Race and Intelligence

Separating Science From Myth

Jefferson M. Fish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135651787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

In recent years, reported racial disparities in IQ scores have been the subject of raging debates in the behavioral and social sciences and education. What can be made of these test results in the context of current scientific knowledge about human evolution and cognition? Unfortunately, discussion of these issues has tended to generate more heat than light. Now, the distinguished authors of this book offer powerful new illumination. Representing a range of disciplines--psychology, anthropology, biology, economics, history, philosophy, sociology, and statistics--the authors review the concept of race and then the concept of intelligence. Presenting a wide range of findings, they put the experience of the United States--so frequently the only focus of attention--in global perspective. They also show that the human species has no "races" in the biological sense (though cultures have a variety of folk concepts of "race"), that there is no single form of intelligence, and that formal education helps individuals to develop a variety of cognitive abilities. Race and Intelligence offers the most comprehensive and definitive response thus far to claims of innate differences in intelligence among races.

Chapter 1

A Scientific Approach to Understanding Race and Intelligence

Jefferson M.Fish

Psychologists, Anthropologists, and Race

Anthropologists long ago began investigating the observation that peoples who live at great distances from one another look different; speak different languages; and have different customs and ways of experiencing, relating to, and understanding the world. It took a great deal of effort and investigation to conclude that these apparent relationships are socially, rather than biologically based. That is, language, customs, and worldviews result from the ways individuals are socialized by their groups and are unrelated to their physical appearance. Healthy newborns from anywhere in the world can be equally well socialized into any distant society, learn to speak its language(s), and become a part of its culture and show no linguistic or behavioral traces of the culture of their faraway biological parents.

The discipline of anthropology incorporated this understanding into its very structure, known as the four-field approach. The primary division is between the field of physical (or biological) anthropology and the three subdivisions of cultural (or sociocultural) anthropology—the fields of ethnology (the description and comparison of cultures), archaeology (the study of cultures through time), and linguistics (Ember & Ember, 1988).

Unfortunately, this understanding of the independence of culture from biology seems never to have reached most psychologists or other social scientists. Lacking cross-cultural knowledge, they have often seen the world through the filters of current American folk categories and presented data on contemporary American behavior as representative of human behavior in general.

Let me give an example from a heated discussion about race that I had with my African American wife nearly 30 years ago. We were each frustrated with the other’s inability to reach certain obvious conclusions about particular populations. It turned out that, as a psychologist, I was using the term population to mean statistical population, whereas she, as an anthropologist, was using it to mean breeding population. In other words, our cultural misunderstanding was due not to differences in black versus white assumptions but in anthropologist versus psychologist assumptions.

The cultural gap between anthropologists and psychologists—in this case illustrated by linguistic differences in the meanings of technical vocabulary—seems not to have been bridged over the decades. For example, I have never met a psychologist who has heard of a breeding population—members of a species that breed among themselves more than they do with other members of the species—except for those to whom I have explained the concept. (To my dismay, with the decline of the four-field approach in anthropology, paralleling increased specialization in psychology, I have discovered in recent years that many anthropologists seem not to have heard of the concept either.¹)

From my point of view as a psychologist, one key reason that cultural misunderstandings and mutual ignorance between psychology and anthropology are problematic is that they permit psychologists to take seriously statistically intelligible but otherwise absurd research. Because knowledge is unitary, studies based on ethnocentric assumptions that are contrary to what is known about human evolution can only lead to false conclusions and a self-perpetuating confidence in those assumptions.

Psychologists generally view race as a biological classification, like sex—assuming that there are two sexes (male and female) and three races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid). Despite the existence of hermaphrodites and transvestites, the sexual classification is generally accurate, and categorizing experimental participants by their physical appearance or self-designation leads to few problems. In contrast, the question “How do you know what race your participants are?” has not been understood by psychologists to be unanswerable. Meanwhile, the classification of people into biological races has long been known by anthropologists to be scientifically inaccurate, but reflective instead of American folk beliefs, which differ from folk beliefs in other cultures. Because psychologists in the United States are culturally American they take these scientifically inaccurate beliefs for granted. When they assume that human races exist, and categorize their experimental participants by their physical appearance or self-designation, they unwittingly create much mischief.

