The Bell Curve

hello everyone today we're going to be talking about the bell curve the bell curve is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray and by way of an introduction here I'll read the description of the book that's on the back of my copy breaking new ground and old taboos Richard J hansteen and Charles Maurey tell the story of a society in transformation at the top a cognitive elite is forming in which the passkey to the best schools and the best jobs is no longer social background but high intelligence at the bottom the common denominator of the underclass is increasingly low intelligence rather than racial or social disadvantage the bell curve describes the state of scientific knowledge about questions that have been on people's minds for years but have been considered too sensitive to talk about openly among them IQs relationship to crime unemployment welfare child neglect poverty and illegitimate ethnic differences in intelligence trends in fertility among women with different levels of intelligence and what policy can do and cannot do to compensate for differences in intelligence brilliantly argued and meticulously documented the bell curve is the essential first step in coming to grips with the nation's social problems even though it is now 25 years old the bell curves ideas have had quite the lasting impact richard Herrnstein passed away shortly before the bell curve was released but the other author charles murray has in recent years among other things been on an episode of making sense with sam harris he's been interviewed on stefan molyneux youtube channel had his ideas discussed on the Joe Rogan podcast and regular viewers of my channel will remember the bell curve being cited in a recent steven crowder video at the time of the books released the backlash against it in certain sections of the media and scientific community was furious dozens of articles were written by scientists and journalists attacking the book studies were conducted to the bunk its claims whole books were written to the monkids claims actually and these criticisms were often phrased very harshly columnist Bob Herbert writing for the New York Times described the book as a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship mr. morri can pro test all he wants rotor but his book is just a genteel way of calling someone the n-word this controversy ignited by the bell curve has also had quite the lasting impact when Charles Murray is invited to speak at college campuses for instance people turn out in protests often with angry cries of racist eugenicist and so on and from the enraged reaction to the bell curve a new reader might expect the book to be blatant and unapologetic racist propaganda a neo-nazi screed arguing for the supremacy of the high IQ white race and such things as that however when we actually sit down and read the book things aren't quite that simple consider the following quotes if tomorrow you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the cognitive differences between races were 100% genetic in origin nothing of any significance should change the knowledge will give you no reason to treat individuals differently than if ethnic differences were 100 percent environmental in any case you are not going to learn tomorrow that all cognitive differences between races are 100% genetic in origin because the scientific states of knowledge unfinished as it is already gives ample evidence that environment is part of the story if the reader is now convinced to that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other it seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences what might the mix be we are resolutely agnostic on that issue as far as we can determine the evidence does not justify an estimate for virtually all the topics we will be discussing cognitive ability accounts for only small to middling proportions of the variation among people it almost always explains less than 20% of the variance to use the statisticians term usually less than 10% and often less than 5% what this means in English is that you cannot predict what a given person will do from his IQ score so what's going on here it seems from these quotes anyway that the bell curve is actually a fairly reasonable piece of work these are all relatively mild of the road statements here so this hardly seems like a scam Burris piece of racial pornography so far Charles Maurey has used quotes from the bell curve such as we have just read to defend himself and his work against accusations of racism Morey and other defenders of the bell curve cast the attacks on the book as resulting from a cowardly reluctance to discuss what they see as difficult scientific truths in particular a reluctance to discuss possible differences in intelligence across designated racial groups so this is what we're going to talk about today we're gonna take a look at some of the arguments in the bell curve discuss some of the most common counter arguments and see if we can figure out what all the fuss is about did the bell curve deserve its harsh criticism or is it the case that its critics simply cannot handle the truth before we get to all that though as you can see this video is rather long I expect people may have to watch this one in multiple parts so firstly here let's just take a second to lay out the format of the video today first off we're gonna briefly talk about intelligence and intelligence testing and quickly mention a few concepts that are going to be important going forward such as spam and G and factor analysis then we're going to introduce the bell curve and summarize the arguments of each of its four main sections as fairly as we can after that we'll move on to counter arguments in sections primarily concerned with the concept of a general intelligence the possible problems with IQ testing the bell curves calculation of IQ versus environmental factors and finally the political arguments and policy proposals found within the book I will include time codes to all of these sections below so you can drop out and come back as needed right then let's get started and if we're going to be reading a book that is about intelligence we should start off by briefly talking about exactly what that is let's imagine that we want to design an intelligence test from scratch and to do this we first have to answer two difficult questions the first is how exactly do we define intelligence and this is a particularly tricky thing to do as we'll see let's start with the dictionary definition of intelligence which is as good a place to start as any I suppose and this is from the Oxford English Dictionary intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills now our first problem here is that this definition is rather broad think about all the activities and groups of activities that could fall under this definition of intelligence is one's ability to solve complicated mathematical soms governed by intelligence how about the ability to solve a difficult chess puzzle I'd imagine we'd say those things are associated with intelligence right well how about the ability to write a great novel or compose a great piece of music are those things influenced by intelligence or would we merely call that creativity is knowing whether to pass or shoot in a game of basketball or football influenced by intelligence or what we merely call that talent or are all of these things some mix of intelligence talent and creativity we can certainly imagine a novel that is written intelligently for instance could we say this is some sort of creative intelligence or our intelligence and creativity strictly two entirely different concepts is there a difference between memorizing and applying mathematical functions say and memorizing and carrying out a piano piece or a dance routine or a set of football plays if there is a difference what is it by what metric are we declaring some of those things to be governed by intelligence and others not are there such things as social and emotional intelligence what we might call the abilities who read a room to be aware of the emotions of others and to react appropriately in interactions with them is intelligence involved there or should we just call that something like being sociable all the various things I just mentioned can be argued to fall under the umbrella of acquiring and applying knowledge and skills right defining exactly what intelligence is is a very difficult thing to do and there is a wide range of opinions among scientists and academics about the best way to go about it following the publication of the bell curve and inspired by the harsh criticism it received a public statement entitled mainstream science on intelligence was written by professor Linda Gottfredson and published in The Wall Street Journal the statement sets out to outline conclusions regarded as mainstream among searches on intelligence in particular on the nature origins and practical consequences of individual and group differences in intelligence the statement was sent to 131 researchers of whom 52 signed it many of whom are themselves cited in the bell curve important for us here is that mainstream science on intelligence gives the following definition of intelligence intelligence is a very general mental capability that among other things involves the ability to reason plan solve problems think abstractly comprehend complex ideas learn quickly and learn from experience it is not merely book learning a narrow academic skill or test taking smarts rather it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings catching on making sense of things or figuring out what to do my favorite part of this definition is among other things because intelligence is apparently all of this and some other stuff too my point here is that even among researchers who are cited in the bell curve and would put their name to a defense of its ideas intelligence is a very broadly defined concept and even if we can agree on a definition of intelligence the second difficult question we have to answer is this how exactly do we measure it it's not as simple as testing for some other human abilities we can measure how fast someone is by using units of time and distance and we can measure how strong someone is by using units of weight but what do you use to quantify how smart someone is what we need here is an intelligence unit we need a way to express someone's intelligence as a number now most people today will recognize IQ as the most common intelligence unit and let's briefly talk a little about how that came to be so way back in the old days if we wanted to determine someone's personality traits and abilities we could measure their skull calculate the volume of their brain or simply look at their facial features phrenology however has fallen out of favor with scientists of late although it should be knows that the technology sector is currently in the process of reinventing it now I won't be going all that deeply into the history of intelligence testing today so I'll just start off here by saying that researchers eventually for the most part anyway stopped measuring people's skulls and started trying to measure what was going on inside them the first practical IQ test was invented by French psychologist alfred Binet in 1905 this test set out to determine the mental age of schoolchildren and was designed with the purpose of identifying those children who were underperforming compared to their peers so they could be given extra help such noble beginnings here now Binet for his part stressed that intelligence was affected by environmental factors was not expressible as a singular fixed numerical value and was not exclusively genetic in origin his test was designed to identify those who were struggling in school and not to rank people into some sort of eugenic hierarchy Binet died in 1911 and has since spent the majority of his time spinning in his grave due to everything else we're going to talk about today an American psychologist called Henry H Goddard translated Benes intelligence tests into English in 1908 and distributed thousands of copies of the test across the United States and in 1916 another American psychologist named Lewis Terman working for the Stanford Graduate School of Education revised the test into what we know today as the stanford-binet IQ test both goddard and term and also work together with other psychologists to create the army alpha and army beta tests which were intelligence tests administered to u.s. military recruits during World War one before we go any further I'd like to pause for a second and propose a question about our intelligence tests here how do we know that they are actually measuring intelligence they're called intelligence tests sure but that doesn't necessarily mean they are actually measuring intelligence does it as we discussed earlier intelligence is a very broad concept how do we know we're not merely measuring a tiny segment of it well in the early 20th century English psychologist Charles Spearman used a statistical technique called factor analysis to identify what he called the G factor Spearman noticed that people's test results across a range of subjects we're positively correlates and reasons that this was because of an underlying general intelligence factor which he dubbed G and this G factor supposedly underlies all mental performance so no matter the subject being tested they are all influenced by this one general intelligence factor and psychometricians claimed that IQ tests measure this G factor psychometricians being people concerned with psychological measurement there now G answers both of our difficult questions if you'd noticed thanks to the G factor the vast range of potential human intelligence is no longer a barrier to us testing for it because it's supposedly all linked to a single underlying factor that is able to be measured and expressed as a single numerical value it's very handy isn't it this general intelligence factor suspiciously handy one might say but we'll talk more about G and Spearman's factor analysis later on now before we conclude our little history lesson here there is something else that must be noted and it's that early proponents of IQ testing in America and elsewhere were not motivated solely by some neutral scientific curiosity they were eugenicist they wanted to use what they could learn from intelligence testing as a way to improve the genetic quality of the human population through what amounts to selective breeding Henry Goddard who translated Benes intelligence test proposed segregating the so-called feeble-minded into colonies separate from the rest of society and Lewis Terman offer of the stanford-binet test wrote the following in a 1916 work called the uses of intelligence tests thus far intelligence tests have found their chief application in the identification and grading of the feeble-minded it is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance of society this will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime pauperism and industrial inefficiency and quote and tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized during the last century and low IQ test results were used to just to find many of those sterilizations the eugenics movement lost a lot of momentum as a result of the Second World War during which eugenics became a revocable associated with many of the worst crimes of Nazi Germany and in the following decades many countries distance themselves from eugenics policies and many scientists became more suspicious of not just eugenics itself but also the extent of the worth of intelligence testing is a concept now not to spoil the end of my video here but this is a good chunk of the reason that the reactions the bell curve was so harsh the idea that we can use intelligence test results in order to inform political policy was only half a lifetime before the book was written getting people sent to gas chambers so it's not surprising that people will be rather suspicious about it let's just say that anyone attempting to resurrect this idea needs to be incredibly aware of and respectful of exactly where what they're proposing can lead so people are fleeing eugenics in droves simply because it was used to justify an indefensible crime against humanity and scientists are increasingly skeptical of the extent of the usefulness of intelligence testing and IQ and efforts to rank people according to biology in general and all this brings us to the bell curve the Empire Strikes Back and in this book Herrnstein and Murray come to the defense of IQ and say now everyone calm down don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here intelligence testing and IQ are important and useful concepts and crucially what we can learn from IQ testing should inform our politics and be used to change our society so you know eugenics but nice this time and since we've now arrived at the bell curve I think it's time for us to read it not all of it right now we'd be here all day but I will briefly summarize it here for the most part using the introductions that precede each chapter in the introduction to the book hansteen Amaury begin by talking about intelligence they offer Spearman's definition of intelligence as a person's capacity for complex mental work and argue that general intelligence can be measured by IQ tests saying furthermore the class assists point out the best standardized tests such as a modern IQ test there were reasonably good job of measuring IQ when properly administered the tests are not measurably biased against socioeconomic ethnic or racial subgroups they predict a wide variety of socially important outcomes they also defend the practice of IQ testing from critics within the scientific community notably evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould whose 1981 book the MIS measure of man was quoting the back of my copy here immediately hailed as a masterwork the ringing answer to those who would classify people rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits in this book Gould is highly critical of everything from phrenology and craniometry to modern IQ testing he argues against the concept of the single general intelligence and he highlights cases where eugenicist sand psychometricians had relied upon bad data and flawed statistical techniques including the case of cyril birth an early proponent of the use of twin studies for examining the heritability of intelligence who after he died was revealed to have just been making up his research data that's one way to do it I suppose the bell curve was written with the mismeasure of man in mind and is in some ways a response to its claims a newer edition of the miss measure of man was printed with an extra chapter responding to the claims of the bell curve and a newer addition of the bell curve was printed with an extra chapter responding in part to Steve and Jay Gould golden Maury probably should have just met up and had a fight at this point on pages 22 and 23 hansteen and Murray summarized their main claims about intelligence which are the following one there is such a thing as a general factor of cognitive ability on which human beings differ to all standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this general factor to some degree but IQ tests expressly designed for that purpose measure it most accurately free IQ scores matched to a first degree whatever it is that people mean when they use the word intelligence or smart in ordinary language for IQ scores are stable although not perfectly so over much of a person's life five properly that IQ tests are not demonstrable biased against social economic ethnic or racial groups and sex cognitive ability is substantially heritable apparently no less than 40% and no more than 80% and on that last point Herrnstein amore later right in a section titled how much is IQ a matter of genes for purposes of this discussion we will adopt a middling estimate of 60% heritability which by extension means that IQ is about 40% a matter of environment so onto part 1 of the bell curve which is titled the emergence of a cognitive elite and introduces hansteen amory's theory of the cognitive partitioning of society since World War 2 they argue colleges in the United States have increasingly admitted people by test score rather than things like social standing or familial connections where you could once expect to attend a prestigious College if your father had gone there for instance increasingly you now need to have competitive test scores this has led to high IQ people being found disproportionately in the top institutions and geographically close together the job market is also increasingly IQ focused as low IQ jobs are replaced by automation and the best jobs have apparently become more selective of high IQ candidates IQ is also apparently a very good predictor of job performance these high IQ people economically and geographically segregated from the rest of society are increasingly partnering with each other and since we're assuming IQ is largely genetic are producing high IQ offspring Society is the stratifying itself into some sort of intelligence based caste system at the end of part 1 hence tina-marie summarized their claims by saying 1 the cognitive elite is getting richer in an era when everyone else is having to struggle to stay even to the cognitive elite is increasingly segregated physically from everyone else in both the workplace and the neighborhood and free the cognitive elite is increasingly likely to intermarry part 2 of the bell curve is titled cognitive classes and social behavior and here Herrnstein amore make the case that intelligence is tied to behavior and predictably determines various things such as likelihood