A columnist in this Sunday's New York Times is slobbering all over himself in a tizzy about the regularly repeated business (that's been carrying on, hydra like, for decades) about the relationship between IQ and race.
Richard Nesbitt: All Brains Are the Same Color.
The article apparently arose from the recent blunder of James Watson, one of the discoverers of the geometry of DNA, who indicated that he thought that the problems of Africa were intractable because "they" (the Africans) "are not as intelligent as we" (presumably white people and the honorary white people of Asian heritage) "are." Watson, who has apparently become a senile old fart, was forced to resign from his role leading the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, although it must be said that he apologized profusely for what he said.
Whether Watson is a racist - as were several other Nobel Prize winners including the inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, as well as the notorious Nazi anti-Semites Phillip Lenard and Johannes Stark - is somewhat meaningless however.
Nesbitt has, apparently, run all around collecting data from "studies" of intelligence and IQ and he announces, happily, that poor people - who don't feel pain like "we" do - only inherit 10 to 20% of their "intelligence" even if middle class people are alleged to inherit 60 to 80% of their intelligence.
Well then. Oh goody.
Now, let me state definitively that I have a bias here. My Thorndike IQ was recorded dutifully by my elementary school administrators and I happen to know what it is. My third grade teacher, who was very beautiful as I recall - she sort of looked like Grace Kelly - and who also would never allow me to go to the bathroom to pee, causing me at least once to wet myself on the school bus (whereupon predictably kids noted that I was a "retard") - was, as I also recall, very serious about that intelligence test. Except for the occasions on which I wanted to pee real badly, I can't remember a damn thing about my third grade classroom experience other than taking that damn IQ test.
That was all well and good, because it was a very serious matter.
They spent lots of time in those days trying to figure out, when you were in the third grade, how smart you were, so they could find out whether or not they should invest any energy educating your pathetic little stupid ass. If you did badly on the test, they put you in the "slow track." If you were a guy, they tried to teach you a mechanical skill, like metal shop, so you could be good at making license plates in prison. If you were a girl, they tried to see if they could teach you to type, or (especially if you weren't bad looking) how to make a sandwich for your husband.
So they measured my IQ and educated me accordingly. When I was a high school senior, they handed us our transcripts and all of us ran around with our IQ scores trying to determine who was smarter than who. Even though many of us had been together for 13 years at that point, including kindergarten, we needed that awesome number to figure out who was smart and who was and who wasn't smarter than whom. Thirteen years of classroom interaction couldn't have mattered less to us. We had a talismanic number that meant far more.
Over the years, many people have come up to me at different times and asked me what my IQ is. I have always answered "53," although sometimes I stretch the truth a bit and say "57."
In case you're wondering why they had to find this important information about you in the third grade, and not, say, when you were in the eleventh grade, you have to remember what the "Q" in "IQ" stands for. It stands for quotient, which is another word for ratio.
Ratio of what you may ask? Well, if you must know, it is the ratio between your "mental age" and your "chronological age." Assuming that your mom and dad weren't covering up your birth because of some difficulty with their marriage license (that sort of thing happened a lot when I was a kid) your chronological age was generally well known. I think, but do not know, that two significant figures were used. For instance if you were 8 years and 7 months old, your age was recorded as 8.6 years.
Now comes the question of your mental age.
People who have been on the receiving age of my vituperative, vindictive, vicious, vilifying, vile, venomous ventings will all tell you that I act like a nine year old, except when I act like a five year old. If I am actually seven and acting nine then my IQ can be calculated as 9/7 = 1.29 (approximately). For IQ scores, we now multiply by 100 (assuming that we have not joined Greenpeace and thus know how to do these simple kinds of mathematical operations) to learn that my IQ is 129. However, if I act like a nine year old and I am 32, then my IQ is 100*9/32 = 28. Since I never act like a grown-up and continue to act (at best) like a nine year old, my IQ is clearly a monotonically decreasing function. Believe it or not though, people actually believe that their "IQs" are constant. I'm serious. You can run into a bunch of 50 year olds who will join clubs based on what their teachers "measured" when they were in third grade. I kid you not.
Yes I am being a wise guy, but I have a point.
I have an eight year old and this weekend he spent a good part of it converting decimal numbers into binary numbers by hand, the old fashioned way, with a pencil and paper, on which he had produced the powers of 2 up to, I think, 8192. Initially he refused to allow me to do produce the powers of 2 in Excel, or even to show him how to do the calculation in Excel: He wanted it to do by hand. What a great kid. This is how you learn stuff, doing it the hard way. Later he relented on the powers part when his older brother - hoping to be left alone for a few hours -"challenged" him to produce the binary representation of 2 billion.
I should go to my eight year old sometime for some help. I should say "Son, your dad has an IQ of 28" (or lower if I am older than 32, which in fact, I am). Can you render my IQ into binary numbers to make it look better?"
He might say "Sure dad," do his calculations and say, "now your IQ is now 1110."
Then maybe, I'd feel better.
In fact, the different representations would have nothing to do with my intelligence, at all. In fact there is no representation of a single score, call it "IQ" or "BQ" where the latter is an abbreviation of the NNadir locution "bigotry quotient," that has much to do with intelligence in fact.
Everybody who is familiar with my writing knows that I am a big fan of cars. I believe that humanity should do anything, from rototilling the Sumatran and Brazilian rain forests, to changing the continental runoff patterns for water, even to making the entire planet's atmosphere more like that of Venus, to keep our cars.
