more on Jensen

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 18 1999 - 14:38:32 PST


                Copyright 1999 C. Loring Brace

                RACIALISM, RACISM, AND THE BIGOT BRIGADE
                Book review of Jensen on Intelligence-g-Factor

                C. Loring Brace
                Museum of Anthropology
                University of Michigan
                1109 Geddes Avenue
                Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
                clbrace@umich.edu
                http://www.umma.lsa.umich.edu

    ABSTRACT: Jensen (1998) differs from Jensen (1969) only in
    statistical elaboration. Although 'intelligence' is described as a
    'construct' and therefore something that should be discarded as a
    word, it lives on as 'g' which in fact is a construct of factor
    analysis. 'Races' may themselves be social constructs, but since
    people believe in them, they live on as entities to be invested
    with varying amounts of 'g'. However, not only do races have no
    biological coherence, but an assessment of the millions of years of
    hominid prehistory leads to the espectable null hypothesis that
    there should be no difference in mental capability between any of
    the human groups in the world. Assumptions to the contrary qualify
    as racialism and actions based on those assumptions qualify as
    racism.

1. With the publication of "The g Factor: The Science of Mental
Ability" (1998), Arthur R. Jensen illustrates in the form of a single
person an embodiment of the judgement applied by Talleyrand, that
politicien extraordinaire, to characterise the Bourbons of the ancien
regime in eighteenth-century France: he has learned nothing, and
forgotten nothing. This ponderous, extensively documented and clearly
written volume is simply an updated version of the tract he published
thirty years ago in the Harvard Educational Review, 'How much can we
boost IQ and scholastic achievement?' (1969). These, along with an
unbroken stream of similar written contributions, present a massive
picture of mental stasis. One of those intervening manifestations, his
"Bias in Mental Testing" (1980), an equally ponderous monument to
intellectual inertia, adds a depressing demonstration of the pervading
presence of bias in the mental testing business ' not in the nature
of the tests themselves but in the assumptions on the part of the
testers.

2. Jensen's outlook is a classic example of 'racialism' in Todorov's
sense of the word (Todorov, 1993:91). As a racialist, he takes it for
granted (a) that entities called 'races' exist, (b) that there is a
continuity between physical 'type' and behavioural capabilities, and
(c) that those capabilities can be ranked in hierarchical fashion among
groups. He is less explicit in reiterating those elements of his belief
in his recent writings, including "The g Factor," but it is quite clear
that nothing has shaken his initial faith in their reality. Other
reviewers are dealing at great length with the thicket of details
contained in his latest book, including the realisation that his 'g' is
simply an artifact produced by the nature of factor analysis. The basic
flaw is not in Jensen's technical treatment, but in his unexamined
underlying assumptions. His conceptual framework is exactly the same as
it was thirty years ago. It will repay us, then, to go back and look at
what he said at that earlier time.

3. Although he now quotes his inspiration, Charles Spearman (1904,
1927), on the observation that 'intelligence' has 'no scientifically
acceptable meaning in the context of human individual differences' (p.
48), there has been no wavering in his conviction that group
differences are real and significant. Initially, he approved of the
idea that 'intelligence' is the ability to adapt to 'civilization' and
that 'races' differ in that ability according to the civilisations in
which they live (edited reply to letter by D. N. Robinson, New York
Times Magazine, Sept. 21, 1969:14). I.Q., in his view, is a measure of
the ability to adapt to 'Western' civilisation. The implication, of
course, is that people of recent African ancestry have not had enough
time to adapt to the selective pressures imposed by 'Western'
civilisation and therefore should be expected to have lower I.Q.
scores. Indeed, he has gone on record as declaring that 'at least'
one-quarter of the African American population is mentally retarded as
measured by his 'g', and that this, not the legacy of slavery and a
succeeding century of enforced inequality of opportunity, is the reason
for the social and economic disparity between African Americans and
other groups to whom they are compared (Jensen, 1992:174).

