3900 words

I came across two articles today, one from The Atlantic and the other from judgybitch.com. Both have attacked Jason Richwine’s dissertation in which he calls for a change to the US immigration policy to turn away low IQ immigrants and only accept high IQ ones. I agree fully with this (if it’s completely controlled, of course). This would drop crime as well as save us more money in welfare and other government programs that low IQ peoples take.

By 2050, 9 out of 10 people in the US will be obese or overweight and by 2020 80 percent of US men will be obese or overweight. This is due, in part, to an influx of those with lower IQs from South of the Border. Jason Richwine’s argument for testing immigrants will, in turn, lower obesity rates in America.

Dr. James Thompson noted how continued mass immigration from the South of the Border would decrease IQ, this is a real and pressing issue. A country is only as good as its majority population and by allowing all of these low IQ people into the country, our country will transform into theirs, which is ironic since that’s the exact thing they’re running away from. You cannot run away from genetics. The overall ‘Hispanic’-white gap is 10.2 points or .72 SDs. That will lower the average IQ of the country even more, and in turn, give us all a lowered quality of life. The average IQ of Mexico is 88 (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2002) so by allowing unfettered mass immigration without checking average IQs to see if they’ll be of any use to us as a country will lead to eventual irreversible effects if this isn’t stopped soon.

The first article I’ll look at is the one from The Atlantic:

Let’s start with the fact that there is no such thing as a direct test of general mental ability. What IQ tests measure directly is the test-taker’s display of particular cognitive skills: size of vocabulary, degree of reading comprehension, facility with analogies, and so on. Any conclusions about general mental ability are inferences drawn from the test-taker’s relative mastery of those various skills.

IQ tests test g or the general intelligence factor which encompasses all mental abilities. I guess the author of this piece has never heard of Raven’s Progressive Matrices. It’s a ‘culture free’ IQ test where the test is based on pattern recognition. No bias there.

Even then, if they don’t speak English and speak Spanish, they can get tests in their native language which are not biased. Gottfredson (1994) and 51 other eminent intelligence researchers signed a 25 point statement in which one of the statements was:

Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.

They will be given the nonverbal test (RPM, see below) or one in their native language, which still test the same underlying concept of the general intelligence factor.

They found that being raised by high-SES (socioeconomic status) parents led to an IQ boost of between 12 and 16 points – a huge improvement that testifies to the powerful influence that upbringing can have.

False. See below.

A study of twins by psychologist Eric Turkheimer and colleagues that similarly tracked parents’ education, occupation, and income yielded especially striking results. Specifically, they found that the “heritability” of IQ – the degree to which IQ variations can be explained by genes – varies dramatically by socioeconomic class. Heritability among high-SES (socioeconomic status) kids was 0.72; in other words, genetic factors accounted for 72 percent of the variations in IQ, while shared environment accounted for only 15 percent. For low-SES kids, on the other hand, the relative influence of genes and environment was inverted: Estimated heritability was only 0.10, while shared environment explained 58 percent of IQ variations.

Turkheimer was right that he did find gene x environment interactions that made genetic influences weaker and shared environment stronger for those from poorer homes in comparison to those from more affluent homes. Though most studies show no interaction effects, or interactions vary significantly.

Other studies have shown that heritabilities are the same both within as well as between white and black samples. That led Jensen to label this the ‘default hypothesis’. Researchers analyzed full and half siblings from the NLSY on three Peabody Achievement Tests. 161 black full siblings, 106 pairs of black half siblings, 314 pairs of full white siblings and 53 pairs of white half-siblings. with measures in math and reading. The best fitting model for all of the data was by which the sources of the sources of the differences between those within race and the differences between races were the same, at 50 percent genetic and environmental. The combined model (50/50) best explains it, whereas the culture-only and genetics-only models are inadequate.

IQ tests are good measures of innate intelligence–if all other factors are held steady.

This is wrong. IQ tests are fine all around the world. RPM is one of the best out there and correlates with g between .8 and .9.

But if IQ tests are being used to compare individuals of wildly different backgrounds, then the variable of innate intelligence is not being tested in isolation. Instead, the scores will reflect some impossible-to-sort-out combination of ability and differences in opportunities and motivations. Let’s take a look at why that might be the case.

Intelligence – g – is the same across every population in the world.

Comparisons of IQ scores across ethnic groups, cultures, countries, or time periods founder on this basic problem: The cognitive skills that IQ tests assess are not used or valued to the same extent in all times and places

This is why they get re-standardized.

Indeed, the widespread usefulness of these skills is emphatically not the norm in human history. After all, IQ tests put great stress on reading ability and vocabulary, yet writing was invented only about 6,000 years ago – rather late in the day given that anatomically modern humans have been around for over 100,000 years. And as recently as two hundred years ago, only about 15 percent of people could read or write at all.

