All Annotations of Books: None of the Above: Books: The New Yorker[Preview]

saved by5 people, first byTaryn . on 2007-12-11, last byDave Waltman on 2008-06-05

• For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the word “moron.” “The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places,” he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.” To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.
• Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories.
• An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
• I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in
• “If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.

• This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian
  immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for
  example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a
  full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts.
  Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As
  you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic
  inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many
  second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed
  endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk
  turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races,
  Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin
  to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John
  Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that
  somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of
  Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which
  permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of
  Americans?”

• It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
• “As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”