of being poor a criminal a high school dropout unemployed an unwed mother on welfare and so on in order to argue this hansteen Amory first introduced the source of their data which is the Armed Forces qualifying test or AFQT this test was taken as part of the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth the subjects of this survey were aged 14 to 22 and were administered the Armed Forces qualifying test in 1980 researchers then interviewed the group over the following decade asking them various questions about themselves hence tina-marie used the respondent scores on the AFQT to determine the IQ of each person and then used their later interview answers to calculate to what degree a high IQ is correlated with positive life outcomes and to what degree a low IQ is correlated with negative outcomes throughout the rest of this section of the bell curve Hance tina-marie go further than simply arguing for the correlation between low IQ and those negative life outcomes they make the case that once AFQT score correlates with them more strongly than socioeconomic status does hence tina-marie compare the AFQT scores of each respondents against their calculation of the socioeconomic status of the respondents parents so as the book inequality by design puts it roughly in the bell curve statistical comparisons the parents class represents nurture and the AFQT score represents nature looking at various negative life outcomes like being in poverty being in jail being unemployed and so on Herrnstein amore repeatedly find that for the young respondents to the survey AFQT score and by proxy IQ score is a more accurate predictor of life outcomes than apparent socioeconomic status hence tina-marie conclude this section by stating that a smarter population is more likely to be and more capable of being made into a civil citizenry part three of the bell curve is titled the national context and is where things start getting especially controversial this is the section of the book where they discuss differences in cognitive ability across designated racial groups they review published literature on differences in Ray like you scores and find substantial differences between the various groups they discussed the ways in which tests can be biased culturally and otherwise but ultimately conclude that these group differences cannot be explained away by bias in Chapter 15 hence tina-marie talk about how they think cognitive ability in the West is declining stating throughout the West's modernization has brought falling birth rates the rates fall faster for educated women than the uneducated because education is so closely linked to a cognitive ability this tends to produce a disc genic effect or a downward shift in the ability distribution furthermore education leads women to have their babies later which alone also produces additional disc genic pressure have you ever seen the movie idiocracy because this is just that basically lower IQ people have more children than higher IQ people so therefore average IQ scores are going down however hansteen Amaury run into a problem here which is that IQ scores had been going up not down in the decade prior to the publication of the bell curve this is known as the Flynn effect name for intelligence researcher James R Flynn who documented it and we will talk more about the bell curves attempt to account for the Flynn effect later on part four of the bell curve is titled living together and is concerned with social policy this is where hansteen and Maury start proposing political solutions to the various problems they outlined in the previous chapters they discuss and ultimately brand as ineffective all contemporary attempts to help disadvantaged children succeed in life things like better nutrition better schooling a better home environment all these things can possibly temporarily make people smarter to a degree but in the end hence ninamarie conclude that they will all eventually run into a genetic limit that cannot be worked around far more money is spent in ineffective attempts to help the disadvantaged than is spent on the gifted hands tina-marie contend and we should thus directly shift the resources upwards to support our best and brightest and this quote is from the introduction to chapter 18 some federal funds now so exclusively focused on the disadvantaged should be reallocated to programs for the gifted affirmative action in schools as it stands should be scrapped of course hansteen amore argue for a sort of race blind score based affirmative action they still support colleges accepting applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds but only if they have comparable test scores to the other applicants affirmative action in the job market should also be scrapped with Herrnstein amore arguing that in pursuit of equality we have actually already overshot it and that black people actually attain better quality jobs than white people once you account for their IQs of course hansteen amore argue for encouraging low IQ parents to have fewer children in a couple of different ways firstly they argue for making marriage a prerequisite for parental rights and they also support cutting off welfare for low-income mothers stating that we urge generally that these policies represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies be ended they also argue more generally in favor of individualism concluding chapter 21 by writing individualism is not only America's heritage it must be its future hansteen amore conclude this part of the bell curve with the following inequality of endowments including intelligence is a reality trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster it is time for America to once again try living with inequality as life is lived understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses and so on this is the end of the main text of the bell curve then follows seven appendices explaining various things about the data and statistical methods used in the book among other things additionally newer versions of the bell curve contain an afterword written in response to various criticisms directed at the book by various scientists and journalists and we will be quoting from that at several points later on so then that was the bell curve and before we carry on here I think it would be worthwhile to attempt to summarize the general argument of the book so here is my understanding of it in four points one general intelligence orgy exists intelligence is to some degree heritable innate unable to be significantly changed and unevenly distributed both within and across population groups - IQ tests measure G fairly and accurately free one's IQ is more important than one social background in determining one's life outcomes and for given what we can learn from these points we should implement conservative social policies such as limiting welfare incentivizing marriage abandoning affirmative action and more broadly we should promote a return to a more individualistic society now I'm sure someone could disagree with the conservative objective in this last point and argue that hansteen Amaury merely promote whatever policies seem to best address the problems they discuss they propose better access to birth control for instance which is not typically a conservative policy overall though their policy recommendations definitely lean heavily to the right so it's now time to begin looking at the counter arguments and we will begin with 0.1 on this list and talk about general intelligence so if we want to understand general intelligence we first need to understand the statistical technique by which it is calculated factor analysis and if we want to understand factor analysis we first need to talk about correlation and causation starting with correlation then correlation is basically statistical Association Steve and Jay Gould in the MIS measure of man describes it in the following way correlation assesses the tendency of one measure to vary in concert with another as a child grows for example both its arms and legs get longer this joint tendencies the change in the same direction is called a positive correlation not all parts of the body displays such positive correlation during growth teeth for example do not grow after they erupt the relationship between first incisor lymph and leg lymph from say age tend to adulthood what represents zero correlation legs will get longer while teeth changed not at all all the correlations can be negative one measure increases while the other decreases we begin to lose neurons at a distressingly early age and they are not replaced thus the relationship between leg length and number of neurons after mid childhood represents negative correlation leg length increases while number of neurons decreases and Gould also includes this handy illustration of some example correlation graphs here now of course leg length and arm lengths are positively correlated because they share an underlying cause which is simply general biological growth however we can think of plenty of things that are positively correlated and do not share a cause you might be familiar with the following examples from the page spurious correlations which I will link below pair capita cheese consumption correlates with number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets number of letters in winning word of Scripps National Spelling Bee correlates with number of people killed by venomous spiders and so on obviously these things have nothing to do with each other probably so some correlations are just chance it would be an error to assume a shared cause their correlation does not imply causation is the same now in addition to assuming a shared cause when there is not one another common mistake here is to ignore a shared cause when there is one for example when considering arm and leg length to ignore the underlying biological growth and assume that legs are getting longer because arms are or vice versa there are lots of different ways to misrepresent correlations basically I agree with Gould when he writes the invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning anyway one result of us calculating the correlation between arm and leg lengths is that we have simplified the data somewhat the strong correlation between the two variables means we can basically express them as one so long as we don't mind losing a little information along the way but what if instead of just two variables we wanted to compare correlations between the size of say 50 different body parts plotting two measurements in a graph is fairly easy with the addition of a third measure though things start getting a little trickier this figure from the mismeasure of man where Gould introduces head measurements into the mix needs another dimension in order to convey the information and with more variables added in the data quickly gets too complex to display with a mere three dimensions and this brings us to factor analysis similar to how we simplified arm and leg length to a single dimension factor analysis can be used to reduce a complex system of correlated variables to a smaller number of underlying factors and you might find that just a few underlying factors explain the vast majority of the variations in a larger number of variables and furthermore you could identify which factor explained the majority of the variation I won't be going into the exact specifics of how factor analysis works I couldn't if I wanted to to be honest but this is basically how it is used to quote gould again factor analysis is a mathematical technique for reducing a complex system of correlations into fewer dimensions so you might be wondering what does all this have to do with intelligence well factor analysis is how psychologists Charles Spearman came up with the concept of the G factor Spearman looked at a big mass of data showing that people's scores on various intelligence tests were positively correlated carried out a little factor analysis and identified the most important underlying statistical factor he then called this G or general intelligence so this G is the underlying general mental ability that we are supposedly measuring with IQ tests however there are a few problems with this G factor one is as the bell curve itself points out that it's based on statistical analysis rather than direct observation we are inferring its existence from the data rather than measuring it directly basically it is the result of a particular statistical method secondly simplifying the majority of the data down to a single factor can actually obscure a lot of useful information what if the data shows that people who do well on tests of numerical ability tend to do well on other tests of ability and people who do well on tests of their language ability tend to do better on other tests of language ability we can imagine two people who were determined to be statistically as smart as each other but who excel in completely different areas right and there are several different intelligence theories identifying different clusters of mental abilities verbal logical spatial mathematical whatever else you can go and read about all of those if you're very bored but what can we take away from our little chat about correlation and factor analysis here well first of all factor analysis tells us nothing about causation it deals with correlations it can show that there might be common factors underlying different variables but it does not identify for us why those variables they're very as a comparison here let's say you take a sample of 10,000 random members of the public and you test their athletic performance at various physical tests amounts of weight lifted length jumped speed at running various distances sit-ups completed whatever and let's say that what you find is that people who perform well on one test relative to the group tend to perform well on the other tests relative to the group and vice-versa for those who perform poorly now you could if you so fancied subject this data to factor analysis identify numerically the most important underlying factor and name it f for general fitness or something and you could probably further assign each person an SQ or fitness quotient however what you would not have done is explain why some people are fitter than others you would have said nothing about the heritability of athletic performance the degree to which genetics and environment contribute to athletic performance you'd have said nothing about the causes of the data at all it would be a leap of logic to assume that each person's FQ is innate and unchangeable the data you have cannot tell you any such thing by itself you may also find that your singular numerical fitness quotient obscures a lot of useful information for instance you might find people who are better at strength exercises tend to be better or the strength exercises and so on so the mere existence of a general factor of cognitive ability would not explain why there are differences between people in fact the G factor is perfectly consistent with a 100% environmental approach to understanding intelligence we could play devil's advocate here and say yes a general factor of intelligence exists and is important but the variance in G between people is explained entirely by environmental factors childhood nutrition socioeconomic status school quality and so on absolutely nothing happens in the factor analysis process to tell us about what the causes are for people having different measurable levels of intelligence and even if we accept a single general intelligence factor exists that would not necessarily imply a genetic causation and speaking of genetics let's next talk about the word heritability when the bell curve says cognitive ability is substantially heritable apparently no less than 40% and no more than 80% what does that mean exactly if we averaged it for 60% like they do are we therefore to assume that each person's individual IQ is 60% determined by heritable genetics and 40% by the environment well no heritability is unfortunately one of those awkward words which has a common use understanding and a scientific understanding which differ in a few important ways the common use understanding is something like the ability of a thing to be passed down genetically right you can inherit being tall or having red hair but you can't inherit a scar or a finger lost in an accident say the technical academic meaning of heritability is rather different heritability is a numerical concept used to estimate the contribution of genetic variants to overall variants of a trait within a group so basically heritability estimates the degree to which the variance of a trait within a group is due to genetics height is thus a heritable trait taller parents generally have taller offspring for example and this is measurable against a population group having two arms however is not a heritable trait because almost everyone has two arms and for people who don't have two arms that variance is usually environmental in nature having two arms is genetically determined but it is not a heritable trait if you follow because genes account for very little of the variance within the population group something that is very highly heritable we would say has a heritability of one something that is not heritable at all we would say has a heritability of zero if we say something has a heritability of 0.6 then what we mean there is that 60% of the variance of the trait in a population group will be due to genetic factors what it does not mean is that 60% of the trait in one individual is due to their genes and 40% due to the environment heritability tells us about variants within a group not the makeup of individuals it is a population statistic you cannot meaningfully ask what the heritability of your IQ is so where am I going with this well there's a couple of points that I'd like to make the first is that a trait can be determined by your genes and be very lowly heritable such as the presence of arms and also the inverse of that a trait could be very highly heritable and not directly genetically determined one common example used to illustrate this is earrings what would we say accounts for the variance in whether people wear earrings within a particular group well depending on the group most of the variance could be Jew in one sense - a genetic factor biological sex wearing earrings would therefore be a heritable trait but this does not mean that there is an earring gene that is being passed down generationally the majority of people wearing earrings being women would be due to environmental factors fashion and gender roles which are subject to change over time in more recent years for example men in the West have increasingly been wearing earrings the heritability of the trait of wearing earrings is thus decreasing because less of the variance is being accounted for by genetics but crucially here nothing is actually happening genetically on the earring front the change in heritability is down to changing environmental factors when we say something is due to genetics we need to be very careful about exactly what we mean a useful categorization here is direct versus indirect genetic determination we need to be sure to differentiate between things that are directly genetically determined as in your genes are directly causing some biochemical process to happen within you and things that are indirectly genetically determined as a result of your genes interacting with your environment women being more likely to wear earrings for instance is a heritable trait but it is not directly genetically determined this is relevant to us because IQ could be such a trait where differences in IQ across designated racial groups are caused not by a direct genetic process but instead by how are genetically determined characteristics interact with our environment so as to affect our results on IQ tests for example let's imagine your genes cause you to have a particular skin color and you live in a segregated society in which people with that skin color are discriminated against and do not have equal access to education now that groups lower results on IQ tests would be in one sense because of their genes and scientists studying genetics might very well find a strong correlation between particular genes and lowered IQ test results but if we don't take the environment into account that by itself can't tell us anything the point here is that a trait could be very highly heritable and correlated strongly with particular genes and still have zero direct genetic determination now the idea that wearing earings can be more of a heritable trait than having ears is admittedly a bit of a difficult concept to grasp at first sight and I would understand if it took a little time for someone to wrap their head around all right now though what I want you to take away from this section if nothing else is the idea that something being heritable does not necessarily mean it is actually being directly caused by genetics my next point is that heritability estimates the causes of variance within a group it cannot tell us about reasons for differences across groups and to illustrate this we will paraphrase a fourth experiments by geneticist Richard Lewontin let's say we take a packet of seeds and plant them in fertilized soil in a controlled laboratory environment and we ensure that the growing plants have sufficient and equal amounts of water and light and doesn't that sound nice now height in plants is a heritable trait just like in humans and the plants would thus grow to a range of different heights height in this experiment would be very highly heritable because the fact we're ensuring the plants have an equal environment means that the variance