I’m reading James Flynn’s new book Does Your Family Make You Smarter? and I’m absolutely blown away by how subtle and creative his ideas are.  Unlike many environmentalists, who simply nitpick the research of IQ hereditists, Flynn actually makes his points with great statistical creativity.

In order to understand this book, you must first understand that according to the conventional wisdom, our IQs have three main causes:

1. Genes: The effect of genes on IQ can be measured by correlating the IQs of identical twins raised apart (though the correlation should be reduced a bit for shared prenatal environment)

2.  Family environment:  The effect of family environment can be measured by    correlating the IQs of unrelated people raised in the same home.

3. Chance environment:  These are random environmental events that affect our individual IQs, but don’t effect our siblings raised in the same family.  For biological determinists like Arthur Jensen and I, these might be getting hit on the head with a golf ball or not getting enough oxygen in the womb.  For cultural determinists like Flynn, these might be having a school teacher who inspires you to learn.  The effect of chance environment on IQ can be measured by noting that there’s a higher IQ correlation between the same person tested twice, then there is between two identical twins raised in the same home.  In other words, you are more similar to you, then you are even to your identical twin raised in the exact same family, so there are obviously unique environmental effects that make even identical twins raised together, individuals.

Now according to Jensen’s (1998) summary of kinship and adoption studies, genes explain about 45% of the IQ variation in childhood, 65% of the variation in adolescence, and about 80% in later maturity.  Family environment explains about 35% of the IQ variation in childhood, and near zero by late adolescence.  Meanwhile chance environment explains about 25% at all ages.

Why does family environment go from 35% to zero percent?  The conventional wisdom is that people with high IQ genes do well in school and end up in stimulating adult environments, and these adult environments replace the effects of family environment.  Further, because their genes caused these adult environments, the effect shows up as genetic variance.

Flynn’s brilliant insight

I’m going to do my best to explain Flynn’s ground-breaking new method. Although so far I’ve only read the first few chapters,  I hope I’ve at least partly grasped the concept (it’s pretty subtle):

High IQ adults outperform high IQ children on tests, both because of age differences, but also because by adulthood, high IQ genes create high IQ environments, creating a multiplier effect.

By contrast average IQ adults score higher than average IQ children, ONLY because of age differences.  In a normal curve, by definition the average person is, on average, average in genes and environment.

Thus by subtracting the test performance gap between average IQ adults and average IQ kids, from the performance gap between high IQ adults and high IQ kids, you get a pure measure of the effect of non-chance environment on test performance.

What this brilliant method shows is that on tests that I have always known are quite culture reduced, like using colored blocks to form designs, the effect of non-chance environment vanishes by the early teens, while on tests that are obviously cultural (vocabulary), non-chance environment persists into adulthood.

To me, the beauty of this method is that two tests could have the exact same heritability, but one test could be heritable for indirect reasons (genes causing environments that improve test performance) while the other test is heritable because genes directly affect performance.

How ironic that Flynn, the man best known for debunking the notion of culture reduced tests via the Flynn effect, may have unintentionally proven they exist after all.

Note the measurements I wrote on the photo above their crania

Evidence continues to accumulate showing that by the early 21st century, 1) the World’s biggest brained black was at times, the World’s ONLY black billionaire, 2) the World’s biggest brained woman was the World’s most influential woman, and 3) both individuals are the same person: A cultural phenomenon named Oprah, who overcame poverty, racism, sexism, weightism, illegitimacy, sexual abuse and teen pregnancy, to revolutionize the culture of America, and by extension, the World.

Just as the biggest brained animal (humans) used our intelligence to overcome our physical weakness and become the World’s most prosperous and powerful animal, the World’s biggest brain woman overcame her disadvantaged background, to become, at times, both the World’s richest black and the World’s most influential woman.

If true, this is arguably the most important anthropological discovery in decades, making me the Darwin of the 21st century.

Oprah is on record many times stating that her head is 25.25″ inches around.  According to U.S. military data, that makes her an astonishing 6.3 standard deviations above the U.S. female mean, making hers almost certainly, the largest female HC in the developed World, and by extension, the entire World (excluding pathological cases).

Further confirmation of Oprah’s stunning cranium comes from the picture above, which offers a rare opportunity to compare Oprah’s head to that of actor Jamie Fox, because both individuals are facing each other in profile, and Oprah’s hair is pulled back tight.