Doesn’t matter. See Raven’s Progressive Matrices above. The general intelligence factor is the same in all populations around the world. There are ways to give intelligence tests, such as RPM, to those who don’t read or write.

More generally, IQ tests reward the possession of abstract theoretical knowledge and a facility for formal analytical rigor.

Abstract thought is linked with intelligence. Those with higher IQs are more analytical than those with lower IQs.

To grasp how culturally contingent our current conception of intelligence is, just imagine how well you might do on an IQ test devised by Amazonian hunter-gatherers or medieval European peasants.

I touched on this in my refutation of Robert Sternberg. The concept of g does not change over time. The more intelligent you are, the better chance you’ll have to survive in those places.

Such skills are used more intensively in the most advanced economies than they are in the rest of the world. And within advanced societies, they are put to much greater use by the managers and professionals of the socioeconomic elite than by everybody else. As a result, American kids generally will have better opportunities to develop these skills than kids in, say, Mexico or Guatemala. And in America, the children of college-educated parents will have much better opportunities than working-class kids.

Those skills are used much more in advanced economies because of higher average innate intelligence. The children of college-educated parents have much better opportunities than working-class kids because intelligence is strongly linked to socioeconomics status.

Among the strongest evidence that IQ tests are testing not just innate ability, but the extent to which that innate ability has been put to work developing specific skills, is the remarkable “Flynn effect”: In the United States and many other countries, raw IQ scores have been rising about three points a decade. This rise is far too rapid to have a genetic cause. The best explanation for what’s going on is that increasing social complexity is expanding the use of the cognitive skills in question – and thus improving the opportunities for honing those skills.

Let’s say Flynn is right. The average black now is as intelligent as the average white in 1945. That’s supposed to show that the race difference in IQ is environmentally caused because there hasn’t been that much genetic change in the white population and the IQ has allegedly gone up 15 points. So, you can have a 15 point difference created by just an environmental change, no one knows why. Some think better nutrition or malnourished brain, etc. That’s also a fallacy. Just because a change in one group over time is due to an environmental change, doesn’t mean, or even make it probable, that a difference between 2 groups at the same time is due to an environmental change. The Flynn Effect make’s that highly unlikely and here’s why.

The Flynn Effect, assuming it’s real, has been acting completely uniformly in every population. Any country you ask, the rate of increase is 3 per decade. That means it’s an environmental factor that affects whites and blacks the same way as well as the whole world. And as a result of this uniform environmental factor, you have a difference in IQ that’s being preserved. That would suggest that the response on the parts of blacks and whites is due to some non-environment factors, a genetic factor, which is making the difference in IQ remain constant as the Flynn Effect goes into effect.

What makes it even more unlikely, in the last 60 years, their environments have become very similar since segregation. These differences don’t exist now, they go to the same schools by court order, same TV shows, same movies, basically same environment for both, and yet, that increasing similarity in the environment, the Flynn Effect, the IQ gap has remained intact. Which means whatever counts for the gap is genetic and not environmental. The more and more similar the environment, the less and less of the difference can be due to the environment and the more and more it must be due to genes. So this 15 point gap surviving these changes in the environment, seems more and more likely to be genetic in origin.

So because this ‘Effect’ is the same across all populations and the gap didn’t close, that means it’s genetic. If the gap persisted even when IQs were rising 3 points per year, the B-W gap has still persisted, proving that it’s genetic.

That is why the Flynn Effect is irrelevant. This “Effect”, has been a slight upward trend in IQ, around 3 points per decade, which, in my opinion, has to do with the advent of better nutrition and an industrialized society. The rise in IQ started around 1880, almost perfectly coinciding with the industrial revolution in America. Along with a more industrialized society, it’s possible to give most citizens in the country good enough nutrition to where they are not iodine deficient (adding iodine to our salt boosted Americans IQs), as well as being deficient in zinc, iron, protein and certain B vitamins which the effects of not getting enough leads to the brain not growing to its full potential, which in turn leads to a lower IQ.

One more point on the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect does not occur on g, as it is not a Jensen Effect. Rushton defines Jensen Effect as follows:

Significant correlations occurring between g-factor loadings and other variables have been dubbed “The Jensen eff€ect”.

…

Thus the secular increase in test scores (the “Lynn±Flynn e€ffect”) is not a “Jensen e€ffect” nor is this the first time the discriminating power of the Jensen eff€ect has been shown.

The Flynn effect is acutely embarrassing to those who leap from IQ score differences to claims of genetic differences in intelligence.