in Heights in the group is solely down to genetics next let's say we do that experiment again only this time we plant the seeds in bad soil and give them less but equal within the group amounts of water and light the thing to understand here is that height in this second experiment would be exactly as heritable as in the previous experiments all of the plants from the second group have the same group environment meaning that again the group variance in Heights would be solely down to genetics the poor environment will produce smaller plants but since they are all subject to that environment equally heritability remains high the problems arise when we start trying to compare these two groups let's say the second group of plants has an average height that is 15% shorter than the first group for instance the heritability of height tells us nothing about why that is heritability was the same across both groups if you're trying to figure out why one group of plants grew larger than the other saying height is heritable tells us nothing useful the difference between the groups was entirely down to environmental factors and heritability despite being high played no part the two points can take from this fort experiments are firstly the heritability of traits does not account for group differences and secondly a trait having a high heritability does not mean that traits is immutable or unaffected by the environment for another example of this height in humans is a highly heritable trait but the average human Heights increased substantially over the last century and this was due to environmental changes such as better health care and nutrition or for another example North Koreans are on average a few inches shorter than South Koreans and this is down to the different material conditions in those two countries not some recent radical divergence in genetics height is heritable in both North and South Korea but it's the environment that is the cause of the variance between the groups this is something that the bell curve crucially misunderstands when talking about the heritability of intelligence and IQ on page 109 they say even a heritability of 0.6 leaves room for considerable change if the changes in environments are commensurable large the implication here being that higher heritability s would be less affected by changes in the environment and this is just not how it works iq could be 100% heritable and still massively affected by changes in the group environment professor Ned block from New York University makes several of these points of our territory in an article entitled how heritability misleads about race and then goes on to say I hope these points remove the temptation exhibited in the bell curve to think of the heritability of IQ as a constant like the speed of light heritability is a population statistic just like birth rates or number of TVs and can be expected to change with changing circumstances these issues are pathetically misunderstood by charles murray in a CNN interview reported in the New Republic Murray declared when I when we say 60% heritability it's not 60% of the variation it is 60% of the IQ in any given person later he repeated that for the average person 60% of the intelligence comes from heredity and that this was true of the human species missing the point that heritability makes no sense for an individual and that heritability statistics our population relative so if you don't quite understand all this stuff about heritability don't feel too bad because Charles Maurey doesn't understand it either or at least he didn't 25 years ago he may have done its homework since then who knows looking again at the bell curves list of claims about intelligence the only one on here that could be said to be making a point about genetics is number 6 cognitive ability is substantially heritable however as we've seen a traits being heritable does not necessarily mean a direct genetic cause it does not tell us anything about the heritability of a particular individuals intelligence and it cannot tell us the reason for differences between groups of people those differences between people could be caused by environmental factors because twist' environments are heritable too as the bell curve itself points out non genetic characteristics can nonetheless run in families for practical purposes environments are heritable too so to summarize this section we have considered the method by which a general intelligence factor is determined and also claims about its heritability but we can conclude from neither of these things that the variance and intelligence between groups of people has a direct genetic cause the cause could simply be directly due to the environment or indirectly by way of how genes are interacting with that environment so why am i listing off all the ways in which hansteen and Maury do not prove a genetic cause for cognitive ability you might ask there later comparisons of IQ and environmental factors assume that IQ is largely genetic in origin so presumably they do prove it at some point right well to put it bluntly no in their section how much is IQ a matter of genes they estimate the heritability of IQ scores by talking about twin studies we can use studies of identical twins non identical twins and regular siblings to estimate the extent of genetic effects upon IQ by noting the differences in correlations between their scores on intelligence tests however there are a few problems with this most importantly for us here being that in attempting to learn about genetic cognitive ability via intelligence test scores we have to make the assumption that intelligence tests are an accurate measure of cognitive ability but more on that in a moment even if we assume that the tests do give an accurate representation of cognitive ability attempt to use these correlations to construct a simple genetic model for IQ run into several issues firstly the IQs of identical twins do not perfectly correlated expect them to given they're nearly identical genetics the correlation of siblings who are raised apart is weaker than the correlation of siblings who are raised together and probably most troublesome for a purely genetic model here is that there is also some correlation between parents and adopted children their scores correlate to some degree despite there being no immediate genetic link beyond being the same species of course so in our search for exactly how much genetics affects cognitive ability these observations are only ever going to get us so far it's very difficult to disentangle the genetic effects from the environmental ones what we really need here is genetics research to advanced to the point where we understand exactly which genes influence intelligence and to which degree they influence intelligence when the bell curve was published the evidence was not there as Herrnstein amore admit the state of knowledge does not permit a precise estimate and in 2019 25 years later the evidence is still not there if anything that regards to the claims in the bell curve particularly its claims about racial differences the genetic story has only gotten more complicated the reason I say designated racial groups instead of racial groups during this video is because on a genetic level our skin color folk understanding of racial groups can be unhelpful there can be greater genetic differences within our socially constructed racial groups than between them I doubt anyone would be so naive as to expect us to one day identify the singular gene that controls both skin color and intelligence someone having dark skin and thus being identified and identifying as black could have a whole range of genetic history you can't read someone's genes by looking at their skin color this is important for us because the office of the bell curve use our socially constructed racial groups in their book talking about this they say what does it mean to be black in America in racial terms when the word black or african-american can be used for people whose ancestry is more European than African how are we to classify a person whose parents hailed from Panama but whose ancestry is predominantly African is he a Latino a black the rule we follow here is to classify people according to the way they classify themselves it would be a leap of logic to assume genetic explanations for characteristics of self-identified groups given that those groups could have a wide range of genetic makeups my point with all this is that the bell curves direct evidence of a genetic basis for IQ is missing Charles Murray's attitude towards this problem in the years since the publication of the book has been to kick the can down the road assuming that he enhance teen were prematurely right to borrow a phrase from his after words of the bell curve and that the accumulating genetic evidence will prove him right if everyone just waits a little longer and it remains his tactic more than two decades later in October of this year professor you and Bernie the director of the European bioinformatics Institute published a blog post titled race genetics and pseudoscience an explainer which discusses among other things how our traditional racial categorizations are not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation how distinct groups within Africa can be as distinct from each other as they are with non-africans how race is not a useful or accurate term for geneticists and it says that it is often suggested that geneticists who emphasize the biological invalidity of race are under the form of political correctness forced to suppress their real opinions in order to maintain their positions in the Academy such accusations are on founded and betray a lack of understanding of what motivates science Charles Maurey responded to this post on Twitter a few days later saying I can't understand why people are so eager to go public with positions for which the weight of the accumulating evidence is so unwelcome and that will be definitively settled within a few years so it seems the evidence for Mori is still just a few years away with regards to the bell curve however it is possible we are being a little unfair when we criticized it for basing much of its analysis on relatively crude estimations after all they do admit the evidence is not there and they say if the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other we should not criticize scientists for saying the evidence isn't there yet but here's a rough guess presenting such estimates and attempting to disprove them is a key part of the scientific process problems arise when we get to part 4 of the bell curve however while it is fine to say the evidence isn't there yet but here's a rough guess it is not so fine to say the evidence isn't there yet here's a rough guess and based upon this rough guess you should immediately suspend welfare programs for underprivileged children but we'll talk more about this later when we discuss the politics of the bell curve for now though let's address the assumption I mentioned earlier when talking about twin studies we have been in this section assuming that we can measure native intelligence accurately if we cannot measure native intelligence accurately then much of what we've talked about thus far is irrelevant so it's now time to talk about IQ tests so I summarized the bell curves claims about IQ tests as IQ tests measure G fairly and accurately I wrote fairly because of their statement properly administered IQ tests are not the mantra biased against social economic ethnic or racial groups and I wrote the word accurately because of their statement that all standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this general fact that to some degree but IQ tests expressly designed for purpose measure it most accurately so firstly here we're going to discuss a few of the possible problems with IQ tests starting with the various ways in which they can deliver biased results now direct cultural bias in IQ test items is discussed by hands Dina Murray in Chapter 13 they use an example of a question that includes the word regatta which is a word that might bias the results towards certain cultural and economic groups and certain historical so called intelligence test questions have actually been much worse than this some of them amounted to nothing more than general knowledge questions the army alpha test used in World War one asked army recruits to identify what particular celebrities were famous for in which cities certain cars were manufactured and the products produced by certain brands questions like these obviously have very little to do with any native intellectual ability they're just testing whether or not you happen to already know the answer there's no opportunity to work it out so any psychometricians constructing intelligence tests certainly need to be careful to not include biased test items like these ones tests can also be biased for instruction and what do we mean by instruction here well simply whether or not you've been taught the meaning of a word or the best method for solving a maths problem is going to matter a lot on a test that requires you to draw upon your mathematical and language abilities as an example here I'm gonna assume that we all agree it would be unfair to expect a random teenager to by themselves during a test invent trigonometry if you include trigonometry questions on your intelligence test what you'll be testing for there will not solely be the intelligence of the respondents but also whether or not they've been taught trigonometry before how recently they were taught it and how well they were taught it this is relevant for us here because the Armed Forces qualifying test which is the primary source of intelligence test data in the bell curve had as one of its four sections a mathematics test which included questions examining knowledge of classroom trigonometry and algebra this is more of a test of scholastic aptitude than native Intel and is also testing by proxy the quality of the teaching at the different schools that the AFQT respondents went to we can't assume that to be equal across thousands of different people can we this is one of a few problems with the AFQT that has roots in the fact that it was not designed as an IQ test but more on that in a second another way that IQ tests can be biased is for speed think of the definitions of intelligence we've seen so far a capacity for complex mental work catching on making sense of things and figuring out what to do and simply because of the way IQ tests are administered we have to add the words within the time constraints of an academic test to all of those things IQ tests are by their nature biased towards how fast you can think and away from other important qualities which contribute to overall cognitive abilities such as stamina determination and discipline similar to that point IQ tests have a more general bias towards familiarity with an academic environment people unfamiliar with taking tests are going to fare worse than people who are very used to it simply due to being in an unfamiliar environment things like anxiety and stress come into play here those can affect intelligence test results despite having nothing directly to do with intelligence themselves hence tina-marie are particularly aware of that last point and we need to briefly discuss the Flynn effect here so when IQ tests are constructed they're standardized using a sample of test takers now what that means in practice is the testers will test some people work out the average score and set that to correspond to 100 this is why we recognize an IQ of 100 as the average when those IQ tests are later revised or when new IQ tests are designed they're also standardized on new groups of people and their average is set again to 100 however researchers noticed that when newer test subjects take the older versions of a test their IQ scores are on average higher so IQ scores have gone up over time basically meaning if you believe that IQ tests measure intelligence then people must be getting more intelligence right this is troublesome for Herrnstein Mauri because they argue the opposite that cognitive ability is deteriorating and this brings us back to our point about bias towards an academic environment addressing the Flynn effect hansteen amore right the following there is a further question to answer does a 15-point IQ difference between grandparents and their grandchildren mean that the grandchildren are 15 points smarter some experts do not believe that the rise is holy perhaps not even partly a rise in intelligence but in the narrower skills involved in intelligence test taking per se so this if it were true would mean that people are actually getting less intelligent but at the same time they are getting better at taking IQ tests now you might say isn't that a huge contradiction aren't they basically admitting that IQ tests measure something other than inborn intelligence after all if IQ tests supposedly measure native cognitive ability accurately how could scores be going up while cognitive ability is going down however to be fair to Herrnstein amore it would be hasty to dismiss their dis janux hypothesis outright there is another possibility here and it's that people are getting genetically less intelligence but the environmental factors affecting intelligence have undergone such large changes that they're positive effects upon IQ are more than accounting for the downward genetic ability shift so roughly we would have lost a genetic IQ point thanks to this janux but gained two back thanks to a better environment so what evidence does the bell curve produce in support of this downward trend in genetic cognitive ability well unfortunately for Hance tina-marie their main source of data the National Longitudinal survey of youth is not much use here ideally what we want to do is give IQ tests to the children of women who took part in the AFQT so we could directly compare child to parents and see if any downwards shift was happening however this would be a mistake as since our data it's coming from the National Longitudinal survey of youth the respondents are appropriately young people who wait longer to have children are typically wealthier and better educated and thus tend to have children with higher IQs limiting ourselves to looking at only young mothers will skew the apparent IQ of the next generation downwards so it would be an inaccurate thing to do hence tina-marie are thankfully well aware of this problem not that it stops them from trying however Herrnstein amorous deshji annex hypothesis is discussed in intelligence genes and success scientists respond to the bell curve a 1997 book which responds to many of the points made in the bell curve the office of that book for their part find no direct empirical evidence either for or against a dis Janak effect acting upon cognitive ability stating back in so far as we are aware there is nothing but anecdotal evidence for dis janux anyway let's get back on track now to illustrate another way IQ tests can be biased I think it would be a good exercise for us all to briefly take a very simple one question test together so get your pencil and paper ready folks here it is easy right an incredibly simple number sequence question they're the sort you'd expect nearly anyone to be able to work out it's also a fair and unbiased question of course I mean everyone was given the exact same question and the exact same amount of time to answer it right what could be more fair and unbiased than that now of course this question is not fair it is biased in favor of Japanese people and anime fans I guess the point here is that this question would in any language be biased against people who don't speak that language a question in English is biased against people who don't speak English isn't it now you might protest this seems like a very obvious point I mean surely nobody is gonna give an IQ test in English to a group of people who are not fluent in English and then try to pass off those results as legitimate right well stay tuned folks one point not given due consideration by the bell curve during their discussion of testing bias is that even a completely unbiased test where it possible to construct such a thing would still deliver biased results if it being carried out in a biased system when hansteen amorous a properly administered IQ tests are not the monstre Blee biased they seemingly mean that the tests themselves do not contain words like regatta not that the tests necessarily deliver fair results so that is another potential problem with IQ tests to watch out for even if we eliminate as much cultural bias as possible from the test we could still thanks to the wider environment that tasks are taking place in be receiving biased results for instance if you carried out an IQ test in a racially segregated white supremacist state that environment is obviously gonna affect the average IQ scores of different designates at racial groups now you might protest this also seems like a very obvious point I mean surely nobody's gonna carry out an IQ test in a racially segregated white supremacist state and then try to pass off those results as legitimate right again stay tuned folks now keeping in mind all the various possible problems with IQ testing that we've just discussed let's take a look at a few of the IQ tests not hansteen Omori site as evidence for claims in the bell curve surely they will be properly administered right after all Herrnstein and Murray themselves discuss many of the same issues that we just have it would follow that given their familiarity with these potential problems they would of course endeavor to avoid them so let's see how they do on that front we'll take a look