Intelligence, Race, and Genetics - Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen

PREFACE

 “Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.” With that opening sentence of a 123-page-long article solicited by the prestigious Harvard Educational Review, Professor Arthur R. Jensen, of the University of California, Berkeley, went from being a highly respected but little-known educational psychologist to one of the most controversial figures in science.

Written in 1969 during the tumultuous days of the rioting in the Black inner cities and White voter disenchantment with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, Jensen’s HER article set off a firestorm of controversy. The title, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” and Jensen’s conclusion, “Not much,” made him a headliner in Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S. News & World Report, and The New York Times  Magazine, on the one hand, and the target of student protests, sit-ins, resolutions of condemnation, and even acts of vandalism and death threats on the other. The word “Jensenism”—shorthand for Jensen’s theory that an individual’s IQ is largely due to heredity, including racial heritage—found its way into some dictionaries.

In this book, I skeptically cross-examine Arthur R. Jensen on Jensenism—how and why he believes the scientific evidence is even stronger today that:

IQ is real, biological, and highly genetic, and not just some statistic or the result of educational, social, economic, or cultural factors; 

race is a biological reality, not a social construct; and, most controversially of all,

the cause of the 15-point average IQ difference between Blacks and Whites in the United States is partly genetic.

The late Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, Howard Gardner’s numerous books on “multiple intelligences,” and Joseph Graves’s The  Emperor’s New Clothes argue that Jensenism and the controversial best-seller The Bell Curve (which draws heavily on Jensen’s work) are marginal science at best, pseudoscience at worst. Here, Jensen replies to these and other critics. He also answers the questions I think you yourself would like to ask him. He tells you why he believes the scientific basis of Jensenism is as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, why the experts in the relevant disciplines of behavior genetics and psychometrics agree with him and not his critics, and why the public has been so misinformed.

This book also introduces you to Arthur Jensen, the man behind the “ism,” so that you can understand why he took up such a controversial research program and why he has pursued it so relentlessly. Finally, it takes you on the intellectual odyssey of the behavioral sciences over the past third of a century, detailing the sea changes that have taken place since Jensen and Jensenism first hit the front pages in 1969.

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Chapter 4, “What Is Race? Biological Reality or Cultural Construction?” examines the biggest taboo of all—the subject of race. I ask Jensen how he, an educational psychologist, can reject the official statement of the American Anthropological Association that race is a mere cultural construction and has no biological validity. Jensen counters that the most state-of-the art population genetic studies and statistical procedures identify “population clusters” that correspond quite closely to the racial classifications of traditional anthropology and even of “the man on the street,” although the term “race” is avoided.

Jensen then presents three lines of argument to support what he calls the Default Hypothesis—that both genetic and environmental factors play about the same part in causing the average difference in IQ between Blacks and Whites as they do in causing differences in IQ within either race. First, he claims that the attempts to explain the Black-White IQ difference in terms of social, economic, or cultural factors alone have been tested and they have failed. When I cite ten of the best-known theories, Jensen explains why he believes they have been disproven. He draws particular attention to the results of trans-racial adoption studies, which show that Black children adopted by White middle-class parents end up with IQs at about the Black average, while mixed-race adopted children have intermediate IQs, and White adopted children have IQs around the White average.

Jensen’s second argument, drawn from evolutionary biology, is that whenever two groups differ in physical characteristics, they will differ in behavior as well. He cites a famous study that demonstrated that Black, White, and Chinese American babies, all in the same hospital and tested in the first days after birth, differed in movement and activity. Next, Jensen claims that both the correlation between brain size and intelligence within either race, and the average difference in brain size and in intelligence between Blacks and Whites, are well established in the scientific literature.

Jensen’s final argument that genes play a role in the Black-White IQ difference is based on what he calls Spearman’s hypothesis. Charles Spearman, the famous British psychologist who first used the term g (general mental ability), also remarked that the more a given test measures the g factor, the greater the average Black-White difference on that test. Jensen explains that his research has confirmed Spearman’s hypothesis for a number of different mental tests, given in different countries, by different examiners. Further, he has shown that g is related to a number of biological measures such as brain-wave patterns, glucose metabolism in the brain, and well-known genetic phenomena such as inbreeding depression (that is, the reduction in height, physical development, and IQ in children born of close-relative marriages).

Chapter 5, “From Jensenism to The Bell Curve Wars: Science, Pseudoscience, and Politics,” draws Jensen out on subjects he has until now touched on only sparingly, if at all—the questions of race, science, and politics in American history, why he believes the race-genetics-IQ question has been so systematically misrepresented in the mass media and in many textbooks, his analysis of the most vocal opposition individuals and groups, and the role of the Pioneer Fund (which has supported much of his own work) in race-IQ research. I ask why, if he is correct, Jensenism is so often treated as pseudoscience, and organizations such as the American Psychological Association (APA), the Behavior Genetics Association (BGA), and the Educational Testing Service (ETS) have either disagreed with Jensenism (at least on the issue of race, genetics, and IQ) or remained silent. Jensen cites a survey of the members of the Behavior Genetics Association and the Test and Measurement Division of the APA (Division 5), as well as a statement in the Wall Street Journal signed by 50 experts in the behavioral sciences, as evidence that among experts in the relevant disciplines, Jensenism is considered mainstream science, not pseudoscience. (See  Appendix B for the Wall Street Journal statement.)

The final chapter, Chapter 6, “Science and Policy: What’s to Be Done?” invites Jensen onto truly new ground. He presents his view of the proper role of scientific fact in setting public policy, including Affirmative Action in the public and private sectors, especially in the military, government bureaucracy, and the educational system. Jensen also speculates on what the future holds in terms of policies such as welfare and eugenics.

 Appendix A lists Jensen’s large and ever-growing bibliography. In addition to the references at the end of each chapter, readers looking for more information can refer to Jensen’s bibliography for relevant articles.

 Appendix B reproduces the statement that appeared in the Wall Street  Journal by 50 behavioral scientists on 25 points the signatories (including Jensen) considered “scientifically well-established.”

Throughout this book my aim has been neither to praise Jensen and Jensenism nor to bury them. Rather, my goals are:

First, to ask the questions you would ask if you were interviewing Jensen for a print or TV newsmagazine. Each chapter opens with an introduction that provides the background knowledge necessary to understand the topics covered in that chapter, much like the material talk show hosts get to “prep” them for interviews.

Next, since most of Jensen’s prolific output has been in technical books and journals, to allow Jensen to respond directly and conversationally to the objections of his best-known and severest critics in the academic world.

Finally, whether you conclude that Jensenism is scientifically rock solid, rotten, or somewhere in between, I want you to meet Arthur R. Jensen, the man behind the “ism.”

Frank Miele