4. Here we need to introduce a perspective that is completely lacking
in formulations of this kind. If one takes seriously the information in
history and prehistory as available from the archaeological record,
virtually no current 'civilisation,' let alone that vaunted 'Western'
civilisation, has continued in its present form for more than a few
thousand years, or in the case of the latter, a few hundred years. To
this, we can add what we have learned concerning just how long it takes
to make significant evolutionary changes in human form. For example,
the initial spread of humans into the western hemisphere goes back
maybe 15,000 years, give or take a few thousand (Frison, 1998;
Dillehay, 1999). From that time on, people of Northeast Asian origin
have made their homes as continuing local inhabitants from the arctic
circle to the equator and well into the south temperate zone. In spite
of 15,000 years or so of continuous occupation at those latitudinal
extremes, there is no gradient in skin colour among the inhabitants of
the New World (Vignaud, 1922). Skin colour is one of those traits that
responds as promptly and directly to differences in the intensity of
environmentally imposed selective forces as any known, and yet it is
clear that 15,000 years is not a long enough time to have had any
effect at all on its manifestations in the native populations of the
western hemisphere. If that is the case, then the much briefer and more
transient differences in the time depth of the current 'civilisations'
Jensen posits should have had no discernible effect whatsoever on the
intellectual capabilities of the world's people.

5. When one looks at the accumulated evidence concerning the nature of
human survival strategies prior to the beginnings of agriculture 10,000
years ago, namely the archaeological record, it is evident that there
was no significant difference in the way the various human groups coped
for a span of some two-million years (Smith, 1994; Brace, 1995; Fagan,
1998). Yes, some lived in areas where the sunlight is less strong and
the winters are colder than in other areas. But the same thing has been
true for some tens of millions of years for temperate zone versus
tropical rodents, carnivores, and ungulates, and there is no indication
that northern mice, foxes and deer are intellectually different from
their southern relatives. The same generalisation should also apply to
the human situation.

6. Near the beginning of his three-decade-long campaign, Jensen stated,
'I simply say the idea of a genetic difference is not an unreasonable
one because everything else that's ever been examined has shown
differences and why should the brain be an exception? It's not an
unreasonable proposition, but it has not been proved in any
scientifically acceptable way. I think it could be' (quoted in Neary,
1970:62). The attempt to provide that proof now runs to more than 400
papers and a series of ponderous tomes.

7. None of this, however, has paid even the most rudimentary kind of
attention to the possible circumstances that could have contributed to
why one would expect population differences in cognitive capability.
Instead, the entire focus has been on the techniques of measurement. At
one point Jensen declared, 'One cannot treat a fever by throwing away
the thermometer' (1980:xi). There is something extraordinarily telling
about that imagery. In the assessment of 'intelligence', Jensen's
entire career has been focused on the construction and refinement of an
intellectual thermometer. But better thermometers do not in themselves
do anything to treat the differences in temperature revealed, any more
than better IQ tests do anything to treat the intellectual performance
differences revealed. And quite the reverse of Jensen's declaration
that 'everything else that's ever been examined has shown differences,'
one thing that has not shown group differences is that essential datum,
average human body temperature. As the medical profession around the
world knows, those aspects of human biochemistry and physiology that
are essential for survival are the same in all human populations.

8. It is universally accepted that, even though there are individual
differences, thermometer readings which depart from the human norm
indicate that there is something wrong. It is at least as expectable
that cognitive tests which indicate deviations of one or another group
from species-wide standards should also tell us that something is
wrong, and that in all probability there are non-inherited factors
involved. Given the multiple-million-year stretch during which the
selective forces bearing on hominid cognitive capabilities were
essentially identical at any given time, we should start with the
expectation that the same level of intellectual capability ought to
have evolved in all human groups (Brace, 1999a). In effect, this should
be regarded as the null hypothesis. Jensen, however, has labelled this
the 'egalitarian fallacy,' adding that it is 'gratuitous' and
'scientifically unwarranted' (Jensen, 1980:370).