at a particular section of the bell curve now see what the claims are and then have a bit of a dig into the sources backing up those claims and this is from a section titled how do African Americans compared with blacks in Africa on cognitive tests and I quote this question often arises in the context of black/white comparisons in America the fourth being that the African black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American black slavery and discrimination and might therefore have higher scores Richard Lin was able to assemble 11 studies in his 1991 review of the literature he estimated the median black African IQ to be 75 approximately 1.7 standard deviations below the u.s. overall papa Relation average about 10 points lower than the current figure for American blacks in summary African blacks are on average substantially below African Americans in intelligence test scores psychometrically there is little reason to think that these results mean anything different about cognitive functioning than they mean in non African populations for our purposes the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data so this is Herrnstein Amore's answer to those who point to the legacy of slavery and discrimination in the United States as an explanation for the differences in IQ scores between its black and white populations they point to black people in Africa and say hey well they also got lower scores black African people haven't been subject to discrimination in America after all so doesn't this prove that discrimination in America can't be depressing black IQ scores well not really hence Tina Murray's decision to limit their concern here to American black slavery on discrimination is a huge oversight because there could also be discrimination in whichever parts of Africa they are talking about if you follow that could be in a similar way depressing the scores there too if that were the case attempting to use the African data as some sort of control test for the American data would be fairly ridiculous to say the least America does not have a monopoly on discrimination and depression does it and so we need to ask which parts of Africa are they talking about they say that Richard Lin was able to assemble 11 studies in his 1991 review of the literature now Herrnstein amore claimed in the acknowledgments at the start of the bell curve to have benefited especially from the advice of this Richard Lin who they elsewhere call a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences and they cite his work several times throughout the book so let's take a look at Richard Lin's 1991 review of the literature entitled race differences in intelligence a global perspective which was published in mankind quarterly and remember the name of that journal folks as we'll be talking more about that later on so the first finger notice about this review is that it unfortunately designates people as either Caucasoid mongoloid x' or negroids including quote hybrids of those groups for instance Caucasoid negroid hybrids and so on I can only apologize for having to read out this rubbish so let's look at the eleven studies included in this review and see which areas of Africa we are concerned with well there's one from what was then known as the Belgian Congo one from Ghana two from Nigeria one from Uganda one from Zambia and five from South Africa and there is rather a lot to comment on here but how about we start with sample sizes some of them are rather small you may have noticed 87 people for Nigeria 50 people for Uganda and so on by far the most represented area here is South Africa the number of people tested in South Africa was more than double the number of all the other subjects combined and what's the significance of this well this review was published in 1991 South African apartheid ended in 1994 now I don't want to get too deep into this right now but for those who don't know apartheid was an explicitly white supremacist system of enforced racial segregation non-white South Africans were openly discriminated against forced from their homes forbidden to live in certain areas and hold certain jobs and most importantly for us here had to attend segregated schools which were massively underfunded compared to the schools that the white South Africans went to many being without electricity or even running water and just so we know the sort of education system were dealing with here I'll quickly quote some relevant passages from South Africa a country study from the Library of Congress the Bantu education act of 1953 widened the gaps in educational opportunities for different racial groups two of the architects of Bantu education dr. W M Isilon and dr. Hendrik Verwoerd had studied in Germany and adopted many elements of national socialist Nazi philosophy the concept of racial purity in particular provided a rationalization for keeping black education inferior then Minister of Native Affairs said that black Africans should be educated for their opportunities in life and that there was no place for them above the level of certain forms of labour the Bantu Education Act helped paved the way for labor strife in the 1980s and 1990s by institutionalizing a plan to restrict black workers to low paid jobs through deliberately inferior education during the 1960's and 1970's per-capita spending on white pupils was about ten times greater than educational spending on black pupils by the early 1990s the gap had been reduced by half but in general standards for teacher qualifications and facilities and black schools continued to be inferior to those in white schools the discrepancies in education among racial groups were glaring teacher pupil ratios in primary schools averaged 1 to 18 in white schools 1 to 24 in Asian schools 1 to 27 in coloured schools and 1 to 39 in black schools moreover whereas 96% of all teachers in white schools had teaching certificates only 15 percent of teachers in black schools were certified secondary school pass rates for black pupils in the nationwide standardized high school graduation exams were less than 1/2 the pass rate for whites you get the points I think so what Herrnstein and Murray have done here in attempting to prove that a history of racial discrimination in America is not depressing black IQ scores his point to our study citing similar scores in a system of open racial discrimination this is utterly ridiculous obviously anyway we're now gonna take a look at some of these studies compiled by Richard Lin and we'll start with this one Woburn 1969 which apparently reported an IQ score of 86 from Nigeria and here it is the meaning and stability of raven's matrices test among Africans and let's read a little of that this paper aims to clarify our understanding of factors affecting African scores on ability tests raven's matrices in particular though the main burden is theoretical some fresh data from Nigeria will be shown during 1965 a testing program was carried out among factory workers in Nigeria the results from 86 men will be reported here they were tested in two Jullien English or pidgin by the author with the aid of a trained Nigerian assistant among the test battery we're Ravens progressive matrices and an adapted embedded figures test which with an index of educational attainment are explained by whoa BRR six months after the tests each man was given the matrices again there was no intervening coaching and the test was given as though it was to be a new experience with full instructions repeated and evidently equally necessary in most cases as previously men were not overtly asked to pit their presence against their previous efforts results were presented in table 1 the relation between retested matrices and EFT is significantly greater than between the initial matrices testing and EFT even though in the former comparisons the tests were done six months apart table one shows that the overall differences in retesting were significant and suggests that improvements were found particularly among the lower initial scorers taken with the improved EFT correlation in table 2 a strong case can be made that the second testing gave a distinctly more valid measure of whatever abilities the matrices and eft involve so to quickly summarize in 1965 researchers gave 86 Nigerian factory workers the Ravens progressive matrices test and then gave it to them again six months later the second time they took the test they perform better overall and the results better correlated with another test they took called the EFT and table one here shows both mean results 15.9 the first time increasing to eighteen point seven three the second time what is missing here you may have noticed is an IQ score this study does not report an IQ score for anyone involved in the test it reports their scores on the matrices test so why then does Lin's review site Woburn 1969 as having reported an IQ score of 86 well looking at table 186 men took the test do you see now most likely here this is a simple typographical error and Lin or whoever typed up his data accidentally wrote the number of test subjects in the IQ field regardless though Lin's review is not accurately reporting the IQ score from Woburn 1969 because there wasn't one Lin cites whoa by 1916 again in his later book IQ and The Wealth of Nations where he says in 1965 norms for the standard progressive matrices were collected by Woburn 1969 for a sample of 86 adult men their mean score was fifteen point nine and then he later claims that this equates to an IQ of sixty-four now there are several lies by omission here firstly Woburn 1969 did not report a mean score of fifteen point nine it reported a mean score of fifteen point nine and a mean score of eighteen point seven three it showed how scores go up with retesting and additionally it claims that a strong case can be made that the second testing gave a distinctly more valid measure of whyever abilities the matrices and DFT involve Lin intentionally chooses to only report the lower score here another lie by omission here is that Lin declines to mention that the sample of eighty-six adult men were not randomly drawn from the general Nigerian population they were not an accurate representation of the society where they lived and nor were they intended to be they were all factory workers reporting the test results of only 86 men who are all employed in the same job as representative of a country which at the time had a population of 50 million people is rubbish just rubbish next up let's talk about this result an IQ of 75 for people in Zambia cites it from pons 1974 and Crawford not 1976 so the 1976 paper from Crawford not is titled our black scores on Ravens standard progressive matrices an artifact of test presentation and opens by saying that previous research has shown that when the method of test presentation ensures that testis understand adequately the requirements of the test situation when the method also make certain that the testis know how items of the test are to be responded to and when the method reduces the anxiety of the subjects about being tested then the results obtained from the administration of the test are remarkably different from those that result from administration in which the same test is presented in the same way to all testes regardless of their cultural origin it goes on to detail how a researcher named pons gave the Ravens standard progressive matrices test to a group of Sambi in copper miners in 1962 using the standard method of delivery then later pons administered the test again to another group only this time using a different method of test presentation as Table one shows the second group showed a rather dramatic difference in score now the thinking behind all this might be that a group of Zambian copper miners aren't necessarily going to be all that familiar with taking academic tests not to generalize and if you want more accurate results it might be worth taking the time to actually explain to them what it is that they're being expected to do now Crawford not claims that the different method of presentation did not alter anything about the test itself and is based upon suggestions found in the 1960 guide to the standard progressive matrices written by John C Raven aka the guy watt invented the Ravens progressive matrices test after reporting the findings of pons Crawford not takes things one step further and tests a selection of pupils from a long-established high school situated in the black residential area of Soweto near Johannesburg a school that is described as having high standards and whose students would be used to being tested Crawford not tested two samples of these school children using the same presentation method as described by pons and the results received were actually slightly higher than the equivalent age range of the white group on whom the test was normalized now you might say what has Crawford not actually proved their test results go up the closer you get to a good school I suppose this shouldn't be surprising anyone if you test a relatively uneducated group of copper miners you get one result do that same test in a competitive academic institution and you will get a higher result by changing the method of test presentation and changing the group which you are testing you can get a whole range of results this is why researchers don't usually test people in just one area one workplace or one school and then try to pass off that singular result as representative of the entire country that they live in that would be a remarkably ignorant thing to do speaking off back to Richard Lin and his claimed IQ of 75 for Zambia which sites both pons and Crawford not as the source of the data there so how did that happen well what Lin does is he cites the much lower results from the research carried out by pons which are presented in Crawford nuts paper and then completely ignores Crawford nuts experiments in the school which reported results above the white norm the entire point of Crawford nuts paper goes totally unmentioned by lin who simply extracts the data that he wants and discards the rest he had data showing a black African test score that was above the white norm and he simply decided to ignore it also like the previous paper we discussed this study did not report IQ scores for the testes those are simply concocted by Lin out of the Ravens progressive matrices data using a sophisticated statistical technique called guessing so to understand what Lin is done here we need to talk a little about IQ test construction and standardization and let's start with the bell curve not the book this time but the statistical distribution now IQ tests as we know return this bell curve or normal distribution this means that the majority of the scores are clustered around the middle and taper off towards the ends of the curve in a symmetrical way but why you might ask do they actually return this distribution well it's because that's how they're designed psychometricians design IQ tests so that their results match the bell curve if the test they design is too easy then the bell curve will lean to the right as too many people will get high scores if the test is too hard it will lean to the left as too many people get low scores and if the test doesn't differentiate between people to the right degree then too many people could be at either end of the curve so the test designers tinker with the difficulty of the test until the results match the bell curve so why do psychometricians do this well it's because that's how they assume intelligence is distributed throughout the human population emphasis on assume here because we do not actually know how intelligence is distributed throughout the human population unless you specifically design for it tests do not necessarily return a bell curve distribution for example here the Armed Forces qualifying test used in the bell curve did not return a bell curve distribution it was after all designed to test readiness to join the Armed Forces not IQ as a result it does not differentiate between people to a large enough degree so hands Dina Murray to make the results conform to a bell curve recalculates at the scores here is a graph of the raw AFQT scores overlaid with hands Dina Murray's recalculates at bell curve scores from the Bach inequality by design and as we can see too many people scored two highly on the test and there isn't enough differentiation between people on the upper end of the scale in particular so yes that's right in the book the bell curve the principal intelligence test the offers used as a source did not return a bell curve distribution to transform these results into a bell curve Herrnstein amore exaggerated the slight differences at the end of the scale they basically gave extra credit for being near the tails of the bell curve and less for being in the middle they did this as they explained in appendix two to correct for skew but remember in relation to how intelligence is distributed throughout the human population these results are only actually skewed if we assume that intelligence is distributed in a bell curve to begin with this is circular logic we are assuming the result that we are going to get beforehand and then designing the test or just manipulating the data in order to reach that conclusion anyway to get back on track here what does all this have to do with Richard Lynn and the Ravens progressive matrices test well that test also does not return a bell curve distribution the results are not symmetrically distributed around their mean to quote an article by psychologist lianca mean that article also notes that the tests developer John Raven always insisted that the progressive matrices scores cannot be converted into IQs here is an example of the distribution of matrix test scores from Ray and paper standardization of progressive matrices 1938 and as you can see those are some very wobbly bell curves right there what the test does give is raw scores which correspond to percentile scores so you can know from your raw score how you compare percentile wise to the group on which the test was normalized but these percentiles will not be distributed evenly around their mean in a bell curve to calculate IQ Richard Lynn takes the average of these raw scores converts them to a percentile score and then gives what the IQ of that percentile score would correspond to if the results were in a bell curve distribution basically lenez assuming a bell curve exists where they're demonstrably isn't 1 and is forcing the data to fit it another issue here is that in the decades since the Second World War scores on the Ravens matrices test similar to IQ test scores had been changing accordingly the test had been standardized several times so when we're comparing the African results with Western norms we need to identify what norm group were using because comparisons with different groups from different times could give different results particularly sharp-eyed viewers would have noticed that Lin does exactly this in the quote from his 2002 book IQ and The Wealth of Nations which I showed earlier where he discusses Nigerian IQs quote in terms of the British 1979 standardization identifying this standardization is important as using a different one could lead to a different Nigerian IQ being calculated in his 1991 review of the literature cited in the bell curve however Lin does not identify what standardization he's using for the various tests he is comparing what this means is that there is a gap in Lin's calculations that can only be filled by faith in his academic honesty which earns tina-marie clearly have but I must confess that I do not anyway if you think what Lin did to those last two studies was bad strap in because this next one is of real bastard South Africa IQ of 69 attributed to owen 1989 which lin calls the single best of the negroid intelligence so this is test and item bias the suitability of the jr. aptitude tests as a common test battery for white Indian and black pupils in standard 7 o anis not on 4 catchy names apparently the abstract to this study starts out this study was undertaken to shed light on problems concerning the construction and use of a common test battery for various South African population groups you see this study is testing a test the Junior aptitude test or chat which was standardized for white pupils in South Africa and determining whether it's also a good test to give to non-white groups the study selected various schools in South Africa for white Indian and black students although it should be mentioned it was not able to use the majority of the selected black schools quote owing to the unrest situation and thus they had to test black schools in the KwaZulu region one of the areas designated for black inhabitants of South Africa under apartheid I mentioned the unrest situation here as a reminder that yes these tests are being carried out under apartheid and protests and demonstrations against the segregated school system we're ongoing so anyway the study examined pupils performances on the various sub tests comprising the Jat and what were the findings well the thing I think we should mention first here is that the tests were given to the black students in KwaZulu in English only and several test sections of the Jats relied very heavily upon language ability now Oh an expected language ability not to matter in the tests because the black students in the KwaZulu region had ostensibly been learning English in their schools oh and apparently either doesn't know or disregards that these schools often didn't have necessary teaching equipments only a small amounts of their teachers were certified and that pupil-teacher ratios were more than double that of the white schools and to quote the