The photo of Oprah’s cranium is 2.6 cm long, making it 130% as long as Jamie Fox’s.  If Fox has the head circumference of the average American man (568.2 mm), that makes Oprah’s HC an unimaginable, 738.7 mm.  Even if Fox has an extreme small head, like 536.6 mm (2 SD below the U.S. mean for men), that still makes Oprah’s an absolutely colossal, 697.6 mm (27.5″ around).  If anything, Oprah’s self-reported 25.25″ head circumference was a conservative figure.

Further evidence of Oprah’s enormous cranium comes from a photo of Oprah with a famous actress.

Clearly, this actress’s brain could fit into Oprah cranium an incredible three or more times.  Now this actress clearly has a small head, but among 6,325 U.S. army personnel measured in 1998, scholar J.P. Rushton found the smallest was 900 cubic centimeters (a black woman), and the largest was 1,795 cm³ (a white man).  Even if we assume the actress standing next to Oprah was only 900 cm³, the fact that Oprah’s cranium is three or four times bigger, could put Oprah at as high as 2700 cm³ to 3600 cm³!  Though Oprah’s self-reported HC of 25.25″ implies a more believable 2,029 cm^3.

A thousand years from now, when no one even knows who Oprah was, anthropologists might dig through the soil and discover a skeleton with a colossal cranial capacity and assume it belonged to someone extremely intelligent.  They’ll think it must have belong to some rare super human, perhaps a more evolved species.  They might then discover the remains of her massive brick mansion and realize her intelligence allowed her to rule over the other humans of her time.

Emotional intelligence is a vague incoherent concept introduced by Harvard scholar Daniel Goleman.  Blogger race realist has described it as a hybrid of IQ and the best personality traits.  I would say it’s a hybrid of general intelligence (g), Theory of Mind, self-awareness, and the best personality traits.

A lot of people find it a useful term because conventional IQ tests do an incomplete job measuring social cognition, and they want a term to describe people who are smart at understanding human emotions, however we now have a term for that: Theory of Mind (ToM).  And Goleman ruined his whole construct by not distinguishing between people who are smart at emotions (i.e. a master manipulator), and those who just have good emotions (someone who doesn’t feel the need to overeat).

But historically there’s been a very clear distinction between emotions (that which feels, wants, and desires) and the intellect (that which thinks, knows, and understands).  In my opinion, the intellect is the part of the brain that problem solves (intelligence) while emotions are the problems that need to be solved.

Even today, factor analysis finds a clear distinction between the cognitive and the emotional.

So the term emotional intelligence is a bit like the term mental physical ability; it’s inherently ambiguous.

How emotions relate to intelligence

If you feel fear, your intelligence solves that problem by figuring out how to make you safe.  Now in rare cases, you might have someone with a high IQ who has damage to the part of the brain that feel fear.  This person will superficially appear to have an extremely low IQ, because he will stand in the middle of the road, not caring about all the cars that could kill him.

Goleman looks at someone like this and thinks, he must not be very intelligent, despite his high IQ and invents the construct of emotional intelligence to explain his behavior.  But the fearless person is NOT lacking in emotional intelligence, he’s lacking the emotional drive to safe his own life because he doesn’t fear it ending.  From our fearful perspective, he has an inability to problem solve, but from his fearless perspective, there’s no problem to be solved.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming that if someone doesn’t solve the same problems most of us do, whether it’s making money, advancing a career, finding a mate, or simply saving our life, that therefore that person is a poor problem solver.  But problems are subjective.  If you lack the emotional wiring to feel anxiety about not surviving or succeeding, then by definition, it’s not a problem for you, so you will not solve it.  IQ tests attempt to make problems objective by explicitly defining every item as a problem to be solved, thus allowing people with different incentive structures to be compared very accurately.

So if someone has a high IQ, and they appear to be acting stupidly, chances are the behavior is smart on a level you don’t understand, because the high IQ person has already been objectively certified as a good problem solver.

Self-awareness

Of course, it’s also stupid to throw the baby out with the bath water just because some of Goleman’s ideas make no sense.  He did use some tests that were innovative new measures of actual intelligence such as one where you had to throw a ring around a distant goal post.  In order to win the game, you had to pick the most distant goal post that you could possibly succeed in ringing.

