This is just the kind of politically correct argument John Barker hates. But
it makes sense to me. Enjoy (or not) -
Robin Rice

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go
to http://www.guardian.co.uk

He'll be weighing brains next
Why are academics like Richard Lynn still taken seriously when they claim
that IQ is racially determined?
Gavin Evans
Thursday November 13 2003
The Guardian


So, here we go again - all the way back to South Africa 1948, Germany 1933
and further, covering the logic of colonial conquests over centuries. What
it amounts to is this: we rule because we're smarter than you (and, by the
way, that's also why you're so poor and we're so rich).

The current culprit - not for the first time - is Richard Lynn, emeritus
professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, who has a long track
record here (he also "discovered" that men are more intelligent than women).
Lynn claims that samples from 50 countries reveal that the average IQ in
Africa is 70. Black South Africans, for example, have an average IQ of 66 -
slightly smarter than the sub-moronic Ethiopians at 63. IQ, he claims, is an
accurate measure of intrinsic intelligence, which means that Africans are
thicker than the rest of us, and because "intelligence is a determinant of
earnings", black South Africans and Ethiopians are poor.

What is remarkable in all this is not so much that there are people who
believe him - after all, there are still those who insist the Earth is
flat - but rather that any creditable institution should take it seriously.
Yet this week we've heard Lynn pontificating on Radio 4's Today programme,
on BBC Radio 5 Live, and appearing in more-than respectful form in the
Times.

Forgetting for the moment his early predecessors - from the red of
tooth-and-claw early Darwinians to the Nazi geneticists - Lynn operates in a
tradition launched in 1969 by the Californian psychologist Arthur Jensen who
argued that intelligence was determined by genetics, that IQ differences
reflected genetic differences, and that efforts to raise intelligence by
educational effort were wasted. The London-based psychologist, Professor HJ
Eysenck, enthusiastically endorsed his case before it was picked to pieces
over the next decade and ultimately shown that much of the earlier data
Jensen and Eysenck relied on had been fabricated.

The result was that this kind of thinking was exiled to the academic
hinterlands of apartheid South Africa. However, all this changed in 1994
when the American social commentators Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein
produced their book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life, which claimed that black people were genetically inferior to
white people, as illustrated by lower IQs, and that poverty is a result of
low IQs (which reflect low intelligence).

The Bell Curve received a huge wave of publicity and was punted in
particular by the once-liberal magazine The New Republic (then edited by the
former Tory student activist, Andrew Sullivan). Again it took a while, but
piece by piece their argument was picked apart, with critics exposing
mathematical errors, logical inconsistencies and deficiencies within the IQ
tests cited (such as questions on trigonometry that measure educational
knowledge rather than intelligence).

But the most significant fallacy within this kind of pseudo-science goes to
the heart of our current knowledge about human evolution. It is now beyond
serious dispute that we all emerged from Africa, and that in scientific
terms the concept of race is of little significance. The Harvard geneticist
Dr Richard Lewontin, for example, stresses that individuals rather than
races are the repositories of genetic variability, and that racial
classifications are products of society rather than biology. For instance,
relatively settled African populations in central Africa have far greater
genetic diversity than anywhere else on the planet. We may choose to
identify them by their common skin colour and hair type, but in genetic
terms these individuals may have more in common with, say, white Anglo
Saxons.

What has also emerged from the Human Genome Project is just how dynamic and
fluid our genetic make-up can be, and the extent to which it is influenced
by nutrition, pollution, disease, family life and education.

First invented in France 99 years ago, IQ tests were designed to measure
general intellectual capacity, with a score of 100 being the universal
average. The notion of intrinsic "general" intelligence is fast losing
ground, but even if we accept this dubious premise, it is easy to disprove
the idea that it can be measured by a test. In order to prevent the average
IQ rising above the 100 mark, test designers in developed countries have
been compelled to make their tests more difficult because we're getting
better at doing them. Most contemporary palaeontologists suspect that human
intelligence has not risen substantially over the last 70-80,000 years (at
which point, incidentally, we were all black Africans); so improvements in
IQ performance over the last century clearly have nothing to do with
increased genetic intelligence and everything to do with cultural changes.

Which raises the question: why do flat-Earthers like Lynn, Murray, Eysenck
and Jensen still get so much attention every time they announce that
Africans, or black Americans, or poor people, are struggling because they're
inherently dumb. But perhaps that's not such a difficult one to answer.

· Gavin Evans is author of Dancing Shoes, a memoir of growing up in
South Africa
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Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

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