The latest IQ debate

Apparently James Flynn and Charles Murray have had another public debate about black/white IQ. Flynn is the only Leftist who is capable of sustaining an informed debate on the matter (people like Gardner and Sternberg are off with the fairies). There was another debate between Flynn and Murray a year ago. The report of the latest debate is by John Derbyshire, who is as cautious and polite as ever.

It is really sad to hear that Flynn is still leaning heavily on the old Eyferth study. Flynn himself knows the problems of generalizing from that study and I point them out with my usual brutal frankness here. Flynn is a perfectly competent IQ researcher so why he clings to something so unhelpful to his case is quite a mystery. It must just be that curious Leftist inability to cope with the world as it is. In Flynn's case it is denial on a pathological scale.

If anything, the Eyferth study shows the central role of genetics in IQ. The study found that the children of black American GIs and white women had similar IQs to whites. But blacks at the time had to pass the same IQ test as whites to get into the army. So what the study shows is that what IQ tests test for is genetically transmitted! And it shows that it was genetically transmitted AMONG BLACKS! Nasty! Putting it another way, it shows that only a subset of blacks especially selected by IQ tests will get results similar to whites. Why Flynn thinks that study helps his case is rather a mystery. It does make him look like some sort of mental case. It might be worth noting that Leftists themselves are much less confident of their mental health than are conservatives.

The other study mentioned by Derb is the Ogbu ("Shaker Heights") study. Black researcher Ogbu found that the children of middle class blacks did not do as well at school as the children of middle class whites. Ogbu himself attributed that to an anti-intellectual culture among blacks and there is no doubt that such a culture exists. A more straightforward explanation of his findings, however, is that affirmative action makes it easy for blacks of only average ability to rise into the middle class whereas whites have to be above-average to get there. So the children simply reflect the genetic endowment of their parents.

There is also a statistical effect known as regression to the mean that could be at work in the Ogbu study. The effect says that parents who are exceptional within their group will IN GENERAL have less exceptional children. That regression to the mean effect has always been a bit of a teeth-grinder for me, in fact. It has always had me wondering about how bright my son would turn out to be. His recent achievements in mathematics have allayed such doubts rather convincingly, however.

Reference:
Eyferth, K. (1961). Leistungenverchiedener Gruppen von Besatzungskindern im Hamburg Wechsler Intelligenztest fuer Kinder (HAWIK). Archiv fuer die gesamte Psychologie, 1 13, 222 241.

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Bloodthirsty Muslims

Post below lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

The behavior the Associated Press describes in this report from Khartoum, Sudan, does not strike us as completely normal:

Thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and knives, rallied Friday in a central square and demanded the execution of a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam for allowing her students to name a teddy bear "Muhammad." In response to the demonstration, teacher Gillian Gibbons was moved from the women's prison near Khartoum to a secret location for her safety, her lawyer said. The protesters streamed out of mosques after Friday sermons, as pickup trucks with loudspeakers blared messages against Gibbons, who was sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation. She avoided the more serious punishment of 40 lashes. . . .

Meanwhile, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have had the following to say about Gibbons's plight: . It's a statement that is all the more powerful for its brevity.

Note that, courtesy of the wicked Bob McCarty, you can now buy "Mohammed the Bear" -- as below:



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ELSEWHERE

Pure bias at CNN: "Eason Jordan famously sullied the reputation of CNN by trading journalistic integrity for access in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That wasn't his only transgression of course - things of this sort are rarely, if ever, single events. We should have remembered that lesson when it came out the other day that the CNN audience for the Democratic presidential debate was full of plants - Democratic Party activists and campaign workers. If we had remembered the lesson, we wouldn't have been surprised at the news that the CNN Republican presidential debate was also full of plants - and that these too were Democratic Party activists and campaign workers. This is shocking behavior on the part of a company that calls itself a "news" network. That this behavior is partisan is not really the point - the shocking part is that CNN has utterly dispensed with any pretense of journalistic integrity"

Arab apartheid at work: "This week the Bush Administration legitimized Arab anti-Semitism. In an effort to please the Saudis and their Arab brothers, the Bush administration agreed to physically separate the Jews from the Arabs at the Annapolis conference in a manner that aligns with the apartheid policies of the Arab world which prohibit Israelis from setting foot on Arab soil. Evident everywhere, the discrimination against Israel received its starkest expression at the main assembly of the Annapolis conference on Tuesday. There, in accordance with Saudi demands, the Americans prohibited Israeli representatives from entering the hall through the same door as the Arabs."

Useless diplomacy: "But does modern diplomacy actually work? Careful consideration does not make for comfortable reading. Kosovo, Darfur, North Korea and Iran suggest that more progress might have been made had a little more stick been employed than endless talk. All the main aid agencies estimate about two million innocent civilians have been the victims of the Sudanese Islamic militias that have waged a genocidal campaign against the Christian and Animist tribes that predominantly inhabit the south of the country. There are 700,000 people in refugee camps in the Darfur province of western Sudan and eastern Chad and it is universally agreed that this is the one issue that demands immediate and effective attention. But four years after the start of a conflict former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called "little short of hell on earth", the killing and deprivation goes on"

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or here

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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