This was a cool test of test of self-awareness (which might be an actual cognitive ability, much like Theory of Mind, though perhaps personality traits like self-esteem and narcissism might attenuate it).  As Goleman explained to Oprah, “you want to set your goals high, but not so high that they exceed your reach.”

Big brained Oprah replied by saying “I have a different philosophy.  Reach for the stars, and if you hit the moon in between, you’re still up there.”

“Well Oprah,” he said “your reach is really really far.  You’ve done amazingly well.”

I remember in my nineth grade English class, the teacher asked the class why we study Greek mythology.  Every student except me got the answer wrong, but the dumbest answer was from a classmate named Doug who said “because the school board feels its nessecary.”

A few weeks later, he told the oldest and wisest teacher in the high school that he wanted to be a lawyer.

“Oh noooooooooooooooo Dear,” she explained in her condescending voice.  “You’re just not a lawyer, dear”

Doug’s friend came to Doug’s defence saying “you could still be a lawyer.  You just have to work a lot harder.”

“Oh noooooooooooo Dear,” she now said to the friend.  “it’s kind to have high hopes, but it’s much better to have realistic goals and go grab em.”

As a university student, this teacher had taken the WAIS IQ test, and though she was never given her score, the examiner would belittle her with comments like “you can’t be that dumb can you.”

Yet she would go on to marry a lawyer and be the head of the resource department at a high class high school.

Because she had realistic goals and goed grabbed em!

Regardless of her score on the WAIS, she would have done well on the ring test.

In my last post I cited excellent data showing Jewish Americans have a math IQ of 113, a verbal IQ of 109, a processing speed IQ of 100, a grammar IQ of 100, a memory IQ of 96, and a spatial IQ of 93.  I crudely estimated that a composite score of all of these abilities would yield an IQ of 102.

However I was criticised for giving all of these abilities equal weight, when some are better measures of intelligence than others.  The problem, is deciding how much weight to give each subtest depends on your definition of intelligence.  I define intelligence as the mental ability to adapt, so I tend to give all mental abilities equal weight, because when the environment changes, you never know what mental abilities you’re going to need.  Right now, math IQ, verbal IQ, and social IQ are the most adaptive, but if civilization were to crumble and it were every man for himself, spatial IQ would be key.

Of course some mental abilities are always going to be more important than others.  If you can reason abstractly, you can find general solutions that solve many different specific problems.

As my nineth grade math teacher would say in his Quebec accent “if you are good at math, then that means you are good at logic.”  And if you’re good at logic, you’re good at almost everything because the universe is inherently logical.  Perhaps I should have given math more weight than grammar and processing speed when calculating Jewish IQ.

Psychometrics largely defines intelligence as g, general mental ability.  But as scholar Arthur Jensen noted, there’s a difference between general mental ability and mental ability in general.

You can be high on the mental ability that all mental abilities have in common (g), but what good is it, if you’re still low on most mental abilities, because you lack all the non-g mental variance.  People with fetal alcohol syndrome for example, have normal g, but are so lacking in non-g brain power that they are typically too mentally retarded to adapt and require lifelong assistance.

So while g might be an excellent predictor of adaptive behavior for most people, it fails for sub-groups that have a very different cognitive profile.  So how do we scientifically measure the cognitive ability to adapt?  Ideally, we would need to take a random sample of every problem, every lifeform in the history of our universe has faced, and see if your mental abilities can solve them.  Only then would we know if one has a truly adaptive combination of mental aptitudes.

The great David Wechsler probably understood that intelligence was about adaptability, because he defined it, in part, as the ability to “deal effectively with your environment”.  He selected 11 subtests that he felt collectively measured this construct, and he divided them into a verbal scale and a performance scale.

In his book, The Global Bell Curve (page 117), scholar Richard Lynn cites a study of Canadian Jews tested on the Wechsler.  After adjusting for old norms, they had a verbal IQ of 111, a Performance IQ of 103, and full-scale IQ of 107 (white norms).  Based on the fact that the verbal IQ of 111 was almost identical to the verbal IQ of 109 I cited above, from a large representative sample of U.S. Jews, I believe this Canadian study is also representative of North American Jews.