Not at all, since it’s easily explainable by better nutrition since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It’s also not even on g so why this gets discussed is beyond me.

Specifically, it is based on the ahistorical and ethnocentric assumption of a fixed relationship between the development of certain cognitive skills and raw mental ability. In truth, the skills associated with intelligence have changed over time–and unevenly through social space–as society evolves.

The relationship exists and there is a strong correlation between cognitive skills and raw mental ability. More intelligent people have better functioning societies than less intelligent people. This is an objective fact.

But contrary to the counsel of despair from hereditarians like Richwine, those deficits aren’t hard-wired. Progress in reducing achievement gaps will certainly not be easy, but a full review of the IQ evidence shows that it is possible. And it will be aided by policies, like immigration reform, that encourage the full integration of Hispanics into the American economic and cultural mainstream.

Jason Richwine is correct. Progress in achievement gaps will not close, barring the continued dysgenesis that America is facing. Immigration reform will not change anything. They don’t want to assimilate; they want to come and leech off of our Welfare State. The denial of genetics and scholastic achievement won’t be able to be held for long. In this study in which Robert Plomin was one of the researchers, it was found that 60 percent of the difference  between individual 16-year-old students in the UK could be attributed to genetic factors. We know that IQ is linked to academic achievement and since that’s heritable as well, we will soon see that race and ethnic differences in IQ and academic achievement are, without a shadow of a doubt, are real and do not exist because of any economic deprivation or some other kind of non-biologic factors.

For the second article, from judgybitch.com, in which she only says one correct thing in it and it’s:

Here’s a little pet theory of mine I’d like to throw out, just for the hell of it.  I think humans prefer lighter skin and hair and eye colors because those tend to be the result of recessive genes.  A man with darker tones who has a child with a woman of lighter tones will almost always see his genes expressed in the children.  Dark tones tend to be dominant.  The preference for lighter skin is a natural paternity test.

This is called sexual selection, which is natural selection which arises for selection of traits in the opposite sex. Selecting for certain traits which the opposite sex found appealing, for example, is how long hair got sexually selected for outside of Africa along with selection for hair, eye, and skin color. Selecting for these traits had them become more prevalent and they eventually stayed due to intense selection for them.

For example, Eurasian women got selected for beauty and Eurasian men who got selected for intelligence as men had to be more intelligent in order to hunt for food. Conversely, African women gathered and hunted for food and became slightly more intelligent than African men who became the more attractive sex (Fuerle, 2008).

But other than this she is wrong.

You know what IS linked very strongly to lower IQs?

Malnutrition.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041117005027.htm

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2628311

http://www.nature.com/pr/journal/v5/n11/abs/pr1971371a.html

The idea is not even the slightest bit controversial.  Children who are starved, especially in the earliest years of life, perform very poorly on IQ tests compared to peers who received adequate nutrition.  Like, really poorly.  IQ’s down around 60 (100 is average).

Let’s look at this world hunger map, shall we?

http://www.geographictravels.com/2008/07/world-hunger-map.html

Oh well now, would you look at that.  Looks like it’s mostly black and Hispanic folks who are starving.   And all those white folks are living life to the hilt, with full bellies and bright futures.

Must be a coincidence.

It’s not a coincidence. There is no coincidence that if you superimpose an IQ map over the world hunger map, that a super majority of the low IQ countries would have bad nutrition and be starving, whereas those higher IQ populations would have better nutrition and, therefore, higher IQs and lack of malnutrition and starvation. There are environmental factors involved in this, which I have gone through in my article IQ, Nutrition, Disease and Parasitic Load. Yes, those environmental variables decrease IQ; but in the case of Africa, if their full genotypic IQ were expressed in their phenotype, they would have an average IQ of 80, 9 points away from the lowest average European country which is Serbia at 89. They would then be able to have better functioning societies and not have to rely on outside aid. Though, their low IQs are the cause of evolution, those factors only cause about 10 points of difference (depending which of the variables I mentioned exist in those areas).

Let’s look at this map of food insecurity in the United States:

http://www.nextgenerationfood.com/news/food-insecurity-in-the-us/

Highest rates of food insecurity:

Mississippi

Texas

Arkansas

Lowest rates of food insecurity:

North Dakota

Massachusetts

Virginia

Gosh, I wonder where all the black and Hispanic people are?  North Dakota, right?

According to the USDA, in a report titled Household Food Security in the United States in 2011, black and Hispanic families are more than twice as likely to experience food insecurity as white families (p. 11).

White                    11.4% of families food insecure

Black                      25.1%

Hispanic               26.2%

http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/884525/err141.pdf

Gosh, I wonder where black and ‘Hispanic’ people are? Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas right? What is the cause of the food insecurity? Lower intelligence. What is lower intelligence highly correlated with? Obesity.

