Race and IQ

Andrew Sullivan has re-opened the 'Race and IQ' can of worms. I would call it a debate, but it's really more like a can of worms.  The issue is that tested white folks have apparently scored a little higher than tested black people, although worse than some tested Asian peoples (after correcting as far as possible for cultural biases and test biases and so on, and on enough different occasions by different researchers that its not feasible to assert that it isn't systematic).  Bill Saletan at Slate made the same attempt a few years ago. Everyone acknowledges that the distribution is very wide in all populations, and so one way to prove you're stupid is to think a small statistical bias tells anything about a pair-wise comparison of you against Obama, for example.

The problem with 'race and IQ' research is that both race and IQ are (19-20th Century) proxies (approximations, fudge-factors) - one for genetic (and maybe epigenetic) heritage, the other for effective learning, problem solving and relative economic or social success. Intelligence is not a thing in itself - it is many faculties and the balancing and managing of them. Both are now too vague to be useful to science ('race' is especially poor*). These days you have to tie to a specific gene at the race end, or to a neurological mechanism at the other.  So race and IQ is superseded for serious science.  The fact that you can get some suggestive correlations at human scale is not interesting, except to bleary old duffers with an unacknowledged desire to honour the traditions of their ancestors, or to people designing bob-sled teams**.

* It is usual to reference the far greater genetic variation within races than between them (which is OK, but, because a few very small differences can be very powerful in physical appearance and hence other traits, it is not necessarily convincing against evidence on a specific issue). Chimp troops really don't mix that much and are far more different from each other than any two modern humans. The other face, and maybe a bigger problem, is that the 'races' were interpreted on appearance without reference to genetics and if you subdivided everyone's family group you would find people groups that were all wrong for their apparent type.  There's more variation between different African regional populations and the inhabitants of the rest of the world.


**Cool Runnings reference