God Fearing Atheist

And to finish...

Insofar as schooling is directed at manipulation of basic symbols, abstract thinking, and so forth, it may work to increase IQ. Lee (1951) found a small increase for African-American school children who fled southern segregation, but its difficult to know the true extent to which education plays a role. Maybe after more research.

As far as intelligence goes, let me quote Jensen:

So we have lots of different abilities, but the thing is, they are all positively correlated. You can use factor analysis to describe the total variance of these abilities in terms of a smaller number of factors that are different in terms of generality. So you have, on the one hand, alot of really specific factors on the top, and on the other, a single, really general one at the bottom (called g). What g actually is is a matter of debate. Jensen and Reed (1992) propose that it is something like neural processing speed. The great Charles Spearman (1927), who's major theoretical contribution *was* g, thought it was some kind of hokey metal energy. That g is firmly established, though, is clear enough.

As far as racial admixture goes, there have been lots of studies using autosomal DNA markers (which are either population specific or differ in frequency between populations) that show, on average, most African-Americans get about 25% of their genetic content from folks of European decent (along paternal lines; rapes and other sorts of sexual abuse during slavery?). Its slightly less in other places. For example, Parra et al. (1998) estimate that Jamacians are about 6.8% European.

I define race the way the way I did above.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Refs

Reed, T.E & Jensen, A.R. (1992). Conduction velocity in a brain nerve pathway of normal adults correlates with intelligence level. Intelligence, 16, 259-272.

Spearman, C. (1927) The abilities of man. New York: Macmillan.

Lee, E.S. (1951). Negro intelligence and selective migration: A Philadelphia test of the Klineberg hypothesis. American Sociological Review, 16, 227-232.

Parra, E. et al. (1998). Estimating African American admixture proportions by use of population-specific alleles. American Journal of Human Genetics, 63, 1839-1851.

Jensen, A.R. (1999) The G Factor: the Science of Mental Ability. Psycoloquy, 10, 23.

-GFA

edit: edited to include a reference i forgot to cite by accident.

God Fearing Atheist

The interesting thing about African-American admixture is that it correlates with a higher IQ in that population than in Africans (1 standard deviation below the European IQ, as opposed to 2).

-GFA

Ut

Huh? Are you serious, GFA?

You do know what the definition of mentally retarded is: someone whose IQ is 2 or more standard deviations below average. Therefore, your claim is equivalent to saying that the average person of African descent is mentally retarded

Do you honestly believe this to be the case?

God Fearing Atheist

"Retarded" technically begins at an IQ of 70, so it would have to be two or more SDs below the European mean.

These are the scores Africans test at. Of course, it would be ridiculous to think that it is mostly genetic, but i would suspect that, adjusting for various environmental factors, they would still average below the African-American mean to some degree.

-GFA

God Fearing Atheist

I should also note that, given the support for Spearman's hypothesis (that the more g-loaded the test subset, the greater the BW difference), a hypothetical g-only test would probably yeild a much larger BW gap than the one that exists in IQ.

If I remember, Jensen guesstimated it at 2 SDs.

-GFA