study language was not expected to play a significant role in test performance in this investigation however the results showed that this assumption was completely wrong in fact language played such an important role and the knowledge of English if the majority of black testis was so poor that certain tests for example the Jats for synonyms and the chat ate memory power raph proved to be virtually unusable and let me just quote that again certain tests proved to be virtually unusable Owen also writes elsewhere the results of the current investigation clearly showed that language played a prominent role in all the tests containing language items which is a wonderful multiple stab wounds shown too short and life expectancy bit of academic obviously language ability was not the only way in which the junior aptitude test was biased however in a section entitled item bias in the tests of the Jat Owen note several ways in which the tests were culturally and economically biased for example he here lists several test items on the first test in the Jat and States a common element in most of these items was that they presupposed knowledge or a degree of knowledge on the part of the testee and mentioned such things as electrical appliances microscopes and western types of ladies accessories going on to rights thus in the case of both the indian and black testes it seems that the single largest cause of bias lay in the fact that the pupils were not familiar with the objects represented by the pictures cultural and socioeconomic status factors probably also played a role in this regard so this test is biased then the study examining it says it is biased but according to Richard Lynn this is the single best study of the negroid intelligence this is the best one the one that tests segregated school children in a non-native language and calls its own results virtually unusable in linz review this is the most important study for his estimates of black African IQ writing about it he says the mean IQ of the sample in comparison with Caucasoid south african norms is 69 it is also around the median of the studies listed in table 3 it is proposed therefore to brown this figure up to 70 why and take this as the approximate mean for pure negroids god damn what Len has done here is ridiculous he has taken 11 studies from a period between 1929 and 1991 with vastly different sample sizes reporting day from different tests most of which didn't even report IQ scores transform the data into what he reckons the equivalent IQ scores we're using some unknown standardization picked one that was sort of near the middle and said that's the average black African IQ this is outrageous it is a crime it might actually be a crime and if it's not it should be now I am far from the first person to criticize the bell curves reliance upon Richard Lin as a source various academics were already well aware of Lin and his dodgy data so when Herrnstein amore cited him they were immediately attacked with accusations of bias and racism Charles Maurey responds to these attacks in the afterword to the bell curve and his defense is laughable his first defense is to say that the topic of african idea was a tiny piece of the bell curve free paragraphs on pages 288 289 and in regards to this two responses jump to mind immediately the first is to say well maybe you should have spent longer on it then Charles we were wrong very quickly isn't a defense against being wrong is it maybe if you put a little more effort in you would have seen that Lin's paper was a load of rubbish secondly this part of the bell curve is far more important than Murray makes out he uses Lin's paper to dismiss the arguments that black white differences in IQ are caused by environmental factors such as a history of oppression which is the single most common counter-argument to one of the principal claims in the entire book at no point does Morrie actually address any specific criticisms of Lin's work or any of its various errors he mainly just seems outraged that anyone dares to have criticized him at all to be honest and it's exactly this sort of academic laziness that fed much of the angry response to the bell curve Morey refuses to admit that citing Lim was a mistake and simply froze out some newer studies that supposedly show he was right anyway so there this speaks to a couple of things firstly it is a fatal underestimation of exactly how badly this damages the faith that I reader of the bell curve can have in its authors after all this is not the only time they cite Richard he has more than 20 citations in their bibliography and they thank him specifically in the acknowledgments if this is the sort of data that Charles Maurey is willing to accept as legitimate how can we trust anything he says anywhere in the book how can we trust the new studies he brings up to defend Richard Lin personally I think it will be a mistake to even look at these new studies Maurice responds to having his previous sources called into question is to simply throw out new sources his response to having these called into question would no doubt be to throw out more the responsibility for checking whether his sources are trustworthy or accurate has been moved from Murray to his critics they're the ones doing the reading and the fact-checking whereas he never gets held to account so long as we all understand that however I suppose we can take a brief peek so Maurice says let me turn to two studies post dating Richard Lin's review that we cite on page 289 one was a South African study led by Ken fo and published in the refereed British Journal personality and individual differences so this was the suitability of Ravens standard progressive matrices for various groups in South Africa a paper that was published in 1992 so we are still in apartheid South Africa and this study tested black students from the KwaZulu region the same as one of the studies from Richard Linds review it even has the same offer so this is not a great showing with the first study here Maury introduces the other study by saying the second example of a recent careful study was conducted by a black scholar Fred Cindy and published in the psychologist it matched 204 black Zimbabwean pupils and 202 white English students from London inner-city schools for age 12 to 14 years old sex and educational level both samples being characterized as working-class and then goes on to say that the white students from London got higher test results than the black students from Zimbabwe however Maury takes a cue from Richard Lynn and leaves out all the context the main thing here being that Zimbabwe was a British colony known as Rhodesia until it gained independence in 1980 follow a 15-year Civil War Rhodesia was a discriminatory racially segregated state 12 to 14 year olds in 1994 would have been born around the time of Zimbabwe independence two parents who were raised and educated in a segregated British colony which makes the comparison to the children of London is all the more ridiculous here the children of the colonized country are being measured against the children of the colonizing country fred's indeed the professor who offered the study more recently spoke about his earlier work in the following way for many years African countries have depended upon the use of Western designed psychometric instruments such as Ravens progressive matrices and some others such tests standardized in Western cultures using Western cultural values have been found to be useful to a certain extent in many cases interpretation of results from Western design tests have however been distorted to suit Western stereotypes about other nations Cindy 1994 a very important point which Lynne and Maury would do well to take on board Maury reveals a misunderstanding of the criticisms raised against the bell curve when he goes on to say that the problem is not as often alleged that such studies are written by racists in the two instances just cited a charge plied by Owens scholarly reputation and by Cindy's race but that the African story is still so incomplete what Murray gets wrong here beyond the implication that a scholarly reputation could not also be accompanied by racism is that the allegation is not that these studies are written by racists it's that the studies are being deliberately misinterpreted and misrepresented by racists racists like Richard Lynn who strip from the studies all context and analysis and used them to push a racist worldview Murray fails to see that the problem is not that it is impossible to find other studies that have similar results to the one cited in the bell curve it's that he's willing to treat data collected in a segregated white supremacist state as a legitimate source to inform us about inherent racial differences that is the issue here on a more general notes what Morey writes in the afterword and how he writes it shows us exactly how little respect he has for what should be treated as a sensitive topic the subject of his writing is potential differences in native ability between racial groups and discussing that requires a level of tact and consideration that is totally absent here you cannot have asked the science with this stuff Maurice refusal to respond directly to criticism of his sources here exposes him as a fraud we're going to move on now and consider how the bell curve measures intelligence against socioeconomic status in determining one's life outcomes but I'd like you to keep in mind if possible several of the things we've talked about so far the difficulty in defining intelligence the difficulties in testing for intelligence the bell curves missing genetic evidence for IQ and of course the incredibly shoddy sources that hansteen Amaury are apparently willing to accept when we see a graph measuring intelligence against environment we should not be fooled into thinking that that intelligence was legitimately or accurately calculated anyway to the claim once IQ is more important than one's social background in determining one's life outcomes to address this claim we first need to define the terms we know by now how Herrnstein and Murray have been determining the IQ of the people they're examining by using their scores on the Armed Forces qualifying test but in order to make comparisons to their IQ how is the bell curve determining those people's socioeconomic status let's take us an example poverty from Chapter five of the bell curve titled poverty hansteen Amaury want to compare low intelligence with low socioeconomic status as causes for poverty to figure out which is more important they use the survey respondents AFQT scores as their data for intelligence and they use socio-economic information provided by the respondents to build what they call an index of socioeconomic status both of these are then compared with the likelihood of the respondents being below the poverty line a decade later and of course Herrnstein Amaury find that Intel audience is the better predictor of poverty so I guess we better examine exactly how hands Dina Maury constructed their index of socioeconomic status but before we get to that I'd like to propose a question for us to answer what environmental factors would you deem important with regards to the likelihood of a young person being in poverty and let's discuss a few possibilities here first up parental socioeconomic status which is usually defined as their level of education occupation and income I think we'd all agree that is fairly important families that have a larger income are less likely to be in poverty better educated parents are more likely to have better jobs and therefore less likely to have children in poverty this is rather straightforward family composition is important a family with a particular income and living space stretched to take care of six children say it's gonna have a harder time than a family but the same income and living space but only one child to take care of so number of siblings is important as is whether or not the individual was raised in a two-parent family two parents typically means more resources and therefore less chance of being in poverty the area where someone lives is very important one family with a particular income might have a very different living experience to another family with the same income that lives in a different area and this could be for a variety of reasons average living expenses like rent food and other costs that vary from place to place the average crime rate the unemployment rate that can be very important for determining one's chance of being in poverty seems fairly obvious to mention but you're gonna have an easier time finding an income in an area with many jobs than an area with few jobs another reason the area someone lives is important to us here is school quality which should be particularly noteworthy given that we're measuring all of this against performance on an academic test how long someone stays in school is also important and how many years of education they completed both before and after taking the Armed Forces qualifying test familial wealth is important and this is a separate issue to income one person with a particular income who's rich parents bought them a house and a car and paid their way through college is going to have a difference variants to a person on the same income but who has to pay off debts related to all of those things overall economic trends can be very important you are more likely to be in poverty during a recession the reason that the poverty rate increases during recessions is not because everyone collectively loses a few IQ points is it and the effects of recession have felt unequally across economic classes and different geographical areas one's gender is important women for example are more likely to be in poverty than men are now whether you believe this is because women have lower genetic IQs than men do or you're sensible and you believe it's because of environmental reasons it is the case I should note here that I'm excluding race because this chapter of the bell curve concerns itself with only the white respondents to the AFQT your health is important of course people with disabilities for instance are more likely to be in poverty and particularly in the u.s. the cost of medical care and health insurance can massively affect someone's likelihood of being in poverty and we could go on listing things but we will arbitrarily stop here I trust you get the point by now there are lots of different things to consider when attempting to determine how someone's environment might contribute to them being in poverty which brings us back to the bell curve which of the various factors on this list that hansteen Amaury think were important with regards to the likelihood of a young person being in poverty the first one yep that's all hansteen Amore's consideration of environmental factors extends to parental education income and occupation that's all as far as they're concerned with regards to determining predictors of poverty all the other things on this list have no affect your family's wealth has no effect family composition the area where you live the quality of the school you went to the crime rates all irrelevant what they have done here is substitute environmental factors for parental socioeconomic status which is a much narrower category of variables they simply add together parental education income and occupation call that parental socioeconomic status and plot it against IQ and this is the graph they come up with the comparative roles of IQ and parental SES in determining whether young white adults are below the poverty line it shows that people with low IQs are more likely to be in poverty than people whose parents had a low SES and also the reverse high IQ people are less likely to be in poverty than people whose parents had a high SES cognitive ability is more important than parental socioeconomic status in determining poverty they say but of course as we have seen their consideration of environmental factors here is laughably narrow they only want to consider as valid things that fall under their definition of parental SES and they ignore all the other relevant environmental factors what would happen to this graph if we also considered the various other things that hansteen Amaury leave out of their analysis now I don't know how to do regression analysis unfortunately but the book inequality by design was written by some people who do know how to do regression analysis and they do exactly what we're looking for here firstly they recreate hands Dina Murray's calculations using their data they then use the National Longitudinal survey of youth responses to add more environmental data to the analysis their first updated graph changes parental SES to parental home environments adding for consideration things like the number of siblings and whether the household has two parents as we can see AFQT score is still more important than parental home environment but now the two are much closer together next up they add community environment to home environment considering the region where the respondent lived when they took the test and the school that they attended doing this we see that AFQT score and social environments are now equal next they add for consideration the number of years of education of the respondents to the survey and by now the AFQT score has slipped below the combined environmental factors in importance using the same statistical methods and data set as the bell curve in equality by designs analysis shows that environmental factors are more important than AFQT score in determining the probability of being in poverty and this is shown using only the but a data available in the National Longitudinal survey of you for remember inequality by design adds to the analysis only a few of the conceivable socio-economic factors that are ignored by Herrnstein and Murray if we were to continue adding in available factors to consider the effect of IQ would get weaker and weaker and lest you think inequality by designs analysis was a one-off the office of intelligence genes and success also reanalyzed the NL sy data and with regards to how much cognitive ability accounts for differences in wages between people say the following however our results conflict with the predictions of Hance tina-marie ability factors of the Vangie are economically useful compared with education family background and region of residence GE explains little of the variance in wages if there exists some x factor that can explain the large residuals common in wage regressions it is not measured cognitive ability in summary our reanalysis of the analyst Y dates are originally analysed by hands Tina Marie show measured cognitive ability is correlated with wages but explains little of the variance in wages across individuals and time later in this chapter Herrnstein amore used the same narrowly defined parental SES to consider which young people will drop out of school get a college degree be unemployed have children out of wedlock be on welfare and so on to be first sometimes they do add or the factors to consider but again only when they personally subjectively decide those factors are important all their comparisons between IQ and SES that inform their later policy proposals are based upon this calculated decision to not consider the full range of relevant environmental factors and there's two other important points that we have to keep in mind here the first is that we have been assuming that AFQT score is a legitimate stand-in for cognitive ability which given all the potential problems with intelligence testing we've already discussed is a bit of a stretch the second thing we need to remember is that hansteen Amore's estimation of IQ is that it is only 60% genetically heritable that would mean according to their flawed understanding heritability anyway that 40% of the IQ score in their calculations originated from environmental factors considering all these things together the case for IQ here is looking incredibly flimsy so as we've seen once you add more factors to consider environment Trump's IQ so we now have to ask is this a legitimate thing to do statistically speaking the bell curve anticipates being criticized in this manner in a section titled but what about other explanations they write we can already hear critics saying if only they'd added this other variable to the analysis they would have seen that intelligence has nothing to do with X at this point however statistical analysis can become a bottomless pit it is not uncommon in technical journals to read articles built around the estimated effects of a dozen or more independent variables sometimes the entire set of variables is loaded into a single regression equation sometimes sets of equations are used modeling even more complex relationships in which all the variables can exert mutual effects on one another why should we not press forward why not also ask if religious background has an effect on the decision to go on welfare for example it's an interesting question as our 50 others that might come to mind this is the first of two defenses by hand Cena Murray where they argue that it would just be too complicated to consider all the factors why there could be 50 environmental variables affecting someone's likelihood of being in poverty that's just too many it would be too complex our graph wouldn't make any sense if we did that so instead of 50 we're just gonna consider I don't know - this is a result of treating the method of Investigation as more important than getting accurate results if you can't use regression analysis to fairly compare IQ to all the relevant environmental factors don't you know you don't actually have to do this hansteen Amore's