The inequality taboo di Charles Murray
- In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups.
- The concepts of “inferiority” and “superiority” are inappropriate to group comparisons.
- women have played a proportionally tiny part in the history of the arts and sciences.[4] Even in the 20th century, women got only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences–a proportion constant for both halves of the century–and 10 percent of the prizes in literature.
- Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but the boys usually do better on standardized tests.[5] The difference in means is modest, but the male advantage increases as the focus shifts from means to extremes.
- In primitive societies, men did the hunting, which often took them far from home. Males with the ability to recognize landscapes from different orientations and thereby find their way back had a survival advantage.
- *****RAZZA******
- Richard Lewontin originated the idea of race as a social construct in 1972, arguing that the genetic differences across races were so trivial that no scientist working exclusively with genetic data would sort people into blacks
- Lewontin’s position, which quickly became a tenet of political correctness, carried with it a potential means of being falsified. If he was correct, then a statistical analysis of genetic markers would not produce clusters corresponding to common racial labels.
- In the last few years, that test has become feasible, and now we know that Lewontin was wrong.[2
- At the moment, the differences that are obviously genetic involve diseases (Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs disease, black Africans and sickle-cell anemia, Swedes and hemochromatosis)
- : (1) The black-white difference in scores on educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly. (2) The black-white convergence in scores on the most highly “g-loaded” tests–the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability–has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 90 years ago
- Whether we are talking about academic achiev
- ment or about IQ, are the causes of the black-white difference environmental or genetic?
- Thus the most interesting recent studies of environmental causes have worked with cultural explanations instead of socioeconomic status.[46]
- comprehensive survey of that evidence, and of the objections to it, appeared this past June in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. There, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen co-authored a 60-page article entitled “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability.”[51] It incorporates studies of East Asians as well as blacks and whites and concludes that the source of the black-white-Asian difference is 50- to 80-percent genetic.
- For those who consider it important to know what percentage of the IQ difference is genetic, a methodology that would do the job is now available. In the United States, few people classified as black are actually of 100-percent African descent (the average American black is thought to be about 20-percent white).[55] To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture
- When you compare black and white mean scores on a battery of subtests, you do not find a uniform set of differences; nor do you find a random assortment. The size of the difference varies systematically by type of subtest. Asked to predict which subtests show the largest difference, most people will think first of ones that have the most cultural content and are the most sensitive to good schooling. But this natural expectation is wrong. The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward.[60] It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation.
- The third implication is that the “Flynn effect” will not close the black-white difference. I am referring here to the secular increase in IQ scores over time, brought to public attention by James Flynn.[72] The Flynn effect has been taken as a reason for thinking that the black-white difference is temporary: if IQ scores are so malleable that they can rise steadily for several decades, why should not the black-white difference be malleable as well?[73] the Flynn effect has been studied over the last decade, the evidence has grown, and now seems persuasive, that the increases in IQ scores do not represent significant increases in g.
- two facts beyond much doubt. First, the conventional environmental explanation of the black-white difference is inadequate. Poverty, bad schools, and racism, which seem such obvious culprits, do not explain it. Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of. Second, regardless of one’s reading of the competing arguments, we are left with an IQ difference that has, at best, narrowed by only a few points over the last century.
http://www.aei.org/publication/the-inequality-taboo/
