James Watson, Black Intelligence, and New Research by Fryer and Levitt
Comment:
Re: discussion with someone yesterday. Of course, this is the kind of thing that gets filed under ‘duh’ ex-post by most (non-racist) people. This may be the best of all possible worlds in terms of testing intelligence outcomes pre-environmental effects. However, intelligence is still a fuzzy word, and for me to accept the research (one way or the other, though of course the strong presumption lies with the outcomes presented here), I want to see links between particular genes/tuples of genes and brain anatomy that is THEN linked to different forms of intelligence (language processing, logic, memory, etc.) Then, detailed analysis of those genes/tuples of genes and their propensity/distribution in certain subpopulation is to me the only proper way to get a decent answer out of the questions.
Nobel Laureate James Watson got into trouble recently for expressing the opinion that blacks are less intelligent than whites. If you look at almost all existing data from standardized tests in the United States, there is indeed a sizable black-white test score gap. Whether the gap is due to genetic differences is a hotly debated academic [...]
