Race and IQs

[Huggy Bear]

About IQ as it relates to race.

What about IQ as it relates to race?  Are you asking if I think there are inherent differences in intelligence between the races?  If so, my answer is I don't know.  I'm inclined to be skeptical of the claim that there are inherent differences in intelligence, but not having studied the subject in any depth, I must acknowledge that my opinion is not an informed one.  If you're asking me if I think there are measurable differences between the intelligence of different races, that's a different question, but one to which I again must answer that I don't know, though I would be more hesitant to jump to conclusions about the latter rather than the former.

Also do you accept research that hasn't been peer reviewed as scientific?

You're getting rather abstruse here.  If you're asking me whether I believe that a book reporting scientific results has to be peer reviewed to be valid, then no I don't think so.  That simply doesn't follow.  Would I have greater confidence in the research if it was peer reviewed?  That's a different question, which I would probably answer in the affirmative.  By itself, I don't find the lack of peer review necessarily damning.  Apparently they're getting plenty of peer review post publication, so I'm not sure it matters.

You're being awfully vague in your response...

You took issue with me exposing the obvious bias in the research conducted on racial IQ, why?

You're correct, the 'Bell Curve' has received plenty of peer review post publication and has been thoroughly debunked.

https://www.samtiden.com/tbc/las_artikel.php?id=66

But the caliber of the data in "The Bell Curve" is, at many critical points, pathetic. Further, the authors repeatedly fail to distinguish between correlation and causation and thus draw many inappropriate conclusions.

Herrnstein and Murray, citing "Owen 1992," write that "the IQ of 'coloured' students in South Africa--of mixed racial background--has been found to be similar to that of American blacks." The implication is clear: the admixture of Caucasian and African genes, both in South Africa and in the U.S., boosts "coloured" IQ 10 points above that of native Africans. But the claims made regarding African and coloured IQs cannot withstand critical scrutiny.

Owen's 1992 paper again does not assign IQs to the pupils. Rather he gives the mean number of correct responses on the Progressive Matrices (out of a possible 60) for each group: 45 for whites, 42 for Indians, 37 for coloureds and 28 for blacks. The test's developer, John Raven, repeatedly insisted that results on the Progressive Matrices tests cannot be converted into IQs. Matrices scores, unlike IQs, are not symmetrical around their mean (no "bell curve" here). There is thus no meaningful way to convert an average of raw Matrices scores into an IQ, and no comparison with American black IQs is possible.
The remaining studies cited by Lynn, and accepted as valid by Herrnstein and Murray, tell us little about African intelligence but do tell us something about Lynn's scholarship. One of the 11 entries in Lynn's table of the intelligence of "pure Negroids" indicates that 1,011 Zambians who were given the Progressive Matrices had a lamentably low average IQ of 75. The source for this quantitative claim is given as "Pons 1974; Crawford-Nutt 1976."
A. L. Pons did test 1,011 Zambian copper miners, whose average number of correct responses was 34. Pons reported on this work orally; his data were summarized in tabular form in a paper by D. H. Crawford-Nutt. Lynn took the Pons data from Crawford-Nutt's paper and converted the number of correct responses into a bogus average "IQ" of 75. Lynn chose to ignore the substance of Crawford-Nutt's paper, which reported that 228 black high school students in Soweto scored an average of 45 correct responses on the Matrices--HIGHER than the mean of 44 achieved by the same-age white sample on whom the test's norms had been established and well above the mean of Owen's coloured pupils.
Seven of the 11 studies selected by Lynn for inclusion in his "Negroid" table reported only average Matrices scores, not IQs; the other studies used tests clearly dependent on cultural content. Lynn had earlier, in a 1978 paper, summarized six studies of African pupils, most using the Matrices. The arbitrary IQs concocted by Lynn for those studies ranged between 75 and 88, with a median of 84. Five of those six studies were omitted from Lynn's 1991 summary, by which time African IQ had, in his judgment, plummeted to 69.
Lynn's distortions and misrepresentations of the data constitute a truly venomous racism, combined with scandalous disregard for scientific objectivity. Lynn is widely known among academics to be an associate editor of the racist journal "Mankind Quarterly" and a major recipient of financial support from the nativist, eugenically oriented Pioneer Fund. It is a matter of shame and disgrace that two eminent social scientists, fully aware of the sensitivity of the issues they address, take Lynn as their scientific tutor and uncritically accept his surveys of research.

At long last, Herrnstein and Murray let it all hang out: "Affirmative action, in education and the workplace alike, is leaking a poison into the American soul." Having examined the American condition at the close of the 20th century, these two philosopher-kings conclude, "It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived...." This kind of sentiment, I imagine, is what led "New York Times" columnist Bob Herbert to the conclusion that "The Bell Curve" "is just a genteel way of calling somebody a nigger." Herbert is right. The book has nothing to do with science.

Now If you have information proving the 'Bell Curve' scientifically sound, provide it, otherwise your objections have no merit.