There is no dispute about the substantial racial differential in the scores obtained on those tests which can be reasonably thought to measure intelligence.
The difference is great -- about a standard deviation -- and is replicated on not just various sorts of IQ tests, but on all of the other sorts of academic tests which have an intellgence-based component.
The real controversy is: what is the cause of this persistent difference?
But first two points to get out of the way:
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One point that must be understood before we can argue about this issue: we are talking about the average score. The average score says NOTHING about any particular individual.
Suppose I take five Blues and five Purples and give them an IQ test, whose top score is 10, with the following results:
Blues: 1, 1, 3, 10, 10. Average: 5
Purples: 6, 6, 6, 6, 6. Average 6
On average, Purples score higher than Blues. But if you had to hire a couple of people to do a job requiring high intelligence, you would hire exclusively Blues.
So, we are talking about averages (arithmetic means, to be precise -- there are other kinds of averages).
Concretely: in the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of Blacks who are more intelligent than most of us who post on this board.
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There are other issues which can be raised. Are the IQ, or other, tests which lead to these results, "biased"? People who raise this usually don't know quite what they mean, but they can mean something like this: perhaps the tests use concepts, or vocabulary, taken from a 'white' or a middle-class environment. And sometimes they mean, perhaps 'intelligence' is a culturally-determined idea ... maybe African intelligence is just different to European or Oriental intelligence. Both of these are related, because both question the "objectivity" of IQ tests
Both of these ideas are wrong, in different ways. The first is factually wrong. Th second is wrong in a more subtle way. They have been extensively discussed elsewhere and I won't take up time refuting them here, unless someone really wants to go into the subject.
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So the only interesting issue is: what causes this difference?
Two possible causes have been proposed: Nature, and Nurture
Your dog, no matter how you train him and no matter what kind of environment you raise him in, will never learn to factorize quadratic equations.
Nature has not given him a brain which is capable of this sort of thinking.
On the other hand, we can imagine raising two identical twins, who have very similar "natures" -- they share the same DNA -- in very different environments: one in a middle-class professionals' home where both parents hold advanced degrees and read a lot of books and put a big emphasis on education -- the other in a slum with a single-mother who spends her free time watching soap operas.
If nurture is all, they should be very different in IQ. If nature is all, identical. In fact, they are somewhere in between, and most cognitive psychologists agree that the genetic -- or heriditarian -- effect contributes about 50 to 70% to IQ.
But it's a complicated subject -- if you have access to the latest New York Review of Books you can read an interesting exchange on this subject, which gets off into the question of monozygotic twins who share, or don't, the same "chorion", and the effect this might have on the similarity of their personalities later.
I personally hope that the revealed differences in mean intelligence among the races is due to heredity.
If it is due to culture -- "nurture" -- we have a problem, because we don't know how to change cultures very well.
There is a huge element of self-destructive behavior among lower-class Blacks. Google "acting white" for an example.
But how to change it? Hooray for Bill Cosby and others who are trying to turn things around. And we should always carefully consider proposals for state intervention that might help improve things ... but these have generally been disappointing.
Of course, cultures can have enormous influences on whole peoples: just look at how different tribal groups, with mostly the same genes as their ancestors, have changed their group behavior over time:
---- the Greeks were just another collection of related Mediterranean tribes, until suddenly, about 2500 years ago, fire from heaven fell on them, and they sat down and invented Western civilization. You cannot now have a conversation with another literate person without speaking Greek.
---- the Danes are the nicest people in the world. A milleneum ago they were the fearsome Vikings.
---- the Jews were timid scholars and merchants, not warriors. A "Jewish army" would have been, for our ancestors a century ago, material for a joke. No longer.
---- Ireland was a sleepy, priest-ridden backwater for decades: check out its income level and growth rates now.
---- the Indians of MesoAmerica (Aztecs and Mayans and others) were building great civilizations, with written languages and mathematics and monumntal public buildings. Now their descedants are inert.
All due to "culture" for sure. But what made the changes?
We will understand our genes long before we understand our cultures.
And we will be able to control them before we can control our cultures.
Right now, we are the prisoners of our genes. The one you have are the ones randomly chosen (half each) from your two parents, plus whatever mutations might have occurred. And your biochemical environment while in the womb is still largely beyond our control.
This will change.
We shall not remain bound by those arbitrary sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid forever. Your descendants will have had their genes chosen for them by their parents. The parental DNA they inherit will be just that wanted from each parent, with unwanted bits taken out and desirable bits spliced in. The old "but what if we had my looks and your brains" joke will no longer make sense.
But in the meantime, I have a couple of nominations for the firing squad:
(1) anyone who tells Black kids -- "Hey, don't even bother to try to make it by society's rules, because you're too stupid. Don't pay attention during class -- you won't be able to understand anyway. You're just a talking ape."
And tied up blindfolded to the next stake is
(2) anyone who tells Black kids -- "Hey, don't even bother to try to make it by society's rules, because they're fixed --- the capitalists/White Man is always going to rig the game against you. Don't pay attention during class -- you don't want to understand, because they are teaching you bourgeois conformity, in order to get you to take your place as a robotic worker/consumer."
Ready ........ aim .........