9. On the contrary, however, the data of anthropology show that this is
fully warranted as a starting point (Brace, 1995, 1999a). Thirty years
ago I noted that a credible demonstration of group differences in
capability could only be possible 'when social conditions for all races
are equal and this situation has existed for several generations'
(Brace, 1971). Jensen's reply was that 'Since no operationally testable
meaning is given to 'equal' social conditions, such a statement, if
taken seriously, would completely preclude the possibility of
researching this important question, not just for several generations
but indefinitely' (Jensen, 1971:24). In contrast, he offers what he
calls his 'default' position, which is that the existence of innate
differences should be the null hypothesis tested (Jensen, 1998:444). By
definition, then, this is a manifestation of 'racialism' as Todorov has
defined it (Todorov, 1993:91).

10. What Jensen has done, then, is to proceed with his programme of
assuming the innate intellectual inferiority of people of African
origin without making even the beginnings of an effort to set up a
scientifically credible test situation. As I replied to his complaint
at that earlier time, 'if in fact Jensen were really interested in an
unbiased testing of the heritable component of intellectual differences
between human groups, he should have been devoting his efforts to
setting up a scientifically acceptable test situation. The very first
step would involve engaging in an attempt to produce an operational
definition of equal social conditions and the systematic effort to see
that these be extended to all of those whom he might wish to test...
Then, and only then, could the question of inherited differences in
ability be posed. In fact, whether or not the question is indeed
"important" could only be decided under such circumstances' (Brace,
1971:8, 1980:334).

11. There are many matters about which the informed reader is certain
to feel uneasy. The casual treatment of the recent massive increase in
I.Q. noted by the New Zealand political scientist, James R. Flynn, is
described as 'puzzling' (Jensen, 1998:318), and dismissed as 'the Flynn
Effect' as though it were something that Professor Flynn had foisted on
the world by some sleight-of-hand trick. This is the same kind of
derogatory treatment used by the authors who coined that term
(Herrnstein and Murray, 1994:307), although the originators are not
mentioned. Then there is the chapter on 'The heritability of g.' This
includes a useful contrast between the meaning of 'hereditary' and
'heritability', but there is no recognition of the fact that
heritability is not a fixed quantity. Nor is it a property of a trait.
It is a ratio of the environmental and genetic contributions to the
manifestation of a given trait calculated for a given population at a
given time, and it can vary over a very large range depending on
circumstances (Lerner, 1954:68). Since Spearman and Jensen's 'g' is a
construct far removed from the level of known genetically controlled
elements, one wonders whether it is just as inappropriate to calculate
a heritability figure for 'g' as it is to do so for those morphological
characters used in cladistics simply because they can be defined and
analysed. As has been noted regarding the latter, recent developments
in biology have made obsolete 'the view that a trait is independently
heritable (or heritable at all) simply because it can be separately
defined and analyzed' (Thorogood, 1997:7).

12. This leads to my final point. Jensen concludes that 'intelligence'
should be discarded as a term, just as concepts such as 'animal
magnetism' and 'phlogiston' have been discarded in the past (Jensen,
1998:48). A good thirty-five years ago, the late Ashley Montagu argued
that, since it was a social construct, 'Race is the phlogiston of our
time' (Montagu, 1964:xii). The prejudicial treatment that has been
meted out in the name of a concept which has no coherent biological
reality is more than enough reason for discarding it. If we really can
discard reifications such as 'race' and 'intelligence' as no more
defensible than phlogiston, then there would be no point in writing
this review. However, it is abundantly clear from the tenor of Jensen's
book that he is strongly committed to both concepts. Jensen has gone on
record as saying that 'the social definition of race should be adequate
and, in fact, should be the only appropriate definition' (1995:42). Can
there be any validity in calculating the heritability of anything that
is associated with a 'self-identified' construct that has no coherent
biological existence?

13. What Jensen has done is to substitute a statistical construct for
'intelligence' and to attribute different amounts of it to groupings
that have no biological reality. I have previously referred to this as
'statistical theology' where 'divinity is depicted with a lower case g'
(Brace, 1980:334). Just recently this has been extolled as 'the jewel
in the crown' (Rushton, 1999) of his three-decade-long defence of a
stance that can only be called racist in Todorov's sense (Todorov,
1993:91). When similar views were promoted in the pages of the
Anthropology Newsletter just a year ago (Rushton, 1998), I replied with
'Beware the Bigot Brigade' (Brace, 1999b). The 'g' Factor certainly
demonstrates that its author continues to qualify for membership in
that still-vigorous sodality.

