C'mon!

"Nativism"?! Let's call it what it really is. Racism - the belief that one is superior (intellectually or otherwise) based upon their race.

[Aside! Yes. I've read "The Bell Curve" and found it wanting. While any group of tests can show differences between the races, the fact that IQs have been rising rapidly among all groups demolishes the idea we are bound that tightly by our genes.]

The fact they rise among all groups, rather than a gap closing, proves IQ is a to a degree a function of race, doesn't it?

A book I mentioned last week, Robert Ehrlich's "8 Preposterous Propositions," has a good discussion of the meaning, if any, of rising IQ scores.

Since IQ tests don't actually measure anything, their rise and fall does not tell us anything.

Except, perhaps, that people do better at things they are familiar with. In 1910, most people who bought cars hired drivers to drive them, because driving was thought to be an unusual skill.

No one would propose that somehow we have all evolved superior driving skills over the past 90 years.

Harry:

I love how you deny science when you dislike the results--it's very reassuring because otherwise you'd be a fanatic.

There isn't any science in IQ tests. Never was.

Ehrlich's book (and his previous "9 Crazy Ideas") are really about epistemology and they are the cat's meow on that subject.

Of course it's science, you just don't like what it says. But you're in good company, it even drove Stephen Gould to basically reject evolution.

Re: IQ

Harry,

To argue the meaning of "IQ", or its relevence to race is reasonable. To argue that it "means nothing" is to court ridicule.

Further, I'd be skeptical of Mr. Ehrlich being the final authority on most of the issues in his book. Though I haven't read more than what I could peruse on amazon, it is pretty clear that the book is about finding "science" that backs an agenda more than a scholarly review of the topics at hand.

OJ,

Your query proposes interesting questions, however, since .....

1. almost all races still "flock together", and
2. a reasonable person would concede that "nurture" has to have at least some impact on our lives....

it stands to reason "differences among groups" doesn't really "prove" much. When all other variables can be controlled, it might be possible to measure a genetic predisposition toward "intelligence" more accurately. But even there, other factors such as morality, personal choices, and even luck (see Ringworld) would come into play.

Bruno

Bruno:

The differences within races seem even more extravagant though than these between races. People with low IQs aren't hiding their smarts, they are in fact less intelligent as a rule.

Have not read Mr. Ehrlich's book. I hope his past pronouncements on population and the depletion of natural resources is included among the nine, but I doubt it.

This is a different Ehrlich, Tom. This one is a physics prof at George Mason U.

OK, IQ measures the ability to take IQ tests. The secular increase in scores reflects the fact that we are now used to taking them. Ehrlich goes into this.

Here's another example of the kind of thing that Orrin consistently mistakes for "evolution."

In every horse-centered society, infants "learn to ride before they can walk" and the warriors are described as "the finest light irregular cavalry" there ever was.

Now, man did not meet horse, except as diner and dinner, until perhaps 10,000 years ago, and in the Americas not until 400 years ago.

Yet the remarks about horse-centered society have been applied to the Plains Indians as well as to the Mongols, etc.

There is no specific horse-gene in us, but evolution has given us various skills that, in certain circumstances, prove very useful.

But it is a matter of habituation and learning, not, as Orrin imagines, genetics. People living in Manhattan have the same genes as Mexican vaqueros, pretty much, but Manhattanites are for the most part nervous around horses and vaqueros are fearless.

You'll get no argument from me when you argue that genes are impervious to change across environments.

That wasn't what I argued.

Mutations accumulate and are selected for or against when stresses build up. When unstressed, selection does not occur.

The group of mutations sloshes back and forth according to circumstance, until "fixed" by a rare (founder) event.

If there had been a founder event for humans during the past 10K years, we'd know about it.