theyeti

Here's a link to the <a href="http://www.skepdic.com/iqrace.html" target="_blank">Skeptic's Dictionary</a> article about it, which itself contains some good links.

A couple of thoughts:

IIRC, The Bell Curve was financed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and was thus intended as an ideological missile to derail such programs as affirmative action and civil rights enforcement. While this doesn't necessarily mean that the book's results are wrong, it does cast some suspicion on the objectivity of the authors. It also explains the grumblings about "liberals" in the Amazon reviews. Charles Murray, one of the authors, is currently ensconced at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Insitute. Generally speaking, these organizations have an extremely poor track-record when it comes to their scholarship. Just ask David Brock.

On a different note, if the authors are right, does this justify discrimination? The answer is clearly no. The whole point of a "bell curve", also known as a normal distribution curve, is that you have a wide range for a given attribute with the great majority somewhere in the middle. In this case, you have a small number of stupid people, a small number of very smart people, and a huge number of people that fall somewhere in between. The idea that the authors put forth is that the distribution curve for blacks, etc. is shifted somewhat to the left of that for everyone else. What that means is that on average blacks would be less intelligent. But there is still a huge overlap in the distribution curves, meaning that there is a very good chance that any individual black, chosen at random, will be more intelligent than any individual white, also chosen at random. All The Bell Curve would mean, if true, is that the chances are slightly less than 50%. What this means is that the only way to determine whether a given individual is smarter than another is to ignore race and to judge them on their individual merits. In other words, even if correct, the conclusions of The Bell Curve still lead us to think that discriminatory practices are wrong.

theyeti

Someone7

The book's central theme is about class divisions, not 'race' (the difference in IQ among 'race' is barely mentioned). The full title of the book is The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It is essentially a defense of hereditarianism.

Secular Elation

Well, the book does say something about blacks not performing as well on IQ tests as whites in general. I think this is dealing with race, don't you think?

Bill Snedden

No, I'm talking about "R-squared", the standard measure for "goodness of fit" in regression analysis. The higher the R^2 value, the better the fit of the regression.

An R^2 of .3 means that the relationship plotted in the regression (the independent variable) explains 30% of the variation found in the dependent variable.

I don't consider a 30% relationship very strong at all. While it may well be the single most influencing factor, it certainly doesn't indicate a strong enough relationship to have much predictive value. After all, the great majority of the variation (70%) is driven by other factors.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

Bill Snedden

How do you define "black" or "white"?

One of the problems with these types of generalizations is that there is no biological definition of "race". Results from standardized tests like the NLSY (used in TBC) are grouped into racial categories either by the participants self-identification or by the proctor's choice. Either way, the classifications are more or less arbitrary groupings based on superficial, morphological characteristics: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, epicanthic folds, etc. While there are certainly genes that code for physical characteristics, there is no specific grouping of genetic codes that is identified as "black" or "white".

Add to that the fact that there exists more variation within such arbitary groupings than between them and it is plain to see that there exists some very real question as to whether or not such groupings have any basis in biological reality.

So, while it is certainly true that the average "black" I.Q. score is lower than the average "white" I.Q. score (even on culture-free tests such as the Raven matrices), there is not necessarily any reason to believe that it has any biological connection to "black" or "white". At this point, the hereditary contribution to intelligence simply isn't known (even though it is probably safe to assume that some level of intelligence is heritable). The effects of "nurture" vs. "nature" simply cannot be identified or ruled out at this point.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Jesse

I thought I read somewhere that the authors of the Bell Curve didn't even try to control for education levels...does anyone know if that's true?

Secular Elation

[b]How do you define "black" or "white?"

By "black" I mean African-American (take Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman as examples) and by "white" I mean caucasian (take yourself, for example).

Ender

Getting a little puffed up there, aren't we? By the way the article does not print out the average Chinese's IQ score and the final sentence in the first paragraph seems to be broken. I was robbed! can you read it?

~WiGGiN~

phaedrus

Naah man, just in a fingering mood. Because of the misinterpretation of the book and the study, it got potrayed as a black vs. white study instead of taking the study for what it is - "a frikking study of different classes". Anyhow, i couldnt the read the line in the article as well....here is another link (pdf file), but the lingo is a lil provocative... (but yet again orientals seem to rule )

<a href="http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/TaxonomicConstruct.pdf" target="_blank">Is Race A Valid Taxonomic Construct?</a>

joshack

Bill: I don't consider a 30% relationship very strong at all. While it may well be the single most influencing factor, it certainly doesn't indicate a strong enough relationship to have much predictive value. After all, the great majority of the variation (70%) is driven by other factors.

And yet an R^2 of .3 would be cited as substantial evidence (moderate predictive value I believe) of ANY phenomena in the social sciences. One never finds goodness of fit even approaching 1 in these fields.