In an earlier comment on Dr Watson’s remarks I asked the following question. What are the relevant logical inferences to be drawn from the data in the first place? The most important one I can think of is that the bell curve is skewed a little more to the right and a little higher for Jews than for the rest of the Caucasian world. The blunt question no one has answered to my satisfaction is simply, So what? What on earth does that predict about the success or performance of Israel in the world community of nations, and what are the transmission lines by which these predictors operate? More importantly what does it suggest as to how the rest of the world should behave towards the nation of Israel?
It certainly doesn’t suggest, as some commentators naively imply, that all Jews are likely to be smarter than all other Caucasians or even than all other people of Sub-Saharan African descent. The late President Nkrumah of Sub-Saharan Ghana, for example tested out with an IQ of about 180! It simply suggests that a greater proportion of one group is likely to be more able in a narrow range of skills than can be found in another group.
The analogy is that a truckload of ore from site is likely to give a higher yield of gold than a truckload from the other site. That will always be true in chaos, which is never of perfect consistency. The flaw in Dr Watson’s naïve predictions is that if you only have 20 million cubic feet of the rich ore, it would be dumb to neglect the 2000 million cubic feet of the poorer grade ore. Similarly, 71.5 million very smart Israelis still suffer from severe limitations when competing with the productivity of the rest of the world, population 6 billion. So, maybe, for whatever reason, genetic, climatic, historical, or more recently, epigenetic, Sub-Saharan Africans are proportionately dumber than Super-Saharan Caucasians, (in a narrow range of skills.) But that lower grade ore will still, given enough of a breathing space to access adequate information be able to produce enormous quantities of what the world may need for future advancement of mankind, simply because there are more of them.
Let me end with a few questions, to what extent do these tests measure synthetic skill sets as opposed to analytic? Why does classical music seem so stilted when compared to jazz? What contribution does the ability to design have to make to the ability to produce? Does the basic g, measured by these tests really exhaust the range of human mental ability? How would we know?
Having been involved in the original Slate endeavor I stopped corresponding after Microsoft bought out the forum and transformed it into an online magazine, not only because it had lost that personal touch, but because most of the new dialogue seemed almost sophomoric and simplistic. It’s not that I have any delusions concerning my own abilities but I prefer to be forced to absorb new ideas rather than to be forced to explain why a certain statement is nonsense and doesn’t rise to the level of the rest of the conversation, but this topic is too important to ignore.
Firstly, the whole discussion of racial superiority is meaningless on an individual basis. The underlying tone of most of these discussions on race seems to imply that such conclusions can be drawn. One lunkhead even suggested that Watson’s remarks about Africa must be right because the blacks who work under him on his job don’t seem to understand his instructions. This egregious non-sequitur ignored such things as pay scales, educational attainment, tuning out of unpleasant attitudes in the boss, or the low expectations of the person doing the hiring, especially if he was thinking in terms of quotas.
Actually, even Watson seems to ignore the fact that natural selection plays out over such a long period of time that migration patterns would tend to wipe out geographical identifiers except in cases of such extreme isolation as found in the Galapagos Islands or such. For example in my own case, two of my 16 great-great-grandparents were Caucasian, one a Scottish crewman who jumped ship in the Caribbean, the other probably descended from exiled Irish, so if I fell into Watson’s test bed how would this infusion of white blood affect his data? It would probably be ignored.
In terms of American blacks, it is nothing short of dishonesty for a researcher to ignore the fact that true freedom, especially in education, was only granted to blacks in the lifetimes of most Americans still alive today, but like everything else most people can’t distinguish between winning an argument for their side, and winning an argument for the Truth.
Furthermore, since the definition of black American means anyone with any visible signs of blackness, most American blacks are even more intermingled with Caucasian stock than am I. Was any attempt made to correct for that? The truest test of racially divergent scores would be to test “light-skinned ethnics” against dark-skinned blacks from the same socio-economic background. That would eliminate some of the “noise.”
