Reddit reviews The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy

http://i.imgur.com/avgMb5E.jpg

The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.”

http://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/research-analysis/foreclosures-by-race-and-ethnicity.html

http://i.imgur.com/HX3Ti.jpg

There is a huge academic literature on the gaps in cognitive test results, practically all of it converging on the fact that African American mean scores on cognitive tests fall below the white means by a tad more than one white standard deviation. There is in fact so much data on this now that we have meta-studies — studies of the studies: the one best-known to me is the meta-study by Roth et al. in 2001, which covered 39 studies involving nearly six million test-takers. That one standard deviation on cognitive testing has been so persistent across so many decades, an academic sociologist, calls it "the fundamental constant of American sociology" — it's like the speed of light in physics
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http://www.amazon.com/The-Controversy-Media-Public-policy/dp/0887388396/? _encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9
325&linkCode=ur2&tag=vd0b-20

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx

https://imgur.com/ZnbLY

Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis The book claims to represent the largest collection and review of the global Intelligence Quotient (IQ) data, surveying 620 published studies from around the world, with a total of 813,778 tested individuals. Lynn's meta-analysis lists East Asians (IQ 105), Europeans (100), Inuit (91), South East Asians (87), Native Americans (87), Pacific Islanders (85), South Asians and North Africans (84), non-bushmen Sub-Saharan Africans (67), Australian Aborigines (62), Bushmen and Pygmies (54). Lynn defines races as the genetic clusters or ancestral population groups identified in previous genetic cluster analysis by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues in their 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Global_Inequality

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study tried to answer whether the gap is primarily caused by genetic factors or whether it is primarily caused by environmental and cultural factors. The children were first tested in age 7 and retested at age 17.

http://imgur.com/b25BWcf

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000. It is a well-documented fact that blacks have shorter time horizons and are less likely to delay their gratification of their immediate desires than whites. This impulsiveness correlates strongly to disciplinary problems in school and to criminality in adult life:

http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2011conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=171

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/4/1p1/93/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/01/when-genes-matter-for-intelligence/

Even if they come from affluent families or attend highly rated schools, black students in Ohio continue to lag far behind their white peers in school. On more than two dozen state tests given to students in kindergarten through high school last year, the average passage rate among black students was 64 percent. On average, 87 percent of white students passed.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/09/22/wide-racial-gap-persists-in-testing.html

"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so." - James. D. Watson, co-discoverer of the human DNA.

Ok, I'll address your points.

1.I disagree with your assertion that race is only a "arbitrary social construct" and by implication not a biologically meaningful concept.

"However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are highly correlate with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance."

Richard Dawkins

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/05/richard-dawkins-accepts-the-usefulness-of-race/#.VFKSslemXzB

Humans are a species that is comprised of several races varying in genetic distance between 5,000 and 100,000 years worth of adaptation to their respective environments. A good example is the branch of humanity in Northeast Asia which migrated to North America and then down to South America. Despite only 15,000 years apart, there are substantial differences between the Chinese and the Incas in Peru. And the belief that "race is only skin deep" is pure nonsense - dangerous nonsense that can impair medical treatments and cost lives. There are a number of diseases common in certain races and unheard of in others. Talk of "skin color" is irrelevant when facing Tay-Sachs or Sickle Cell Anemia, etc.

Humans do share around 97% of our DNA across the most divergent races. But men and women of the same geographic ancestral background (race) share over 99% of their DNA. Is human reproductive anatomy a "social construct"? Or in an example from another species, dogs (canis lupus familiaris) vary as widely in breed (race) as the Great Dane and the chihuahua.

Denying the existence of race, denying common features of racial groups and/or differences between groups, is just as foolish (and potentially as dangerous) as pre-judging all members of a racial group based solely on belonging to said group. People must be evaluated and judged as individuals, but when I'm in the emergency room I want a doctor who immediately recognizes and addresses my risk for Sickle Cell. Race is simply identification of our ancestral geography and adaptation for survival.

