BECAUSE DARWINISM IS NOTHNG MORE THAN A BOAST:

All brains are the same color (Richard E. Nisbett, December 9, 2007, IHT)

Why rely on such misleading and indirect findings when we have much more direct evidence about the basis for the IQ gap? About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher IQs than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and "negroidness" of features are only weakly associated with IQ.

During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average IQ of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

Most tellingly, blood-typing tests have been used to assess the degree to which black individuals have European genes. The blood group assays show no association between degree of European heritage and IQ. [...]

A superior adoption study - and one not discussed by the hereditarians - was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in IQ between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Moore's finding that children adopted by white families had IQs 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families.

The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of IQ as those of middle-class whites.

Important recent psychological research helps to pinpoint just what factors shape differences in IQ scores. Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, the blacks did just as well as the whites.

Whites showed better comprehension of sayings, better ability to recognize similarities and better facility with analogies - when solutions required knowledge of words and concepts that were more likely to be known to whites than to blacks. But when these kinds of reasoning were tested with words and concepts known equally well to blacks and whites, there were no differences. Within each race, prior knowledge predicted reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.

There's no such thing as species.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2007 8:59 AM