Race and Intelligence - History of The Debate

History of The Debate

The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate, primarily in the United States, concerning possible explanations of group differences in scores on intelligence tests. Historically there have been differences among average scores in IQ tests of different population groups; these have sometimes been called "racial IQ gaps". Researchers believe that environmental (socioeconomic and cultural) factors contribute to this, but have not agreed on whether the gaps are due to environmental factors alone, or whether there is any genetic contribution that can be substantiated.

Claims of races having different intelligence were used to justify colonialism, slavery, social darwinism, and racial eugenics. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, group differences in intelligence were assumed to be due to race and, apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. The first IQ test was created between 1905 and 1908 and revised in 1916 (the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales). Alfred Binet, the developer of these tests, warned that these should not be used to measure innate intelligence or to label individuals. However, at the time there was great concern in the United States about the abilities and skills of recent immigrants. Different nationalities were sometimes thought to comprise different races, such as Slavs. The tests were used to evaluate draftees for World War I, and researchers found that people of southern and eastern Europe scored lower than native-born Americans. At the time, such data was used to construct an ethnically based social hierarchy, one in which immigrants were rejected as unfit for service and mentally defective. It was not until later that researchers realized that lower language skills by new English speakers affected their scores on the tests.

In the 1920s, many scientists reacted to eugenicist claims linking abilities and moral character to racial or genetic ancestry. Despite that, states like Virginia enacted laws based in eugenics, such as its 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which established the one-drop rule as law. Generally, understanding grew about the contribution of environment to test-taking and results (such as having English as a second language). By the mid-1930s most US psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors played a dominant role. In addition, psychologists were reluctant to risk being associated with the German Nazi claims of a "master race".

In 1969, Arthur Jensen revived the hereditarian point of view in the article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" It followed changes in public programs introduced to try to correct decades of discrimination against poor African Americans. In 1954, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that public school segregation was unconstitutional. As part of the Great Society programs under President Lyndon Johnson, the Head Start Program was started with the goal of early intervention to help socially disadvantaged children succeed by providing remedial education. Given the effects of segregation and discrimination into the 1960s, many Head Start programs served African-American children.

Jensen's article questioned remedial education for African-American children; he suggested their poor educational performance reflected an underlying genetic cause rather than lack of stimulation at home. Jensen's work, publicized by the Nobel laureate physicist William Shockley, sparked controversy amongst the academic community and student protests.

In their 1988 book The IQ Controversy, the Media, and Public Policy, Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman claimed to document a liberal bias in the media coverage of scientific findings regarding IQ. The book builds on the results of a survey of more than 600 psychologists, sociologists and educationalists. 45 percent of those surveyed thought that black-white differences in IQ were the product of both genetic and environmental variation, while 15 percent believed that the differences were entirely due to environmental factors; the rest either declined to answer the question, or thought that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer.

Another debate followed the appearance of The Bell Curve (1994), a book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, who argued in favor of the hereditarian viewpoint. It provoked the publication of several interdisciplinary books representing the environmental point of view, as well as some in popular science. They include The Bell Curve Debate (1995), Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996) and a second edition of The Mismeasure of Man (1996) by Steven J. Gould. One book written from the hereditarian point of view at this time was The g Factor: The science of mental ability (1998) by Jensen. In 1994 a group of 52 scientists, including leading hereditarians, signed the statement "Mainstream Science on Intelligence". The Bell Curve also led to a 1995 report from the American Psychological Association, "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", acknowledging a gap between average IQ scores of whites and blacks as well as the absence of any adequate explanation of it, either environmental or genetic.

The review article "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" by Rushton and Jensen was published in 2005. The article was followed by a series of responses, some in support, some critical. Richard Nisbett, another psychologist who had also commented at the time, later included an amplified version of his critique as part of the book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count (2009). Rushton and Jensen in 2010 made a point-for-point reply to this and again summarized the hereditarian position.

Two public figures claimed in interviews that one of the main causes for poverty in Africa is a low average intelligence, an idea which caused great controversy. Following an interview in the monthly supplement of Helsingin Sanomat, Lynn's coauthor Tatu Vanhanen, a political scientist and father of the Prime Minister of Finland Matti Vanhanen, was investigated by the Finnish police between 2002 and 2004. In 2007 James D. Watson, Nobel laureate in biology, gave a controversial interview to the Sunday Times Magazine during a book tour in the United Kingdom. This interview resulted in the cancellation of a Royal Society lecture, along with other public engagements, and his suspension from his administrative position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He subsequently cancelled the tour and resigned from his position.

Many of the leading hereditarians, mostly psychologists, have received funding from the Pioneer Fund with Rushton as its current head. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group, citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with racist individuals. On the other hand, Ulrich Neisser writes that "Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research—research that otherwise might not have been done at all." Other sources and researches have criticized the Pioneer Fund for promoting scientific racism, eugenics and white supremacy.