second defense is even more telling than the first our principle was to explore additional dynamics when there was another factor that was not only conceivably important but for clear logical reasons might be important because of dynamics having little or nothing to do with IQ this last proviso is crucial for one of the most common misuses of regression analysis is to introduce an additional variable that in reality is mostly another expression of variables that are already in the equation so what Herrnstein and Murray is saying is that they dismissed variables if they deemed them to merely be mostly expressions of IQ which is already in the equation they only considered additional factors when they had little or nothing to do with IQ and were quote conceivably important which should lead us to ask a question how are hence tina-marie deciding which variables are conceivably important and how are they deciding how much they have to do with IQ and the answer of course is subjectively they're only considering things that they reckon are important you see the problem with hansteen Amaury dismissing variables that they have subjectively decided are merely expressions of cognitive ability here is that they think that socioeconomic status itself is an expression of cognitive ability later in the book when criticizing the practice of controlling for SES between racial groups they write the difficulty comes in interpreting what it means to control for socio-economic status matching the status of the groups is usually justified on the grounds that the scores people learn are caused to some extent by their socioeconomic status so if we want to see the real or authentic difference between them the contribution of status must be excluded the trouble is that socioeconomic status is also a result of cognitive ability as people of high and low cognitive ability moved to correspondingly high and low places in the socio-economic continuum now this is circular logic hansteen Amaury claimed to be limiting which factors they're considering to avoid including those which are merely expressions of other factors but their main comparison here is between cognitive ability and socioeconomic status which they elsewhere argue is a result of cognitive ability using this framework where cognitive ability determines both IQ and socioeconomic status two whole series of comparisons from this chapter of the bell curve seems cynical and unnecessary hansteen amore have already decided what conclusion they're gonna come to that cognitive ability is more important than all the other variables and all their statistical comparisons readers them just going through the motions to get that result in simply declaring socioeconomic status the result of cognitive ability the bell curve brings to mind the chicken and egg problem here you see a lot of disagreements over IQ stem from different interpretations of the same data let's say you do a study which proves a strong positive correlation between the amount of time someone is spent in education and their IQ and you present those findings to two groups of people one group that favors environmental explanations and one that favors genetic explanations now of course the environmentalists will say this result makes perfect sense the longer you're in education the more things you learn the better you get answering the sorts of questions that show up on IQ tests the more familiar you are with taking academic tests in the first place iq clearly stems from environment that genetic minded folks on the other hand will say of course this result makes perfect sense people with higher IQs favor and academic environments and they're more likely to stay in school longer because that's the smarter thing to do since they have higher IQs to begin with they will naturally make better choices environment clearly stems from IQ so which came first the chicken or the egg environment or cognitive ability we can phrase this two ways a parent's higher cognitive ability leads to a better environment which again leads to a higher cognitive ability in their children or we can say that a better environment leads to a parent's higher cognitive ability which then produces a better environment for their children but both of these ways of phrasing are merely presenting a segment of the overall environment cognitive ability logic chain the bell curve solves the conundrum of whether cognitive ability or environment should come first by saying cognitive ability that's first we like that one the most so that's the one that comes first but of course this is completely arbitrary and also ultimately incorrect to understand this we need to talk about another of the main problems with the scientific arguments of the bell curve which is that hansteen Amaury are conspicuously uninterested in the causes of the things that they're talking about much of the bell curve for instance is concerned with proving that there are substantial differences in cognitive ability between different designated racial groups but what Herrnstein and Maureen ever seriously concerned themselves with is why this supposed divergence happened population groups don't evolve to be different for no reason do they if one group developed better cognitive skills than another group there would have to be some mechanism there that was leading to higher cognitive ability in that group or I suppose leading to lower cognitive ability in the other group now this could simply be direct evolutionary pressure as in different levels of cognitive ability in different groups are being directly selected for or it could be an indirect unintended effect of a different trait being selected for or some sort of genetic drift as generations of different population groups are isolated enough from each other to develop in significantly different ways whatever the reason though there would have to be a reason and we should expect a scientist attempting to argue for a substantial difference in ability between different groups so therefore maybe be interested in exactly why this difference came about right one of the only times that hands tina-marie show any interest in this question is in appendix 5 where they discussed the work of Canadian psychologist J Philippe Rushton who wrote the book race evolution and behavior in 1995 Rushton alleges that brain and genital size are inversely related and that larger genitals correlates with an increased fertility so at some point different designated racial groups diverged from one another and developed different traits according to some sort of trade-off system so it's like a computer game where you have limited points to put into your starting stats only here the starting stats are int genital size in 1988 Rushton was reprimanded by the University of Western Ontario for carrying out two particular studies he surveyed first-year psychology students and then male customers at a Toronto shopping mall asking them questions about their sex lives the size of their penises and the exact distance that they ejaculate now I can only speak for myself here well I can't say I've ever measured one there for wonders how reliable is self-reported data could be or who knows maybe I'm the anomaly here maybe all you penis have us out there are keeping detailed daily statistics I don't know one also wonders about exactly how distance is supposed to come into play here for want of a better phrase what does this Rushton guy think is going on in the bedroom does he think you have to hit a moving target or something I don't know rushed ins work also uses the same Caucasoid mongoloid negroid categorization that Richard Lynn uses and to quote a response to rush tans ferries by Canadian psychologist as axon offski some of rushed ins references the scientific literature which respects the racial differences in sexual characteristics turned out to be references to a non-scientific semi pornographic book and to an article in the Penthouse Forum I am mentioning Rushton and his weird genital theories here not just because they're funny to relate which they certainly are but because he and his research are defended in the bell curve hansteen amore relay his ideas before stating we cannot at present say who is more nearly rights as a matter of science Rushton or his critics however rushed ins work is not that of a crackpot or a bigot as many of his critics are given to charging but they're wrong there of course he is a crackpot and a bigot or he was anyway he's dead now as for why Herrnstein amore seemed so disinterested in examining causes for the things that they're discussing I can only speculate here but I suspect it's because at least with regard to the bell curve anyway Herrnstein amore are not scientists they didn't even submit the bell curve for peer review prior to its publication they are here to advance a conservative social and political agenda and all the air quotes science is just window dressing for that agenda and that's what we're going to talk about next so then the politics of the bell curve and I'd like to first talk a bit more about why the bell curve was so controversial and there's one main reason comprised of two sub reasons the first is that Herrnstein amore spend a large part of their book asserting differences in intelligence between designated racial groups and we have to wonder why they even did this because it isn't important at all for their overall point their main argument is that IQ is the most important factor determining success or failure in life and they seemingly don't need the racial elements at all to make this point or do they in a section titled how ethnic differences fit into the story they write the following in part one we described the formation of a cognitive elite given the cognitive differences among ethnic and racial groups the cognitive elite cannot represent all groups equally a statement with implications that we will develop in part four part for being the section of the book comprised of their policy proposals and it is these policy proposals that are the second part of the reason for the bell curve being such a controversial book more than either of these things individually being controversial it's how they interact that rarely produces the controversy you see for all hand steena Morrie's posturing about how brave they're being speaking out and breaking taboos and all that it is not actually controversial in the scientific community to simply acknowledge group differences in IQ let's imagine that instead of the bell curve Herrnstein amore had simply published a list of IQ test results showing differences in IQ in different countries nobody would have cared researchers from across the political spectrum work with intelligence test data all the time some environment mind researchers because they acknowledge that the group differences exist but they want to prove that environmental factors are the key to understanding them nor is it controversial to assert that differences in cognitive ability in general are partially due to genetics there are a whole host of genetic conditions that can affect someone's cognitive ability right wingers who characterize lefties as diehard 100% environmentalists missed the point here as we'd actually be hasty to point out the ableism in denying the effects of those genetic conditions so it's not simply that hansteen Amaury are breaking the supposed taboo of discussing IQ differences that sparked the backlash it's that they explicitly linked those differences to a set of policy proposals this is why the bell curve is controversial because of its political ideas so let's talk about those first off the enormous glaring problem with the vast majority of hands Tina Murray's policy proposals is that they absolutely do not logically follow from any of their previous claims in the bell curve and if it sounds like I'm exaggerating there trust me I am NOT take for instance their account of programs like Head Start that are designed to help disadvantaged kids hence Tina Maury acknowledged that these programs can have temporary positive effects but they argue that these positive effects fade over time and become statistically insignificant by the time those children leave school this is taken by Herrnstein Amaury as proof that there is ultimately nothing to be done to help these kids any temporary positive effects will simply fade away due to their inferior genetics so we should stop wasting money on them and instead give it to the naturally gifted children this does not follow however there is an alternative interpretation of this situation which is perfectly consistent with a majority environmental understanding of childhood development we can argue that these programs produce a positive effect because they are changing the children's environment any diminished effects after the program's stop or because the program stopped thus changing the environment and to pact the norm so instead of abandoning these programs we should instead take them as proof that environmental changes can produce positive effects and then expand them increase their funding have equivalent programs for every stage of school life any later diminished effects are proof that we aren't trying hard enough not that what we're trying to do is impossible nearly every policy proposal in the bell curve has this sort of alternative explanation one of their proposals for dissuading low IQ mothers from having children is to stop the welfare programs that support them but as we know richer people tend to have fewer children and birth rates are lower in countries with comprehensive welfare programs making these women poorer will not make them have fewer children and besides hansteen Amaury are arguing that these women are resolutely unintelligent so if that were true why would we be expecting them to be able to plan ahead and reason logically that having fewer children is a good idea that they're not supposed to be able to plan well for the future is kind of the whole point right what hence tina-marie could have done here is some very basic comparisons between the United States and other countries they scare monger about the possible effects of welfare programs which exist in Europe in abundance for instance but since those European welfare programs have not led to the sort of utter catastrophe that Hance tina-marie prophesize they instead choose to focus only on the United States even if hansteen Amaury had proven that some groups were genetically less intelligent than others cutting welfare would not follow from that rather one could make the argument that those groups would deserve more welfare because they would have an unfair disadvantage in school and in work that would not be their fault and even worse than hansteen Amore's logic simply not following their proposals sometimes actually directly contradict with their previous analysis for example let's talk about affirmative action as mentioned earlier Herrnstein Amaury really don't like affirmative action and as we've also seen they are very worried about the supposed of stratification of society and let's briefly quote them talking about that in this penultimate chapter we speculate about the impact of cognitive stratification on American life and government predicting the course of society is chancy but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about an increasingly isolated cognitive elite a merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution unchecked these trends will lead the u.s. towards something resembling a caste society with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose among the other casualties of this process would be American civil society as we have known it like other apocalyptic visions this one is pessimistic perhaps too much so on the other hand there is much to be pessimistic about now what Herrnstein Amaury failed to spot here is that a policy of aggressive affirmative action what directly works to check the cognitive partitioning that they call frightening and apocalyptic if Harvard or some other fancy school decided they were gonna admit a certain percentage of applicants based upon some characteristic other than test scores then there would be that same number of applicants with higher test scores who were therefore not get into Harvard and have to go to their next choice of college and the next smartest people who would have gone to that college will now not get in and have to go to their next choice and so on down the line and if this ruthless affirmative action policy was adopted by the group of colleges as a whole the cognitive elites would be forced to spread out throughout the whole college pool which would have the added effect of spreading them out geographically to hansteen Amaury really should have spotted this since earlier in the book they talked fondly about Harvard's policy of admitting legacy applicants those usually being people whose fathers had graduated from Harvard they also mention applicants being considered for things like his potential as a quarterback or stroke for the eighth man and other non-academic qualities curiously Herrnstein and Murray do not criticize Harvard's practice of admitting people for non-academic reasons when it comes to affirmative action however hansteen Amaury are very clear about that being unfair and I quote to what extent is a society fair when people of similar ability and background are treated as differently as they are now in 1964 the answer would have been unambiguous such a society is manifestly unfair the logic was right then and right now so college is admitting applicants for non-academic reasons such as their father having gone there that's okay it's counteracting the dreaded cognitive partitioning of society after all but college is admitting applicants because of affirmative action well that is rather dramatically leaking a poison into the American soul so how do we account for this apparent contradiction on behalf of hands ninamarie well what would you imagine to be the most likely difference between a legacy Harvard applicant and an affirmative action applicant I will leave it to you to ponder that one instead of the unfair and poisonous racial affirmative action hansteen Amaury argue instead for a race-blind version of affirmative action based bizarrely on test scores and I say bizarrely here because this idea would actually accelerate the supposedly apocalyptic cognitive partitioning they say that in the case of two candidates who were fairly closely matched otherwise University should give the nod to the applicants from the disadvantaged background now I agree with this in isolation here I do think that if you have two similar candidates you should admit the less privileged one but with regards to hansteen Amore's fears of cognitive partitioning though this is exactly what they were worried about colleges becoming better at collecting all of society's high IQ people together and funneling them into high IQ jobs in high IQ areas they've basically said he is an apocalyptic problem and now he is how to make it happen faster and actually guarding the concept of affirmative action their logic is all wrong there at the start of the chapter titled affirmative action in higher education hansteen amore recounts an affirmative action controversy from 1991 where a large students at Georgetown University quotes surreptitiously compiled the entrance statistics for a sample of applicants the Georgetown's law school and then published the results of his research in the law school student newspaper he revealed that the mean on the law school aptitude test differed by a large margin for accepted black and white students hands ninamarie dubbed this difference the ethnic premium or edge that minority applicants are supposedly being afforded in the admissions process and go on to detail how they've looked at the college admissions data from 26 colleges and found that in the classes entering those in 1991 and 92 the average SATs course of the black students were below the average Sat scores of the white students hence tina-marie take this as proof that black students have an unfair edge in the college admissions process quote the summary statement about affirmative action in undergraduate institutions is that being either a black or a Latino is worth a great deal in the admissions process at every undergraduate school for which we have data however this method of measuring the suppose it results of affirmative action is entirely incorrect there is a crucial flaw in the logic here and it begins with hansteen Amore's decision to begin their analysis by looking at the college entrance data instead of earlier by thinking about the wider pool of college applicants so black people have historically had lower Sat scores than white people now whether you believe this is due to some fixed genetically originated lower IQ or your sensible and you believe it's down to environmental reasons it is the case so in any random group of students applying to a college in the United States we would expect the scores of the black students to be on average lower than the white students if you follow so what happens next is the college takes a look at this group of applicants and decides to admit some of them using certain criteria so test scores but usually various other things like extracurricular activities and whatever else so all the accepted students get in and all the denied students go off to apply somewhere else right then Herrnstein amore come along to the college and they notice that the scores of the black students are on average below the white students and thus start decrying the terrible unfairness of affirmative action but what they've missed here is that this discrepancy between the average black and white