Many psychologists, as part of their general education, have been exposed to the broad outlines of human evolution. Anatomically modern members of our species first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago. After about 80,000 to 100,000 years, small groups that were biologically unrepresentative of the continent’s diversity began leaving Africa through the Middle Eastern land bridge and spread out across Eurasia, while the large and varied populations in Africa continued to evolve (although some genetic interchange between Africa and Eurasia also continued over time). About 15,000 years ago, when the Ice Age lowered the sea level enough to create a land bridge across the Bering Strait, small and biologically unrepresentative groups of Asians entered and spread out across the New World. Thus, rather than three races, we have three geographical regions of human variability: The preponderance of human physical variation is in Africa, a much lesser range of variation can be found in Eurasia, and relatively little variability exists among indigenous populations of the Americas. If biological races did exist, they would be found only in Africa, although psychologists in their research persist in acting to the contrary.

Psychologists’ (and other social scientists’) lack of awareness of the basics of physical anthropology is illustrated by The Bell Curve’s evaluation of the scientific status of the work of the developmental psychologist J.Philippe Rushton. Rushton actually asserts that Negroids have small brains, large genitals, and lots of sex; that Mongoloids have large brains, small genitals, and little sex; and that Caucasoids fall in between. In Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) words, “According to Rushton, the average Mongoloid is toward one end of the continuum of reproductive strategies—the few offspring, high survival, and high parental investment end—the average Negroid is shifted toward the other end, and the average Caucasoid is in the middle” (pp. 642–643).

Herrnstein and Murray (1994) evaluated Rushton’s work as follows:

Setting aside whether his work is timely or worthwhile—a judgment we are oath to make under any circumstances—it is plainly science. He is not alone in seeking an evolutionary explanation of the observed differences among the races. As science, there is nothing wrong with Rushton’s work in principle; we expect that time will tell whether it is right or wrong in fact. (p. 643)

This evaluation makes it clear that they view such work as serious science meriting serious consideration. I hope that Race and Intelligence: Separating Science From Myth will help interested readers—including psychologists and other social scientists—to understand why it is that races do not exist, and to distinguish between culturally constructed labels for people’s physical appearance and what is known about human evolution.

The notion that the human species has no races in the biological sense is not a new one in anthropology. Montagu (1941) made the point six decades ago, and it was commonly accepted in anthropology by the 1960s, although the relevant knowledge seems never to have diffused to other disciplines. Perhaps the publication of The Bell Curve served to legitimize the discussion among scientists of views about race and eugenics that have remained dormant since the end of World War II and the discovery of the Nazi death camps.

Some Recent Books Dealing with Race and Intelligence

Before discussing the content of this volume in detail, I should mention that it was prepared over a period of several years. During this time, a number of other books have appeared that have dealt with the same topic as a main or secondary focus of attention. These books have been written from a variety of perspectives and have made a variety of claims. As I see it, their appearance has only confirmed the need for this book; a number of them are discussed or alluded to in other chapters. Suffice it to say at this point that none of them showed an understanding of the facts of human physical variation. Several showed an ethnocentric misunderstanding of the evidence, and in others the question was not even dealt with.

Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that many of these books displayed no awareness that there was something to be known. That is, because the authors did not know what they did not know, there was no way that relevant information could have an impact on the arguments they were making. In particular, the key issue of the irrelevance of data concerning differences in performance between categories of Americans labeled as “races” to the question of whether those differences are the result of innate biological differences could not be adequately addressed.

Part of the problem is the naive notion among many researchers in psychology, sociology, education, and other fields that one can operationally define “race” in terms of American categories, as self-reported by Americans or rated by American judges, without reference to the knowledge of evolutionary biology or physical anthropology—and then make inferences about biological causation from the data obtained. It is the biological ethnocentric counterpart to the psychological ethnocentric practice of operationally defining a dimension of American personality and then imposing it on other cultures for which it may be irrelevant. By measuring it cross-culturally and then comparing (or even ranking) cultures, one winds up with quantitative ethnocentric nonsense. (As is mentioned in chap. 5, cross-cultural psychologists refer to such a concept as an imposed etic [Berry, 1969].)

Books Claiminġ Innate “Racial” Differences

Several recent books define race ethnocentrically (in terms of American folk categories) and misunderstand, misrepresent, or ignore evidence concerning human physical variation. The scientific way to go about the matter is to ask what we know about human physical variation, then to ask whether the evidence suggests the existence of biological races, and only if the answer is “yes” to proceed to investigate differences between the races. Because the answer is “no,” the discussion is pointless, and scientists can go on to investigate other matters.

