Word: iq
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Blacks as a group consistently score lower than whites on standard IQ tests. That is a fact no one can dispute. But the reason for the discrepancy has become a matter of heated dispute -sparked largely by the widely publicized theories of Psychologist Arthur Jensen and Physicist William Shockley. The two men suggest that genetic factors account for the differences. Others, like University of Pennsylvania Anthropologist Peggy Sanday, insist that the differences are environmental. Last week Sanday buttressed her case by reporting the results of her own study...
...that heritability must be referred to particular populations and, more important, that for the question of genetic differences between races, it really makes no difference what value of heritability you suppose for the white population. Indeed, at one point in the article I even allowed that the heritability of IQ among white Americans could be 100 per cent for all the difference it makes to the question of race. I was willing to grant a high heritability of IQ for American whites because, for the purpose of exposing Mr. Jensen's particular brand of nonsense, it was not worth disputing...
...nonsense, I again did not challenge any particular estimate of heritability in any population, because none of these estimates is relevant to the causes of the difference between social classes. Just to make things crystal clear, however, let me state again that no current estimate of the heritability of IQ can be validly referred to the white population of the United States as a whole, not to any identifiable sub-section of it. We do not know to what real population, if any, these estimates are to be referred, and they are all irrelevant to the differences between social classes...
...star-crossed lovers and their experience with a flend in search of a potato salad recipe. The playing out of these situations takes us through a beauty contest for cows, the trauma of a lost barometer, a Firesign Theatre-type game show called "Justify Your Existence" and a Kafkaesque IQ test. The show does have a plot, however disguised it is in these absurd digressions...
...theory he labels dysgenics. He defines it as "retrogressive evolution through the disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged." One of its controversial contentions is that blacks are genetically inferior to whites in intellectual capacity. Another is that bonuses should be paid to persons with less than an average IQ who are voluntarily sterilized...