scores would still exist even if the college admissions process only considered test scores and nothing else and let's think about this imagine an American College in 1991 with a certain amount of positions to fill and they get a larger group of students applying for those positions right so they have to let some in and not others in that group of applicants there will be a range of test scores and the black applicants will have on average lower scores than the white applicants and let's say this college only admits people via test scores so if they have one files and positions to fill they only accept the top 1000 Sat scores and they send everyone else packing now in this group of 1,000 successful applicants there will still be both black and white people but of those black people who scored high enough to get in they will be on average towards the lower end of the range meaning the black group average will still be lower than the white group average even though they all scored high enough to get in even in a world without affirmative action and even with a totally racially blind admissions policy and accepting Herrnstein Amore's positions regarding racial IQ scores a disparity between black and whites at scores in college intake groups would still exist the only way we could fairly expect the two averages to be the same is if the black and white students in that 1991 applicant pool also had on average the same scores and since hansteen Amaury have just spent a huge section of their book arguing for black people's lower cognitive ability I don't know why they'd be expecting that moving on from affirmative action I like to ask a question can the politics of the bell curve be described as eugenics and I mean yes right they're arguing for policies with the agenda of changing birth rates for particular groups of people they want lower IQ mothers to have fewer children Herrnstein and Murray stop short of openly embracing eugenics however they pull a rhetorical trick by saying they're simply worried about dis janux dis janux being the opposite of eugenics there so we're not necessarily for it but we are anti the opposite of it you know it's very clever one telling quote here is when Herrnstein amore talking about the nazis say the following followed by the terrors of Nazism and its perversion of eugenics that effectively wiped the idea from public discourse in the West now the phrase perversion of eugenics should set off some alarm bells they're implying apparently that there is a good sort of eugenics and the Nazis just did it wrong Gore took it too far or something or maybe there was just something uniquely evil about Nazi eugenics that wasn't present in the supposedly good eugenics is that true well let's find out the footage you're seeing here is from a movie called herb crank in English the hereditary defective this is a 1936 propaganda film produced by the Nazi party's racial policy office it features video shots at German psychiatric hospitals of people with various types of disabilities interspersed with text informing the audience among other things of the expense of caring for these people going on to argue that the prevention of hereditarily sick offspring is a moral duty now I'm not actually showing the images of the people in the video here as they almost certainly did not consent to be in a film which was used to propagandize in favor of their sterilization and I would feel uncomfortable including that footage in my video herb crank is available online though if you prefer to watch it unedited the film ends with the quote the farmer who prevents the overgrowth of the weed promotes the valuable the purpose of this film was obviously to increase blick support for the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities a nazi program that would escalate into outright mass murder just a few years later Adolf Hitler was reportedly a fan of herb crank and encouraged the production of a sequel titled victims of the past the sin against blood and race which was shown in cinemas throughout Nazi Germany in 1937 so why am I talking about herb crank here is this simply a slippery slope argument perhaps look we're all with eugenics rubbish leads to the Nazis and the Holocaust now although I think that would be a fair point to make actually no this particular movie has a much more direct link to what we're talking about today now something that might come as a shock to you and it certainly did to me in the process of researching this video is the extent of the International eugenics movement prior to World War two Nazi eugenicist s-- were not operating in a bubble and most importantly for us here is that they had a reciprocal relationship with American eugenicist you see herb crank had another big fan in addition to Hitler so this guy is Harry H Laughlin an American eugenicist director of the eugenics Record Office and founding member of the American eugenics Society he likes eugenics if you didn't pick up on that now in 1922 Harry Laughlin published a book titled eugenic all sterilization in the United States which included a chapter titled model eugenic all sterilization law this model law begins an act to prevent the procreation of persons socially inadequate from defective inheritance by authorizing and providing for the eugenic sterilization of certain potential parents carrying degenerate hereditary qualities this law designates a socially inadequate person as someone who fails chronically in comparison with normal persons to maintain himself or herself as a useful member of the organized social life of the state these socially inadequate people were not just the ill but also for example the criminalistics the inebriate and the dependent including or fans ne'er-do-wells the homeless tramps and paupers 18 US states passed laws based upon Lofland model and between them sterilized tens of thousands of people and in 1933 somewhere else passed a law which was based upon Lofland model the law for the Prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring which actually was slightly more moderate than what the model law proposed if you can believe it this was of course Nazi Germany Laughlin was later awarded an honorary degree by the University of Heidelberg for his work on behalf of the quote science of racial cleansing Laughlin was also an open Nazi Party supporter writing and fusee a Stickley about Nazi Germany's eugenics laws in a publication titled eugenic news and why shouldn't he be excited about them I mean he wrote them in addition to inspiring Nazi Party policy Laughlin also helped to disseminate their propaganda in 1936 he purchased an English translation of herb crank and raised funds to have it shown in American high schools which it was that's right just a couple of years before the Nazis started systematically murdering people with disabilities this Nazi eugenics movie was actually shown in American schools and this event was reported unfavorably in the Nazi press Laughlin raised the funds to distribute the film by writing to Wickliffe Draper who was another American eugenicist and racist and importantly for Laughlin a millionaire together in 1937 Laughlin and Draper founded the Pioneer fund the purpose of which was to promote the genetic stock of people quote deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original 13 States prior to the adoption of the Constitution now besides subjecting schoolchildren to Nazi propaganda the Pioneer fund set about supporting massive air quotes research into race betterment giving enormous grants to any researcher willing to push a pro eugenics agenda and here dear video Watchers is where weary join the bell curve Richard Lynn you remember the guy who thinks the single best study of the quote negroid intelligence was carried out under apartheid he's received over $600,000 from the pioneer fund and currently as in now currently today is the head of the pioneer fund because it is still going and he is still alive mankind quarterly the journal which published Lin's work that is cited in the bell curve is funded by the Pioneer fund mankind quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education Corrado Jeanne who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in fascist Italy and achma friar von virtua who was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of anthropology human heredity and eugenics in Nazi Germany was a member of the Nazi Party and believe it or not the mentor of Josef Mengele Josef Mengele of course being the physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp infamous for performing human experimentation on the prisoners during World War 2 Mengele provided for schewe with human remains from Auschwitz to use in his research into eugenics that is who founded mankind quarterly editor of the New Republic Charles Lane writing about the bell curve in 1994 noted that five articles from the journal that's mankind quarterly are actually cited in the bell curves bibliography but the influence on the book from scholars linked to mankind quarterly is more significant no fewer than 17 researchers cited in the bibliography of the bell curve have contributed to mankind quarterly 10 are present or former editors or members of its editorial advisory board J Philippe Rushton the guy wandering around asking people how far they can ejaculate he was president of the Pioneer fund from 2002 to 2012 received hundreds of thousands of dollars from it and he used pioneer funds to mail 40,000 copies of his book race evolution and behavior to various social scientists another pioneer fund recipient was American anthropologist Donald Swan now in 1966 Donald Swann was arrested on charges of mail fraud when the police investigated swans apartment they found an assortment of illegal weapons a stash of racist literature Nazi memorabilia including flags and a helmet and photographs of Swan with members of the American Nazi Party oops do you remember Linda Gottfredson the author of the public statement defending the bell curves claims about intelligence that I mentioned way back at the start of the video well as of 1994 she'd received two hundred and sixty-seven thousand dollars from the pioneer fund and speaking of that public statement actually the Southern Poverty Law Center notes that more than 20 of the 52 signatories where themselves pioneer fund recipients and crucially for us here the pioneer fund wanted to fund Richard Herrnstein the head of the fund prior to joyfully Rushton was a lawyer called Harry F wire and in 1994 the year that the bell curve came out he told the journalist interviewing him that regarding hansteen we'd have funded him at the drop of a hat but he never asked now the fact that the bell curve includes among its sources a bunch of people who receive money from the Nazi fund and publish papers in the Nazi journal was understandably cause for concern for many when it was published and this was used frequently to dismiss the books arguments so Morrie includes a very short defense of the Pioneer fund in his afterward to the bell curve which reads as follows the relationship between the founder of the pioneer fund and today's pioneer fund is roughly analogous to that between Henry Ford and today's Ford Foundation so he's saying you know it may have been founded by pro-nazi eugenicist but today it's completely different the trouble is Morrie includes absolutely no evidence to back this statement up he treats it as a given but actually the Pioneer fund has been unwavering in its support for eugenics over the years Richard Lynn the current head of the fund works with the explicitly white supremacist publication American Renaissance and speaks at their conferences the way supremacists editor of American Renaissance Jared Taylor who viewers of my other videos will remember is funded by the Pioneer fund so I don't buy Charles Maurey just saying it has changed he doesn't give evidence for why he thinks that and there is ample evidence against it anyway it's about time to wrap this video up with a few final thoughts I think but let's first briefly summarize our main counter arguments to the bell curve firstly the bell curve does not prove that genetics are the primary reason for differences in intelligence the offers are not geneticists they're a psychologist and a social scientist their estimates of the importance of genes are based on suppositions and guesses after failing to make the case that IQ is genetic in origin they compare that IQ not to one's social background as the back cover of the book promises but a much more narrowly defined index of parental socioeconomic status which includes only a few of the relevant variables the main source of their data is more a test of academic achievement than intelligence and since it did not return a normal bell curve distribution Herrnstein Amaury manipulated the data to exaggerate what were previously much smaller differences after a completely unnecessary section making the case for racial IQ differences they include a set of policy proposals most of which do not follow logically from their previous analysis and some of which contradict it and of course hansteen Amore's willingness to quote highly questionable data from even more questionable sources should be very worrisome even if you happen to agree with them otherwise having now read a lot of criticism of the bell curve I think I've identified a particular difficulty that people have in arguing against it and it's a tendency to argue with not the opinions that hansteen Amaury claimed to hold but the opinions that they would have to hold in order to support the policy proposals which they do for example it makes no sense to claim that IQ explains only a tiny amount of the variance between people and that you cannot know what someone will do from their IQ as hansteen Mauri do and then move on to claim that IQ is one of the best ways of determining an employee's individual productivity and employers should pick applicants with the highest IQs a passing critic of the bell curve who hears this logically might then respond but that makes no sense iq explains only a tiny amount of the variance between people you can't know what someone will do from their IQ so which defenders of the bell curve respond AHA you didn't read the book because they say that in there now this gotcha tactic as satisfying as it might be does not actually explain the contradiction however this is the main rhetorical trick of the bell curve they pretend to concede to mainstream scientific opinion but then propose a set of conservative and eugenicist political policies as if they hadn't anyone who genuinely believed all the moderate hedging quotes that hansteen Amory put in the bell curve would not be able to propose the policies that they do so the critics of the bell curve see these policies and start arguing against the opinions that they assume hansteen amore would therefore have to hold thus the repeated defense of the bell curve is that the authors can't be racist or biased or bigoted as their critics claim because in their book they say that they're not the critics must therefore have not read the book this is not the airtight defense they think it is we care about their political proposals not how moderate they pretended to be in order to camouflage their approach to those political proposals one chord if one wanted go through my video and find corresponding quotes in the bell curve for pretty much all of my counter arguments see they also worried about the dangers of social engineering they also paraphrase the wantons fourth experiment with the plants they also talk about the various problems with IQ testing they also call the existence of G arguable they say all this in the book so therefore they've addressed it and your counter arguments are nullified right the problem is putting all that in the book didn't stop them from AB for the political policies that they do and it should have if with regards to how much genes influence intelligence you spend a whole book saying things like the state of knowledge does not permit a precise estimate but then you go on to propose a set of policies that only make sense if intelligence is definitely primarily genetic in origin you are contradicting yourself you don't actually care that the state of knowledge does not permit a precise estimate that apparently isn't going to stop you from acting as if it does I'm guilty myself of several times arguing against the point that hence tina-marie should have made instead of the one that they did make only a minute ago i said the bell curve does not prove that genetics are the primary reason for differences in intelligence to which the defense is of course that they never set out to do such a thing but they should have if you don't prove that then the rest of the argument doesn't work now they couldn't have proved that if they wanted to of course because the data is inconclusive hansteen amore acknowledged the data is inconclusive but then just keep on trucking assuming firstly that later genetics research will prove them correct which it hasn't the data is still inconclusive twenty-five years later and secondly assuming that any data which trends against their position is due to strictly temporary effects rising IQ scores are thus explained away as being due to an increase in test-taking ability or else whereas due to the data being distorted by the baby-boom rising standards of living can raise a country's average IQ but only to a point it is assumed black and white IQ scores are converging but they may be expected to stop and the gap could even begin to widen again so predicting the future on this issue is little more than guesswork at this point all the trends that contradict what the office of the bell curve will quite clearly like to be true are assumed to be time limited you get the sense that hands tina-marie are implying that once we get to the end of history once things stop happening to make the data look like we're wrong then you'll see you'll all see in just a few more years you'll see that we were right all of course to a reader in 2019 all this as with much of the rest of the book comes off as rather quaint relic of the 90s maybe like pogs you see today of course we have social media and daily get to see just how cognitively elite the supposed cognitive elite are hansteen Amore's theory of intellectual inequality is of course just economic inequality with the license plates changed and I can think of no better illustration of this than the college admissions bribery scandal from earlier this year this was a criminal conspiracy organized by William Rix singer to dr. exam results and bribe college officials in order to ensure children of rich parents get into several top universities singer testified that he'd helped more than 750 families get children into college this way and he furthermore claimed that some of the tactics he used to inflate test scores we're widespread outside of his particular scheme the problem of course is not that the rich are getting smarter it's that the rich are getting richer and can increasingly rigged the system to their own benefit the fact that the rich definitely aren't cognitively elite is increasingly becoming a problem thanks to our imbalanced economies in 2008 this cognitive elite caused an economic crash and had to be bailed out by all the middle bell-curve average people lastly here I'd like to say that the bell curve proves if anything that any apprehension the scientific community might have about discussing possible differences in racial cognitive ability would be very well justified because what you shouldn't want to happen as a scientist presenting inconclusive evidence for such is for someone hearing that inconclusive evidence to then start using it as a justification to propose eugenicist political policies the bell curve is all this in one package in conclusive evidence and eugenicist politics the bell curve has stuck around not because it breaks new ground or presents new ideas but because it is a useful pseudo scientific justification for conservative looking to cut welfare programs and racists looking to feel justified in their racism it is a scabrous piece of racial pornography thanks for watching folks this one took a bit of time to put together I'm sure you've noticed 26 thousand words this is thank you as always to my patrons for supporting me so that I can keep making ridiculous videos like this one if you'd like to join this list of lovely people I will put a link in the video description below that you can check out if you like and I'd like to give an extra thank you to my patrons this time for fact-checking a previous draft of this video for me and making some very useful suggestions this video would not be half as good as it is without all of your excellent feedback so I am very grateful for that I'd also like to thank the people who were able to source a few difficult to find studies for me some folks were even kind enough to physically go and photograph or scan things that were not available online so thank you so much for helping me out there thank you also to the editors who helped me out with this video your contributions and suggestions were fantastic now with any project of this length you inevitably end up with a lot of unused material at the end and there is so much that I left out here usually for time reasons because it would just take too long to explain or because it was too complicated and beyond my ability to present the information in a way that made sense if you'd like to look into the various subjects mentioned today in more depth than I do in the video I would recommend checking out the sources and reading list below righty-ho that's all from me today folks I'll see you next time

