Word: iq
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Harvard Educational Review published an article by a Berkeley professor who claimed that some of the IQ differences between whites and blacks were due to genetic differences between the races. The author, Arthur A. Jensen, said that human intelligence is affected more by heredity than environment...
...author uses his theories to attack compensatory education programs, such as Operation Head Start, which assume that the withered young intellect will bloom if it is properly watered. Jensen contends that if substantial IQ improvement is the goal, all such programs will fail. He proposes instead that the schools broaden their approach to accommodate all levels of intelligence. Jensen writes: "Too often, if a child does not learn the school subject matter when taught in a way that depends largely on being average or above average, he does not learn...
...response to the Jensen article commissioned by Harvard's Review. "But this is not to say that the magnitude and direction of genetic racial differences are predictable." In American society, he adds, the environmental difference between being black and being white could of itself account for the IQ...
...which was not cited by Jensen, of 38 pairs of identical white twins. Separated in infancy, these twins were reared in different environments. Gottesman and Shields found that, since the twins were presumed to be genetic equals, the environmental factor alone must have accounted for a spread of 14 IQ points-almost the same gap that separates black and white...
Until instruments more precise than the IQ test are developed, any attempt to rank the intelligence of black and white is meaningless-and is bound to be mischievous in the light of its political implications. Too little is known of the genes to justify positive statements about their contribution to the intelligence of mankind at large, much less to any division of mankind. The suspicion that there are genetically determined differences at birth, and that these may contribute to the enormous diversity of the human intellect, is at least as old as Plato. But, as Geneticist Lederberg observes, "it remains...