Instead, these authors appear committed to investigating IQ differences between unscientific, nonbiological, American folk categories. Their goal seems to be to demonstrate that—despite centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination as alternative explanations—African Americans really are inferior. Thus, Rushton (1997) never really defined what races are; assumed the existence of Mongoloids, Caucasoids, and Negroids as biological entities; blithely lumped together widely varying groups of individuals and data of uneven quality into these three categories; and referred to resulting numbers as racial differences.

Levin (1997) also assumed the existence of Mongoloids, Caucasoids, and Negroids. Although he does give a definition of race, it is an unashamedly ad hoc one—“letting 25 years mark a single generation, a ‘Negroid’ may be defined as anyone whose ancestors 40 to 4,400 generations removed were born in sub-Saharan Africa” (p. 20). As is discussed briefly in this chapter, and at length in Parts I and II of the book, Americans have long used ancestry, in the form of the folk concept of blood, as their own cultural criterion for race. In this way, the definition is ethnocentric. However, 110,000 years ago (25×4,400) all anatomically modern humans were in Africa. Hence, by this definition, all humans are Negroids. Clearly, what Levin was trying to do was create a biological definition that corresponds to American folk categories. As he said, “One hundred randomly chosen individuals sorting passers-by on an urban street would, without hesitation or collusion, almost always agree on who is black, white, or Asian” (p. 19). Evidently, he was assuming that the generic humans who are randomly chosen are Americans on an American street. They are not, for example, Brazilians in Brazil or Haitians in Haiti who, as I point out in chapter 5, have very different systems of “racial” classification. And what of the billion people in India? What race are they? There seem to be quite a few people who do not fit into these purportedly universal categories. Finally, studies of race and intelligence make no effort to trace the ancestry of individuals back even 4 generations, let alone 40 or 4,400, nor are genetic tests routinely run on children even to verify that their socially designated fathers are their biological fathers. So what we are left with is that socially designated race in the United States today is race.

Eysenck (1998) did not define race, but assumed that races exist and used terms like “the white (Caucasian) race” and “mongoloid races” (p. 10). He made it clear that he believes these are biological entities, and that a significant part of differences in IQ scores between the races is biological in origin.

Jensen (1998) wrote that “virtually every living species on earth has two or more subspecies. The human species is no exception, but in this case subspecies are called races” (p. 425). This statement is simply false; Homo sapiens has no subspecies, as Templeton demonstrates in detail in chapter 2.

Jensen (1998) went on to write:

A race is one of a number of statistically distinguishable groups in which individual membership is not mutually exclusive by any single criterion, and individuals in a given group differ only statistically from one another and from the group’s central tendency on each of the many imperfectly correlated genetic characteristics that distinguish between groups as such. (p. 425)

This is an example of the kind of ethnocentric operational definition described earlier. A fair translation is, “As an American, I know that blacks and whites are races, so even though I can’t find any way of making sense of the biological facts, I’ll assign people to my cultural categories, do my statistical tests, and explain the differences in biological terms.” In essence, the process involves a kind of reasoning by a converse. Instead of arguing, “If races exist there are genetic differences between them,” the argument is “Genetic differences between groups exist, therefore the groups are races.”

Humans have so many genes that any two groups are bound to differ from one another genetically. For example, just by chance, there are probably genetic differences between members of the local golf club and members of the local bowling league. However, one would not want to argue for the existence of golf and bowling races; nor would one want to argue if differences between the groups were found in income, education, or even IQ, that these were racial differences, rooted in biology, rather than social class differences reflecting the American cultural reality.

Genetic differences among local populations of the world’s religions are also the result of social, historical, and geographical circumstances, and do not imply the existence of Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or other races. It would be bizarre to hunt for the genes responsible for their differing religious thought processes.

Jews constitute an illuminating example because Hitler’s labeling them a race was used as a eugenic justification for their extermination. It is true that because of culturally determined patterns of mating, there are slight genetic differences between European Jews and European Christians. For the same reason, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1. A Scientific Approach to Understanding Race and Intelligence
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Part V
• Author Index
• Subject Index