Furthermore, I have attached no genetic limitations to race. I have only noted different population groups exhibit different baseline scores on tests measuring intelligence.

http://imgur.com/Vs3NeHj

2.There is a huge academic literature on the gaps in cognitive test results, practically all of it converging on the fact that African American mean scores on cognitive tests fall below the white means by a tad more than one white standard deviation. There is in fact so much data on this now that we have meta-studies — studies of the studies: the one best-known to me is the meta-study by Roth et al. in 2001, which covered 39 studies involving nearly six million test-takers. That one standard deviation on cognitive testing has been so persistent across so many decades, an academic sociologist, calls it "the fundamental constant of American sociology" — it's like the speed of light in physics.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Controversy-Media-Public-Policy/dp/0887388396

This gap appears in the SAT even after accounting for socioeconomic status. It also occurs in the GRE, LSAT, undergraduate GPA, and IQ tests. This one standard deviation gap keeps appearing and reappearing on a wide variety of test that measure cognitive ability.

http://i.imgur.com/nO0qU9f.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rw6QQdi.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/XRUOoad.png

http://imgur.com/Vs3NeHj

Even the ASVAB is not immune to this one standard deviation gap.

"Nearly 40 percent of black students and 30 percent of Hispanics don't pass, compared with 16 percent of whites. The average score for blacks is 38 and for Hispanics is 44, compared to whites' average score of 55."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/21/high-school-grads-fail-military-exam_n_799767.html

So unless you are willing to credit racism with the power to diminish test scores for some minorities (blacks) but not for others (asians) across a wide array of institutions and professions I believe your quoted statement to be true.

>Even in a world free from any sort of racism, you'd still see a tremendous gap in achievement, crime rates, etc. between blacks and other races based on that fact alone.

I blame the parents most of all. The black community is broken. 72.3% of all black children are born out of wedlock and the vast majority of those children remain in single parent led households through out their childhood. Unstable/broken homes are a reality for many many black children. But that isn't the state's fault. And the behavioral and cultural problems that derive from these bleak statistics will never change until they decide for themselves to change it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/329432/latest-statistics-illegitimate-births-roger-clegg

Perhaps, if there was a greater emphasis on getting married before procreating these problems might be eased.Being raised in a married family reduced a child’s probability of living in poverty by about 82 percent.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/09/marriage-americas-greatest-weapon-against-child-poverty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_Cake_speech

I'm not sure. It's obviously a culture problem but culture is a function of environment plus intelligence. And the consensus right now seems to be that a: Intelligence is a largely heritable trait. And that b: There are large and measurable differences between population groups.

http://i.imgur.com/avgMb5E.jpg

The mean intelligence of blacks is much lower than for whites. The least intelligent ten percent of whites have IQs below 81; forty percent of blacks have IQs that low. Only one black in six is more intelligent than the average white; five whites out of six are more intelligent than the average black. These differences show in every test of general cognitive ability that anyone, of any race or nationality, has yet been able to devise. They are reflected in countless everyday situations. “Life is an IQ test.” http://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/research-analysis/foreclosures-by-race-and-ethnicity.html

http://i.imgur.com/HX3Ti.jpg

There is a huge academic literature on the gaps in cognitive test results, practically all of it converging on the fact that African American mean scores on cognitive tests fall below the white means by a tad more than one white standard deviation. There is in fact so much data on this now that we have meta-studies — studies of the studies: the one best-known to me is the meta-study by Roth et al. in 2001, which covered 39 studies involving nearly six million test-takers. That one standard deviation on cognitive testing has been so persistent across so many decades, an academic sociologist, calls it "the fundamental constant of American sociology" — it's like the speed of light in physics.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Controversy-Media-Public-Policy/dp/0887388396/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=ur2&tag=vd0b-20 http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx

https://imgur.com/ZnbLY

Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis The book claims to represent the largest collection and review of the global Intelligence Quotient (IQ) data, surveying 620 published studies from around the world, with a total of 813,778 tested individuals. Lynn's meta-analysis lists East Asians (IQ 105), Europeans (100), Inuit (91), South East Asians (87), Native Americans (87), Pacific Islanders (85), South Asians and North Africans (84), non-bushmen Sub-Saharan Africans (67), Australian Aborigines (62), Bushmen and Pygmies (54).
Lynn defines races as the genetic clusters or ancestral population groups identified in previous genetic cluster analysis by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues in their 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_Global_Inequality

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study tried to answer whether the gap is primarily caused by genetic factors or whether it is primarily caused by environmental and cultural factors. The children were first tested in age 7 and retested at age 17.

http://imgur.com/b25BWcf

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.
It is a well-documented fact that blacks have shorter time horizons and are less likely to delay their gratification of their immediate desires than whites. This impulsiveness correlates strongly to disciplinary problems in school and to criminality in adult life:

http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2011conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=171 http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/4/1p1/93/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/01/when-genes-matter-for-intelligence/