But why then did the Canadian Jews have a Performance IQ of 103, when the U.S. Jews have a spatial IQ of 93 as mentioned at the start of this article.  I think it’s because pure spatial ability is only one part of Wechsler’s original Performance IQ, which also includes reasoning, common sense, visual alertness, lateral thinking, and social smarts.

A full-scale IQ of 107 is 7 points above the white means and is probably a good estimate for Jewish IQ.  High enough to partly explain their wealth, influence and scholarship, but low enough to explain their somewhat smaller brains and dark Caucasoid ancestry.

I’ve been informed in the comments by William that Wikipedia is claiming Ashkenazi Jews have a mean verbal IQ of 125.6!  Although I’d like to believe this because it would nicely explains the incredible economic and cultural achievements of U.S. Jews, it’s hard to believe a people so genetically related to whites and Arabs could have a verbal IQ dozens of points higher than both.

I decided to turn to chapter 10 of my hero Daniel Seligman’s excellent 1992 book A Question of Intelligence, since Seligman was especially curious about how his people scored on IQ tests.  I learned that most studies of American Jews are not very representative, because samples are often drawn just from New York city or from children in Orthodox schools.

Seligman notes that the closest thing we have to a representative sample is Project Talent, a wide ranging survey, done in the early sixties, of Caucasian high school students.

Seligman writes:

The students were given an exhaustive battery of tests (forty-nine in all!) when they were in the ninth grade, then tested again (though not on all forty-nine) in the twelfth grade.  The Project Talent data included results for 1,236 Jewish students.

Seligman then goes on to quote a summary of the results from scholar Miles D. Storfer.

Jewish math IQ 113

Storfer writes:

The scores of the Jewish boys averaged almost a full standard deviation above those of non-Jewish boys, and the Jewish girls’ scores exceeded those of their non-Jewish counterparts by a nearly equivalent degree (0.75 standard deviations); because boys substantially outperform girls on this test, the average score of the Jewish boys was in the top 1 percent of all test takers.

Averaging boys and girls together, it seems U.S. Jews outperform whites by 0.88 standard deviations (SD), implying the average math IQ of 113 (white norms).  Of course this is approximate because IQs are calculated with reference to sex-combined norms, which don’t necessarily correspond to the average within sex norms.  I’m also baffled as to how the average Jewish boy could possibly be in the top 1% of the sex combined sample (implying an astonishing math IQ of 135) if they are only 1 SD higher than white boys, unless the male SD is far higher than the sex-combined SD and/or the sex gap is absolutely colossal.

U.S. Jewish verbal IQ 109

Storfer writes that on verbal knowledge:

…Jewish boys’ scores averaged 0.7 standard deviations higher than those of the non-Jewish boys, and the Jewish girls outperformed their non-Jewish Caucasian counterparts by slightly more than half a standard deviation.

So averaging both sexes together, we see Jews are +0.6 SD on white norms, suggesting an average verbal IQ of 109.  That’s an incredibley impressive average for an entire U.S. ethnic group, but it’s nowhere near the verbal IQ of 125.6 claimed by Wikipedia.

U.S. Jewish processing speed IQ 100

Storfer writes that on measures of perceptual speed and accuracy, “…non-Jewish students were on par with the Jewish students in this test of visual-motor coordination under speeded conditions…”.  Note that psychometric processing speed should never be confused with chronometrics as the two measures have relatively low correlations.

U.S. Jewish grammar IQ 100

Storfer notes that non-Jews also matched Jews “on a test of grammar and language use.”

U.S. Jewish spatial IQ 93

Storfer notes that on reasoning with spatial forms, “…Jewish students scored significantly less well on this test (half a standard deviation lower than the non-Jewish sample)”  This implies an average spatial IQ of about 93.

U.S. Jewish memory IQ 96

Storfer notes that Jews “also performed poorly on a measure of short-term recall of sequences of nonword letter strings (scoring 0.3 standard deviations below the non-Jewish sample).”  This implies a memory IQ of 96.

U.S. JEWISH OVERALL IQ 102?

Given such a wide range of scores, it’s fascinating to ask what the overall Jewish IQ is.  Averaging across all six subtests, Jewish Americans outperformed U.S. whites by 0.12 SD.  Converting that into a composite IQ requires knowing the intercorrelations of the subtests, however on a comparable battery of tests (the WISC-R), someone who averages +0.12 SD across all the subtests has a composite score that is +0.13 SD, equating to a full-scale IQ of 102.

