No, I appreciate that.
And I appreciate, of course, that you and other researchers have stood, you know, on the mountaintop and cried your barbaric database yorps to the world as a whole, to quote the poet.
And it is uncomfortable stuff.
I recognize that, you know, I can feel the collective, you know, of the listenership as a whole.
But we, you know, we must be courageous in pursuing the data where the data leads.
This is called civilization.
This is called science.
This is called the discourse.
And the accumulated data is too much for any rational person to ignore.
And I certainly don't mean to convince anybody one way or the other, but if you follow the data and listen to the experts and try to avoid the clamoring mob of Pitchfork-bearing villagers out to slay the ogres of their imaginary moral outrage.
You can learn a lot, and I think we can make a lot of progress in social cohesion, in peace, because the great enemy of compatibility is delusion.
And, you know, if we get the facts, then I think we can all get along a lot better, and we can actually make progress where progress is possible.
But denying the facts is so dangerous.
Sorry, go ahead.
There's a lot of catastrophic thinking, which is unwarranted.
As I learned in college, some psychotherapists say, if you have a monster in your dream, turn around and face it.
Go away.
Or it won't look so bad.
So I think if people looked at the situation in the face, they see it's not catastrophic.
It's not going to...
The United States isn't going to crumble.
You know, there isn't going to be any more fighting in the streets than there is now.
So...
So that the fear has been ginned up so much that is totally unrealistic in my view.
And that's part of the strategy for critics to undercut the seeming power of the evidence is to make people fear the consequences which they never spell out.
Never spell out.
They'll mention genocide.
But never say, what, how would that happen?
Or, well, I've had people tell me, well, what you're saying means that we won't give anybody a help, we won't give blacks any help at all.
Other people have said, well, we're going to have rampant affirmative action, if they believe what you say.
So, just making the point that Policies can go many different ways.
But policies will always go wrong without the right data.
I mean, to me, that is just the basic.
So, really, I mean, I know we've taken a lot of your time.
Hugely, hugely appreciate the call, you know, in bringing the different researchers to bear on the audience.
I hope, of course, to provoke a robust discussion about taboo topics.
I mean, that to me, it is the job of public intellectuals to tell the difficult truths to an unwilling population sometimes, you know.
If you're fat and your doctor says, hey, looking good, then he's not actually doing you...