REFERENCES

Brace, C. L. (1971) Introduction to Jensenism. In C. L. Brace, G. R.
Gamble & J. T. Bond (eds.), Race and intelligence. Washington D.C.:
Anthropological Studies No. 8, American Anthropological Association,
pp.4-9.

Brace, C. L. (1980) Social bias in mental testing: Book Review of
Jensen Bias in Mental Testing. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3,
pp.333-334.

Brace, C. L. (1995) The stages of human evolution. Englewood Cliffs,
N. J.: Prentice-Hall.

Brace, C. L. (1999a) An anthropological perspective on 'race' and
intelligence: the non-clinical nature of human cognitive capabilities.
Journal of Anthropological Research, 55, pp.245-264.

Brace, C. L. (1999b) Beware the bigot brigade. Anthropology
Newsletter, 40, 2.

Dillehay, T. D. (1999) The late Pleistocene cultures of South
America. Evolutionary Anthropology, 7, pp.206-216.

Fagan, B. M. (1998) People of the earth: An introduction to world
prehistory, 9th ed. New York: Longmans.

Frison, G. C. (1998) Paleoindian large mammal hunters on the plains of
North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U. S.
A., 95, pp.14576-14583.

Herrnstein, R. M. & Murray, C. (1994) The bell curve: Intelligence
and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.

Jensen, A. R. (1969) How much can we boost IQ and scholastic
achievement? Harvard Educational Review, 19, pp.1-123.

Jensen, A. R. (1971) Can we and should we study race differences? In
C. L. Brace, G. R. Gamble & J. T. Bond (Eds.), Race and intelligence.
(pp. 10-31). Washington D. C.: Anthropological Studies No. 8, American
Anthropological Association.

Jensen, A. R. (1980) Bias in mental testing. New York: Free Press.

Jensen, A. R. (1992) Mental ability: Critical threshold and social
policy. The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, 17, pp.
171-182.

Jensen, A. R. (1995) Psychological research or race differences.
American Psychologist, 50, pp.41-42.

Jensen, A. R. (1998) The g factor: The science of mental ability.
Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.

Jensen, A. (1999) Precis of: "The g Factor: The Science of Mental
Ability" PSYCOLOQUY 10 (23).
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1999.volume.10/
psyc.99.10.023.intelligence-g-factor.1.jensen
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.23

Lerner, I. M. (1954) Genetic homeostasis. New York: Wiley.

Montagu, A. (ed.) (1964) The concept of race. London: Free Press

Neary, J. (1970) A scientist's variations on a disturbing racial
theme. Life, 68, 58B, 58C, 58D, 61, 62, 64, 65.

Rushton, J. P. (1998) What is everyone afraid of? Anthropology
Newsletter, 39, 2.

Rushton, J. P. (1999) The 'Jensen effect' and g vector analysis:
PSYCOLOQUY 10(044).
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1999.volume.10/
psyc.99.10.044.intelligence-g-factor.3.rushton
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newspy?10.044

Smith, B. D. (1994) The emergence of agriculture. New York: Freeman.

Spearman, C. (1904) 'General intelligence, objectively determined and
measured.' American Journal of Psychology, 15, 201-293.

Spearman, C. (1927) The abilities of man: Their nature and
measurement. New York: Macmillan.

Thorogood, P. (1997) The relationship between genotype and phenotype:
Some basic concepts. In P. Thorogood (ed.), Embryos, genes and birth
defects. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley.

Todorov, T. (1993) On human diversity: Nationalism, racism, and
exoticism in French thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard.

Vignaud, H. (1922) Le problme du peuplement initial de l'Amrique.
Journal de la Socit des Amricanistes de Paris, 14, pp.1-63.



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