This is substantially lower than the U.S. Jewish mean of 110 commonly cited by Richard Lynn.  Of course it depends on the test. If one goes by tests like the SAT, which are all about verbal and math talent, Jews should easily score 110, but on a more comprehensive global sample of intellectual abilities,  it seems U.S. Jews are virtually tied with U.S. whites.

So it depends how you want to define intelligence.  I like to define it as the mental ability to adapt: to take whatever situation you’re in, and turn it around to your advantage.  For the last 100 years or so Jews have been incredibly adaptable, emerging as 36% of U.S. billionaires and 50% of media pundits, despite being only 2% of America.  However in the early 20th century, Jews were poor, and their intellectual achievements were scarce before the 19th century.

Why did Jews struggle to adapt for so long, and then suddenly start thriving economically and culturally?  Is this because Jews only recently evolved their high IQs as scholars Cochran and Harpending argued, or did their genes stay the same, while the environment suddenly began to favour their specific cognitive talents (verbal and math)? Spatial IQ might be useful for building a civilization, but once the buildings and technology is built by others, wordsmiths and math types rule the roost.

Ashkenazim IQ in Israel, 8 points lower than in the U.S.

But one reason it’s hard to believe that the mean U.S. Jewish IQ is 102 is that American Jews are perhaps the elite of worldwide Jewry. In the 2006 book Race Differences in Intelligence (pg 94), Richard Lynn claimed that Ashkenazim in the U.S. and Britain averaged 107-115, while Ashkenazim in Israel averaged 103 (eight points lower).  But if U.S. Jews average only 102 on a more complete measure of IQ, does that means Israeli Ashkenazim average only 94?

Although such figures would be consistent with the slightly smaller brain size that’s been found among Jews and Israel’s dependence on U.S. support, it is inconsistent with the incredible scientific achievements of Jews throughout the 20th century.

Those of us in the HBD blogosphere can sometimes get trapped in our little bubble, and lose touch with what mainstream science thinks about genes and intelligence.

When I was in high school (I’m now in my thirties) I asked a biology teacher if he thought intelligence was genetic and I will never ever forget his response.

“Is this loaded question?” he said with a laugh.

“No,” I replied.

“I believe certain intellectual abilities are genetic, like being good or bad at math, being able to grasp concepts, or having a good or bad memory.”

Teachers know intelligence is a hardwired physical property of the human head because they can see it.  I remember in my grade nine math, I overheard our teacher gushing that a South Asian girl had solved a certain geometry problem.

“Very impressive,” he said in his Quebec accent.  “There are only two people in this class who can answer that question.  You and Veemo” he said, pointing to the South Asian boy in the class.

“You either have the brain to do it or you don’t,” he said.

Although dark caucasoids tend to have IQs below the white mean, Canada got a loft of the best and brightest Third World immigrants (at least in those days) and it’s rumoured in HBD circles that some Indian castes have high IQs.

Meanwhile there was this pale skinned red head in the class who struggled so much to grasp the math.  Everyday most of the teacher’s time was monopolized personally tutoring her on the most basic of concepts and she always had this look of complete bewilderment.  It was like there was some physical biological genetic block, preventing the concepts from being grasped.

I’m reminded of this brilliant metaphor for intelligence by scholar Douglas Detterman:

 a traffic jam. All the modules of the brain have to go through a central hub, and the poorer the connection the lower the intelligence.

At the deepest level of analysis, mental abilities are PHYSICAL abilities.

Genetic abilities.

Several years later we would discover that the red-headed girl was pregnant and the father was black.  When she announced this a black classmate went hysterical, screaming:

“Noooooooo! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

A bunch of classmates held him back, racistly assuming he was depraved enough to attack her unborn baby.

He couldn’t stand the thought of her stupidity being passed down to another generation and because her child would be half black, people would blame its low IQ on black genes, not knowing it came from the pale Nordic white mother.

Murray is probably extremely bright given his large cranial capacity, enormous influence on society, high income, and elite education.  He looks a bit like Charles Darwin, and his reflective haughty speaking style adds to his learned air.

