Genetics

The self-evident inequalities

Anthony Flew

In the winter of 1969 the Harvard Educational Review published a long article by Arthur Jensen, a Professor of Psychology in the University of California at Berkeley. "It was," he has since confessed, "a part of my personal philosophy that a scientist should try to bring his technical expertise to bear on practical as well as theoretical problems." In this article Jensen reviewed the evidence bearing on the question, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"

Its reception showed, not for the first time, that to satisfy the radical concern for relevance it is not sufficient for academic work to relate to practical issues. To be thus truly relevant it is necessary also to give positive support to certain approved doctrines. For the original publication of this article occasioned an enormous coastto-coast brouhaha of protest and denunciation. This included — from the storm-troopers of the monstrously misnamed 'Students for a Democratic Society' — tyre-slashing, slogan-painting, telephoned abuse and threats, and strident demands to " Fire " or even to "Kill Jensen."

The author has now republished the offending article, along with several shorter contributions in the same area, under the title Genetics and Education.* He has also supplied, in addition to a full collection of references for the papers included, a bibliography of the controversy, two indices, and a 67 page preface. The cautious conclusion which gave, and still gives, such enormous offence is that it is " a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference." There can be no question but the there are such differences in the US at this time, whatever may be in other places, or might have been at other times. For the word ' intelligence' is here defined in terms of IQ tests; and so these differences, which are of course only and precisely differences on average, just are the differences which are in fact found in achievement on these tests. Jensen's question is: "How much of the variation . . . can we account for in terms of variation in the genetic factors . . • affecting the development of the characteristic? "

It is, in this context, irrelevant to urge that IQ tests are culturally-loaded: that they are "Whitey's tests"; or — worse still — that they favour the hated middle class. "To the extent that a test is not culture-free ' or culture-fair,' it will result in a lower heridability measurement. It makes no more sense to say that

intelligence tests do not really measure intelligence but only developed intelligence than to say that scales do not really measure a person's weight but only the weight he has acquired by eating. An 'environment-free ' test of intelligence makes as much sense as a ' nutrition-free ' scale for weight."

So now, why has it become a mark of the soundly conformist left-thinking person to denounce Jensen and all his works, and to pitch in to try to prevent any research which might confirm his appropriately tentative conclusions? The first part of the answer lies in a gross failure to distinguish between claims about an equality of rights and claims about an equality of talents. The American Anthropological Association, for instance, passed a resolution at its New Orleans conference in 1970 repudiating "statements now appearing in the United States that Negroes are biologically and in innate mental ability inferior to whites." It reaffirmed as a "fact that there is no scientifically established evidence to justify the exclusion of any race from the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States."

The Founding Fathers, however, never said that all men are equal in talents. They had too much sense. Nor did they make the logical mistake of saying that that equality of rights, upon which they did insist, is founded on and presupposes an equality of talents. They did not hold it to "be self-evident, that all men are created equal," full stop. Instead they went on to complete their sentence by explaining that the equality which they were demanding was an equality of basic rights. To this moral demand it is, as Jensen himself insists, simply irrelevant to object that some individuals or groups are inferior or superior in talents.

Nor, again, will it do to draw conclusions about individuals from premises about the average characteristics of any groups to which these individuals may happen to belong. Jensen quotes from one of the less scurrilous letters of protest: "If the group is to be labelled intellectually inferior, I, as a member of that group, am also inevitably and automatically labelled." If anything deserves to be itself labelled as " one of the fallacies of racism " it is this form of argument. For if this is compounded with the first fallacy of assuming that moral equality — equality of rights and duties — necessarily presupposes equality of talents, then you are indeed forced to choose between either accepting that we ought to discriminate between. individuals on grounds of race, or accepting that all racial groups are in fact equal in talents.

It is doubly lamentable that so many of our unthinking conventional left-thinkers have got themselves tied up with these two fallacies. It is lamentable, first, because — given their proper wish to avoid all discrimination between individuals on grounds of race — they become committed to an obscurantist insistence that no research is to be allowed to reveal that any racial group may be on average in any respect inferior to any other.

All obscurantism is bad. But Jensen gives good reasons for thinking that the obscurantism of the environmentalist establishment is peculiarly damaging here. Paradoxically it is obstructing research, and the application of research, into ways in which hereditarily determined differences might be themselves affected by environmental manipulation. There are, for instance, striking differences in the US between the reproductive practices of blacks and whites. Since IQ correlates with social class, and since upper class blacks tend to have smaller and lower class blacks larger families than their white opposite numbers, any IQ disparity between black and white is likely to be increasing.

The second reason why these muddles are so lamentable is that there really do seem to be very good reasons to suspect that — whether or not this has as yet been proved — there are some such hereditarily determined differences in average ability. Indeed, since scarcely anyone except speakers at conferences of educationalists has the face to deny that individual abilities are in part hereditarily determined, and since the physical defining characteristics of racial groups are certainly so determined, to believe that there are in fact no correlations what soever between racial groups and average intelligence would seem to be to assume that the Creator himself must be a lefty!

It would be disastrous, supposing that the evidence for such average differences of ability between racial groups became too strong to be either ignored or shouteci down, if this were then to be taken — as most of Jensen's critics, apparently, would take it — as warranting the immoral conclusion that we ought to discriminate between individuals on the grounds of their race. For these critics mostly insist upon misusing the word ' racism ' to include, without distinction, both the belief in such discrimination, and the belief in some inequality of average talents. Hence they automatically denounce as viciously racist anyone like Jensen, who — more clearheadedly than they — entertains the latter while repudiating the former.

Finally, let us treat ourselves to the mischievous observation that claims to superiority — at least when made for generally underprivileged groups — do not give the same offence. No one seems to have denounced Jensen for noting: that "Negro infants, for example, are more precocious in development . . . in their first year or two than Caucasian infants;" or that, though "American Indians are much more disadvantaged than Negroes . . their ability and achieve ment test scores average about half a standard deviation higher than the scores

of Negroes." The argument seems to be

that familiar to all students of incomes policies. Everyone must, of course, have at least ' the average. But some favoured exceptions may nevertheless demand more.