Many Kossacks share my love of cars, and are always writing diaries about biofuels and Tesla Roadsters and hydrogen hypercars and also "cars are sustainable" books like "Winning the Oil Endgame," by Amory Lovins, award winning "genius," who is a high level marketing executive at Walmart.
Since we all love cars equally, let's ask how many of us would choose to buy a car based on a single number, say the "DQ" the "Desirability Quotient." Suppose I came up to you and said, "My car is better than your car because my car has a "DQ" of 238, while your car has a "DQ" of 79. We'll leave aside for a moment about whether or not your car's "DQ" indicates something about whether or not you should "execute" it (junk it) if it gives you any kind of trouble. Let's ask if you would be willing to invest in a car based on its "DQ," i.e. pay for it.
You might say to me, "Um, NNadir, I like to use my car to drive to Walmart, and it matters whether or not it can fit into tight parking spaces."
"Don't worry," I'd say, "That's factored in to the 'DQ'."
You might say to me, "Um, NNadir, I like to use my car to feel 'free,' just like in the TV ad and it matters to me if my car is able to drive over pristine river beds and billion year old geological formations, because I want my car to have four wheeled drive."
"Don't worry," I'd say, "That's factored in to the 'DQ'."
You might say to me, "Um, NNadir, I like to use my car to feel sexy, even though I'm fatter, uglier and balder than you are."
"Don't worry," I'd say, "That's factored in to the 'DQ'."
You might say to me, "Um, NNadir, I like to use my car to feel 'green,' and it's important to me that my car only consumes as much energy as 1,000 Cambodians use in a year every time I drive to Walmart, as opposed to Governor Arnie's hydrogen Hummer, which consumes as much as 10,000 Cambodians every time he drives to Walmart."
"Don't worry," I'd say, "That's factored in to the 'DQ'."
There's no sense beating the obvious analogy to death. You would never choose to buy a car based on some vague number with arcane criteria like a "DQ." How then, do people choose whether or not to educate a child, whether or not to execute an adult, whether or not to treat entire cultures with dignity and respect, based on a number?
The late great Steven J. Gould, the paleontologist, wrote a book called The Mismeasure of Man that was an extremely sophisticated analysis of this question. The book is now more than 25 years old, but it still stands - given the need to write columns in the New York Times about "race" and "IQ" - as a useful cultural corrective. I don't remember too many books that I read two decades ago, but I remember that one.
One of the criticisms of Gould, by the way, was that he was not a psychometrician. That's sort of like noting that I am a critic of creationism, but that I am not a fundamentalist minister.
It came in handy that I'd read that book, by the way, when some "professionals" to whom I was referred because my oldest son, then three, had difficulty saying words that began with the letters "R" and "S," informed me that he "had a low IQ" and would thus was severely disabled and would need to be in special classes for the rest of his life.
That boy is now in the seventh grade, and he gets rid of his brother by telling him to go "put the number 2 billion in binary notation."
As it happens, there are some physical traits that are "race" based. For instance, if you are of Asian extraction, you probably have a high propensity toward lactose intolerance, which is why you never get served cheese with sushi and also why fried rice in a Chinese restaurant seldom comes with cream sauce. This has lead to some wonderful speculations about history, like the role of animal husbandry in historical famines in Europe, and shows how history impacts genes and how genes inform historians.
Lactose intolerance however, is measurable. It is quantifiable in physical units, by measuring the concentration of lactose in the gut for instance, in grams per liter or some such unit.
It is also known that certain populations have a high propensity to have dark skin, whereas other populations have light skin. This property has a notable impact on rates of melanoma.
Similarly it is known that people of recent African origins (all people have long term African origins) do not respond as well to certain classes of blood pressure medicines as do people of European or Asian origins.
Similarly, for reasons that are not well understood, the rates for breast cancer in Shanghai are about 1/3 the rates in New York. (See, for instance, CANCER RESEARCH 63, 7624–7629, November 15, 2003) The reasons may have something to do with cheese, or they may have something to do with genetic (single nucleotide) polymorphisms in the gene that codes for the catechol O methyl transferase (COMT) enzyme.
In fact though, the population dynamics of the COMT genes are under investigation in ways that are unambiguous. You can easily determine the breast cancer rates of a population, simply by screening them.
The number of genes that are associated with "intelligence" is zero. Why is that? Because "intelligence" cannot be measured.
Now. We are never going stop grateful racists from using the invention of the IQ test to serve their dubious ends. It's not like the equivalents of Chuckie Murray and dead as a doornail Richard Herrnstein are going to stop cropping up from time to time. Next time though, it may behoove us to ask whether all that intelligence tests measure is skill with intelligence tests. Clearly the people from whom modern European origins are descended were selected for survival by their ability to retain the ability to metabolize milk after infancy. It is very doubtful though, that anyone was selected on the basis of their ability to arrange blocks for psychology graduate students in the 1930s.
Clearly there are some perceptual abilities that are genetic. For instance, it is known that the dyslexia gene, for which I am apparently a carrier genotypically but not phenotypically, has an association with an allele on chromosome 18. It is believed that there was a historical situation in human history that once selected for this gene, and it is relatively common. However, the gene has negative consequences in modern times for people who must read in phonetically transcribed languages. It has very serious consequences for people who speak French - French has many letters in its written form that are not voiced - for instance, but very little consequence (even though it is represented) for people who write and speak in Japanese. Thus it may be, that future generations of French speakers will be deselected for this gene, since the ability to read and write has consequences on one's economic status and poor people get shafted when it comes to survival.