Picture of Darwin

A few years ago, Murray wrote a fascinating book (which I’ve partly read) about the new upper class called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, the theme of which is that today’s elite is different in kind than elites of past generations.  The biggest, and from an HBD perspective, most fascinating, difference between today’s elite and elites in the 1950s is that the former are Jews and the latter were WASPs, but that distinction is perhaps too taboo even for Murray, lest he lose the respect of Charles Krauthhammer and William Kristol, the latter of whom describes Murray as the best social scientist in America!

Although I find Murray an absolute pleasure to listen to, I struggle a bit to fully grasp his point.  Yes today’s elite is far more likely to have attended an elite school than in past generations, but that seems largely because today many people attend college, while in 1920, just attending any college at all was an elite education.  Seems to me like a simple case of credential inflation, and perhaps not the social revolution Murray implies.

But perhaps Murray’s most compelling point is that in cities like LA, San Francisco, and New York, there are entire geographic areas consisting of at least 100,000 people, where the average person is in the top 0.5% of all Americans in a composite of education and income.

I would estimate that people who average in the top 0.5% of attained socioeconomic status average in the top 5% in IQ (IQ 125 U.S. norms, IQ 123 white norms), and given regression to the mean, their kids might average IQ 115; U.S. norms (IQ 112 white norms).

Murray worries that having so much money, education and brains located in just a few geographic areas instead of being spread out all over the country like it used to be, is creating social classes much less mobile than they used to be, thus killing the American dream.

I think Murray is overestimating how much cognitive stratification has increased, partly because as I mentioned, elites have always been the most educated, it’s just that Ivy League degrees are the new college degrees.

But more importantly, Murray thinks people who’ve attended elite colleges are obscenely smart, having an average IQ of 135+ (U.S. norms) (see page 375, note 36 from his book), which is certainly true if measured by SAT scores, but not even close to true if measured by neutral test that they weren’t explicitly selected for. Murray vaguely acknowledged this issue when he co-wrote The Bell Curve (see page 694, note 32), but seems to greatly underestimate it.  This is not to deny that SAT might be a valid measure of IQ (I cite SAT scores all the time), but only when used to measure the IQs of people not largely defined by being selected by it, lest you get a selection bias effect where the test used to screen a group gives systematically higher scores than all other tests the group has taken.

But Murray does make a great point when he implies brains have far more market value (independent of education) than they used to, probably because society has become so complex.  I’ve noticed this just from perusing old issues of the Forbes 400.  The richest Americans used to be retail and oil tycoons.  Today they’re largely nerds, and the average self-made decabillionaire might have an absolutely stratospheric IQ of 151 (it’s unlikely the richest few Americans have ever before been that far above the cognitive average).

But if Murray is right that the college sorting system combined with market forces are turning America turning into an IQ caste system, with more and more assortative mating and stratification by IQ, and that this has been going on since the 1950s, compound one generation after another, then what we should find a secular increase in IQ variance, as the cognitive elite mates with each other, and so does the other extreme, making the cognitive gap between the brightest and dullest 10% higher each generation.  Of course the standard deviation (SD) on IQ tests is set at 15 in each birth cohort, but by giving a very old IQ test to a representative sample of kids today, we should expect to see an increased SD if Murray is right.

At first glance, it might sound strange to suggest that an IQ test given at age seven is more accurate than IQ test taken when you’re an adult and your brain is fully developed.  Indeed one of the most stunning discoveries of behavioral genetics is the doubling (yes doubling) of IQ’s heritability from childhood to older adulthood.  Of course the majority of these studies estimate heritability by comparing the correlation of MZ twins raised together with DZ twins raised together; a method that is vulnerable to criticism because of the equal environment assumption. But we have corroborating evidence (i.e. the zero correlation between the IQs of unrelated people raised together, the vanishing of IQ gains caused by adoption) that IQ does indeed become more genetic with age, at least within a given developed country.

But the rising heritability of IQ might be misleading.  We know from the Flynn effect that shared environment effects like schooling and socioeconomic status have HUGE effects on IQ (though perhaps not intelligence) but as scholars Dickens and Flynn brilliantly noted, within generations, these cultural effects get counted as genetic effects because people with certain genes spend more time in culturally stimulating environments.