If you keep in mind the fact that obesity (especially as the result of heavily processed, nutrient deficient junk foods) is also a form of malnutrition, it seems to me that there is an entirely different explanation for why certain racial groups might tend to perform lower on IQ tests.

Sure it is. A big cause for obesity is lowered intelligence (Kanazawa 2007). What he found was that those studies that concluded that obesity causes lowered intelligence only observed cross-sectional studies. Longitudinal studies that looked into the link between obesity and intelligence found that those who had low IQs since childhood then became obese later in life and that obesity does not lead to low IQ.  The average IQ for an individual suffering from PWS is 65 (Butler, Lee and Whitman 2006, p. 13), so that is one reason they have a tendency to be obese. He states that those with IQs below 74 gained 5.19 BMI points, whereas those with IQs over above 126 gained 3.73 BMI points in 22 years, which is a statistically significant difference. Also noted, was that those at age 7 who had IQs above 125 had a 13.5 percent chance of being obese at age 51, whereas those with IQs below 74 at age 7 had a 31.9 percent chance of being obese. This clearly shows that those obese individuals who score low on IQ tests, more often than not, are obese because of their intelligence. The lack of ability to delay gratification is also correlated with low IQ (Mischel and Metzner, 1982).

Becoming obese is largely in part related to environmental factors, but there are correlates with obesity and genetic factors, as well as racial and ethnic differences in obesity, which are due, in part, to environmental as well as genetic factors. All of these factors fall back to a) lower intelligence, b) differing physiology and c) differing nutritional habits. Lower IQ is the main reason, though, for these differences which manifest itself as differences in scores of cognitive ability. Those with lower scores than have higher chances of having negative effects in life, such as low SES, higher chance of becoming obese and so on.

Correlation is not causation.

This is the liberals word phrase they use when they cannot contest data and know it so use the same old boring phrase. When you get the same result over and over using the scientific method, then it’s safe to say that the same results and conclusions that get brought up time and time again are real and cannot be explained away by the correlation does not mean causation line.

And furthermore, I haven’t read Richwine’s dissertation, nor do I plan to, so I don’t know if he offered any tentative explanations for his findings.

Didn’t even read it and is giving a critique of it. How does that work?

It looks to me like Richwine is a gigantic racist asshole, because he is using his findings to try and limit the opportunities for Hispanic people to come to the United States, because dumb spics.

Lower IQ people commit more crimes than do higher IQ people. This phenomenon is well-noted that those with lower intelligence commit crime, as the average IQ of a criminal in America, is 85, whereas the average IQ for a juvenile is 92. The average juvenile IQ is higher because more often than not, those who are habitual offenders in childhood become habitual offenders in adulthood, and at adulthood IQ drops from childhood where the environment was able to artificially boost their IQs.

What if I’m right?  What if IQ differences are traceable to malnutrition?  That would indicate a whole different set of interventions and policies than just turn them away.

You are part right, but that won’t put any big dent in any genetic/phenotypic IQ differences and still, mass immigration from South of the Border still wouldn’t be OK in the first place.

In shutting down the conversation about race and IQ, Harvard students are explicitly saying they don’t WANT to find a reason behind low performance on IQ tests amongst certain racial groups.  They don’t CARE why some groups are not reaching their full human potential.  They don’t give ONE SINGLE FUCK about anyone other than themselves. It could be as simple as making certain children have access to proper food and nutrition.

I at least give her credit for acknowledging the biological reality of race and the reality of IQ. But she thinks that malnutrition plays too big a part in the ethnic IQ gap than it does in reality.

As I have covered here before, people will do anything they can to deny the validity of IQ tests. However, their explanations cut it.

People who attempt to deny biological differences in intelligence because they strongly predict positive life outcomes will do anything to deny their validity. But that doesn’t change how strong a predictor they are in regards to predicting both positive and negative successes in life.

Those who attempt to deny any differences between races, like Chanda Chisala (I know you can see this Chanda, still waiting for a response to the criticism of your horrible article that “redneck genes” are the cause for the black-white IQ gap), who are wrong in their premises on the cause as well as how to fix the gap. They will do anything to attempt to explain away a gap which is, at least, 50 percent genetic in origin.

The attack on Jason Richwine is because, of course, he’s right. They don’t want to admit he is right so they do whatever they can to discredit his argument, by calling him a ‘racist’. But that doesn’t negate his data, and as seen above, any arguments against Richwine’s dissertation are unfounded.

Germany is going to begin IQ testing their immigrants, why can’t we?