Word: herrnsteins
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Environmental Handle. For the most part, Herrnstein avoids the racial issue, concentrating on the relative influence of "nature and nurture" (heredity and environment) in shaping intelligence. But today that subject is studied chiefly in hopes of accounting for the 15-point I.Q. difference typically found between American blacks and whites. Herrnstein's study thus becomes the latest in a series of documents that have sparked a continuing dispute over racial differences. It follows the 1965 Moynihan report that attributed many problems of blacks to their matriarchal families; the 1966 study by sociologist James Coleman that seemed to eliminate poor...
Jensen weighed the factors that determine I.Q. and concluded that 80% are hereditary and only 20% environmental. Herrnstein goes beyond Jensen in stating that heredity will become even more important if scientists find external ways to improve intelligence. His reasoning: "Suppose we do find an environmental handle on I.Q.-something, let us say, in the gestating mother's diet. Presumably society would try to give everyone access to the favorable factor. But if we make the environment much more uniform, then an even larger proportion of the variation in I.Q. will be attributable to the genes. The average person...
...Herrnstein, this means that class status would also run in families. Removing social barriers to mobility would not change this; on the contrary, it would create biological barriers by sorting people out according to inherited differences in intelligence. Increasing the nation's wealth to make more room at the top would also be ineffective in reducing class barriers, Herrnstein reasons. Some poor people would become well-to-do, but "the growth of wealth will recruit for the upper classes precisely those from the lower classes who have the edge in native ability." This will only "increase...
This vision of "a virtual caste system" is appalling, Herrnstein admits, because it "reminds us of aristocracies, privileged classes, unfair advantages and disadvantages of birth." But there is a difference: the new aristocracy's prerogatives would stem from genuine ability and hence, Herrnstein seems to imply, would be fair enough. In a warning, perhaps unintended, to those who might rebel, he writes that "the privileged classes of the past were probably not much superior biologically to the downtrodden, which is why revolutions had a fair chance of success." Herrnstein's implication is clear: rebellion against the new intellectual...
Such views are certain to make Herrnstein's article at least as controversial as the studies that preceded it. Many blacks and whites will be angered by his defense of intelligence testing because they believe that the racial characteristics it discloses reflect no real differences in ability but only the cultural deprivation of blacks and the cultural bias of I.Q. tests. Because Herrnstein accepts Jensen's ideas about heredity and intelligence, as well as Jensen's contention that compensatory education has failed, he is likely to be criticized by some scientists who, like Nobel Geneticist Joshua Lederberg...