So when we say IQ is 80% genetic by late adulthood, we’re not necessarily saying genes DIRECTLY cause IQ.  Rather genes cause you to engage in IQ increasing behavior. It’s a bit like saying weight is highly genetic, when what we really mean is diet and exercise choices are genetic (which cause weight). So adult IQ is not necessarily measuring who is the most biologically clever.  It could merely be measuring who got a PhD in English literature, thus artificially boosting their score on vocabulary beyond what it should have been.

In order to truly measure REAL intelligence (if you believe in such a construct), you need to return to childhood, where people haven’t had as much time to coach themselves for IQ type tests.  Of course children who come from rich and educated homes have an unfair advantage on IQ tests but because the gene-environment covariance is much smaller in kids than in adults, the effects of shared environment can be separated from the effects of genes by statistically adjusting for social class.

How do you adjust childhood IQ for social class?  Let’s say you have a seven year-old child from an upper class family who scores 120 on an IQ test (white norms) This implies he’s smarter than 90% of white Americans his age.  However most white kids his age were not raised in upper class homes.  Now you could compared him only to other white kids from his class, but that’s misleading because they’re a genetically elite sample (since they inherited not only their social class from their parents, but the genes that caused it).  What you need to do is compare him to a genetically random sample of white kids raised in upper class homes, and the closest we have to that are adoption studies.

After correcting for old norms and converting to white norms, the sixteen white adopted kids in the Minnesota transracial adoption study had an age seven IQ of 109 with an SD of 11.3, compared to the general U.S. white population which by definition has a mean IQ of 100 with an SD of 15.  What this shows is that if every white seven year-old in America was raised by the upper-class, the mean IQ would rise and the variability would shrink.  This makes sense because we’ve removed a huge chunk of the variance from IQ (cultural effects) leaving hopefully only direct biological effects (genes and biological environment).

So a white upper class seven-year old with an IQ of 120 is 0.97 SD above the mean if all white kids were raised in his social class.  Thus his social class adjusted IQ would be 115.

If being raised in an upper class home causes the  mean IQ to increase by 9 points (and the SD to drop to 11.3) we might guess that being raised in a lower class home causes the mean IQ to drop by 9 points.  So if all white kids were raised by low income high school dropouts, the IQ distribution at age seven might be 91 (SD 11.3).

So a seven-year-old from a low class family with an IQ of 120 is an astonishing 2.57 SD above the mean if all white kids were raised in such homes.  His social class adjusted IQ would be an incredible 138!

So here we see two kids with an identical IQ score, but by adjusting for social class, we find that one kid is actually 23 IQ points smarter than the other.  The kid from the lower class will probably get a good education and enter the upper class when he’s older, and by 40, his measured IQ might become as high as his age seven adjusted IQ.  By contrast the upper class kid might go down a bit in social class, causing his measured IQ at age 40 to also match his adjusted IQ at age seven.

On the other hand, if the upper class kid is especially curious, and the lower class kid has no interest in learning, the opposite might occur.  This is why IQ tests when measured in childhood, if properly adjusted, might be far better measures of real intelligence than measurements taken after kids are old enough to shape their own environments in ways we can’t adjust for.

I define conservatism as siding with the powerful over the powerless.  This may seem like a strange definition but it’s the single umbrella that covers the many forms conservatism takes.  For example, if you support  tax cuts for the rich, you are siding with the rich (who have power) over the poor (who lack power).  If you oppose feminism, you are siding with men (who have power) over women (who lack power).  If you oppose affirmative action, you are siding with non-blacks (who have power) over blacks (who lack power).

If you support the death penalty, you are siding with the government (who has power) over prisoners (who lack power).  If you support the Israeli occupation, you are siding with Jews (who have power) over Palestinians (who lack power).  If you support traditional values, you are siding with the establishment (who have power) over the counterculture (which lacks power).

Now studies (mostly done on whites) have found conservatives to be less intelligent than liberals.  This is perhaps because from a moral perspective, conservatism is the wrong answer because it promotes inequality, and low IQ folks, by definition, get the wrong answer to all questions that require reasoning, including those that have a moral component.

One paradox is that blacks tend to be more liberal than whites, despite having lower IQs.  This is perhaps because if you’re black, conservatism is not just wrong from a moral perspective, but also from the perspective of your self interests, and from the perspective of your ethnic genetic interests.  In other words, for a black to be a conservative, they need to be wrong in three different ways, while a white only needs to be morally wrong to be conservative.  This would explain why whites can be more conservative than blacks, despite having higher IQs.  It also predicts that those blacks who are conservative, will be especially low in IQ (on average).