Channel: Shaun

Views: 1,026,611

Rating: 4.6899486 out of 5

Keywords: the bell curve, shaun, charles murray

Id: UBc7qBS1Ujo

Length: 159min 45sec (9585 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/lostalongtheway]

Claims phrenology is bunk science yet openly shows off the size of his skull as the background for the video... I’m onto you Shauny boy

[u/zxlkho]

Shaun: The Movie

[u/DisgruntledPorcupine]

2 hours and 40 minutes, good god. Gonna need all the popcorn for this one.

[u/selwun]

"In the book The Bell Curve, the principle intelligence test the authors use as a source did not return a bell curve distribution." - 1:25:28

[u/voodoochile78]

I assume that many of you are atheists like me, and depending on your age really got into the New Atheist movement back in the early 2000s. Well isn't it a fucking trip that the reason that Charles Murray is back in the limelight is because of Sam Harris?

What a fucking world...

[u/cyvaris]

Gets update, NEW SKULL DADDY YES

sees the length

Oh damn.

[u/SuperBlurryface182]

He’s really doing it. Sis is really fucking doing it.

Nazi’s are gonna brigade it eventually and Nazi youtubers like the Alt Hype are gonna nit pick it to the death but I’m just gonna relish in this right now.

[u/titotal]

If people want a slightly shorter dissection of "general intelligence" and IQ research, I recommend two articles by statistics professor Cosmo Shalizi pointing out that the existence of general intelligence is completely unproven and that your zip code is "heritable".

Edit: these are apparently referenced in the video, I do recommend reading them anyway, they are very very good. Also I'll throw in this brilliant dissection of charles murray himself. Biggest howler: he apparently wrote a book "objectively determining" the greatest musicians of all time and only had one black person in there.

[u/marianitten]

(don't worry it's not racist it's refuting a racist)

dude.. its Shaun.. we know him. If you dont... you have something to binge