However commenter Tenn begs to differ, writing:

I disagree for two reasons. 1) a black person voting conservative rejects the herd mentality of that ethnic group to vote democrat, demonstrating the ability to think independently.

The flat earth society also shows an ability to think independently, but I wouldn’t characterize them as smart.  Independent thinking may be a signing of critical objective analysis, or it could show an inability to learn from others, eccentricity, or just plain autism.

Tenn continues:

2) More importantly, liberal policies are not in fact in the genetic interest of the black community.

The liberal policies that you presume play to blacks advantage, such as welfare programs, do indeed work well in the short term. But over the long term they have crippled the black community. The best (or rather, worst) example is the aid to single mothers programs. Begun in the 50s and expanded in the 60s under LBJ, these programs systematically disincentivised marriage in the black community, which in turn led to greater rates of single motherhood. Kids raised without dads are far more likely to flunk out of school, get involved in crime, and bear fatherless kids themselves. Over the last 50 years, this has shattered the black community and is why, despite five decades of racial reconciliation, the black American is worse off today than he was at the end of Jim Crow.

It takes a sober mind to look past the short-term benefit of welfare aid and see the long-term disadvantages associated with dependency. Therefore, I’d wager that conservative blacks are some of the very smartest of their race.

At first glance, this sounds like an excellent argument, however according to blogger JayMan, shared environment has virtually zero effect on most life outcomes.  Hard to believe, I know.  So if the behavioral geneticists are right, kids raised in fatherless welfare homes should have roughly the same behavioral outcomes as kids raised in stable two-parent homes.  Of course these behavioral-genetic models may only apply within races and birth cohorts, not between them, making them a risky rebuttal to Tenn’s argument.

But Tenn’s argument is based on the assumption that LBJ’s Great Society programs of the 1960s crippled the black community, and I would argue that they have not.  While it’s true that blacks are more likely to be in poverty and jail than whites are, when you control for IQ, the black-white wage gap virtually vanishes, and the occupation gap actually reverses (see chapter 14 of The Bell Curve).  For example, a black with a high IQ has a much better chance of entering a high status occupation than a white with a high IQ.  President Obama being the most obvious example.

So although blacks are still enormously disadvantaged in American society, I would argue that they are much less disadvantaged then they would have been, had it not been for LBJ’s efforts.

One of the most fascinating correlates of IQ is conservatism.  I find this correlate fascinating because IQ tests justify anti-black racism (a conservative value) by showing that dark skinned people have lower IQs (on average) yet at the same time, IQ tests condemn racism by showing that anti-black racists also have low IQs.  So one can’t use IQ tests as a racist weapon without impugning their own likely IQ.

The other reason conservatism is such a fascinating correlate of IQ is that it’s one of the few variables that correlates positively with IQ between groups, but negatively with IQ within groups. That is, higher IQ races tend to be more conservative than low IQ races, yet within each race, I’ve argued that higher IQ people tend to be less conservative.  For someone who likes to statistically predict IQs from biodemographic variables, this is an incredibly useful property.

Why?  Because one of the biggest problems with predictive statistical models is multicollinearity. In other words, when trying to guess a person’s IQ based on many variables, you run into the problem of the variables being positively intercorrelated and thus not adding new information.  For example, if I know you’re homeless, I can guess with 90% certainty that  have a low IQ because 90% of America’s homeless are below 100 IQ (white norms).  Now if I also know you’re also high school dropout, the odds of you having a low IQ increase (because you now belong to two low IQ groups), but the odds don’t increase as much you’d think, because the mere fact that you’re homeless already suggests you’re probably uneducated.

On the other hand if I know you’re black, I might guess your IQ is below 100, but I can’t be certain, because millions of blacks have high IQs, but if I know you’re also conservative, the odds of you having a low IQ increase precipitously, because conservatism is not something I could have guessed from your blackness.  Just the opposite: blacks tend to be liberal, so conservatism predicts low IQ completely independently of blackness.  Statistically, one would need an especially low IQ to belong to belong to the two low IQ groups that have almost zero overlap.