Race, genes and IQ: Some observations



By J.J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)


An area of discussion that REALLY offends the Leftist equality dogma is the idea that differences in intelligence are inborn and that differences in average group intelligence may therefore be inborn too. I realize, in fact, that in even mentioning this subject, I am taking a risk. As it says here:

In the past, many of the the strongest taboos regarded sexual matters. One can read almost the entire body of Victorian literature without seeing any explicit mention of that activity which enables the human race to reproduce itself, and which is a major preoccupation of the majority of human beings. Today, one can freely discuss most sexual topics in public.

A major taboo in today's world concerns any mention of genetic differences between the races, even when it is made plain that the differences are statistical rather than universal. The politically correct view is that the only physical difference between Negroes and Caucasians lies in the color of their skin. There are, of course, many other statistical differences between the physical attributes of blacks and whites. (For example: eye color, hair color, amount of body hair, age at menarche, and frequency of fraternal twins.) But the most serious taboo regards any suggestion that the well-known racial difference in average IQs is even partly due to genetic factors.

As psychometrics is my academic specialty, however, I have always taken an interest in studies of IQ and I have even summarized some of the relevant evidence and issues in the academic literature. See: Ray, J.J. (1972) Are all races equally intelligent? Or: When is knowledge knowledge? J. Human Relations 20, 71-75. I will therefore not attempt to rehash here the mountain of evidence for large race and group differences in IQ but will rather look at some of the issues that have been raised in response to that evidence. For those who need convincing about what the evidence shows, however, there is a recent and comprehensive downloadable reference here and a PDF version of the same online here. There is a more condensed treatment of the evidence here.

And, perhaps surprisingly, what you will read there is no longer academically marginalized stuff at all. I don't quite know whether to be pleased or disappointed but it seems that mainstream psychology is catching up with what psychometricians such as myself have been saying for years: That IQ is highly general, highly central, highly hereditary and of overwhelming importance in determining people's life-chances. Even a few years ago any claim to that effect would be very marginal within psychology and would expose anyone making it to all sorts of nasty accusations.

But you can now read it all not in some obscure academic journal or some Rightist source but in a 2004 issue (vol. 86 no. 1) of the American Psychological Association's most widely-circulated journal -- the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Article after article there sets out the importance of IQ. And for social psychologists to be taking an interest in such evidence is really amazing. Psychometricians have known all that stuff for years. It is the social psychologists who have been most resistant to such ideas. I fear that I have suddenly become mainstream! I guess that even an organization as Leftist as the American Psychological Association has to come to terms with the evidence eventually. I would never have predicted it, though.

The madness of the 60s must be waning at long last. Before the 60s the central importance of IQ was uncontroversial introductory textbook stuff in psychology but the radical takeover of the universities from the 1960s onward and its inevitable accompanying baggage about "all men are equal" caused the whole idea of IQ to be marginalized for many years.

And a debate on "Slate" mentions some of the issues involved. Excerpt from Steven Pinker:

Judith Harris was among the first to call attention to the fact that we know much less than we think we do about "environmental" influences on personality and behavior. In The Nurture Assumption she points out that once you subtract out the effects of shared genes on correlations between parenting practices and children's outcomes (which few psychologists do), there isn't much evidence that parenting shapes children's personalities. It's not all in the genes, but the part that isn't from the genes isn't from parents either (siblings separated at birth end up no more different than siblings reared together, and adopted siblings end up not similar at all)

The big issue, of course, is how much of anyone's general intelligence is genetically determined. Leftists often go so far as to say: "None" but psychometricians and geneticists have been reporting results for nearly a century now that show IQ to be predominantly genetically inherited.

Faced with the evidence, Leftists sometimes try to discredit it by asking whether IQ tests really measure intelligence. And the answer of course is that everybody defines intelligence in their own way. I know some people who think that owning a bull-terrier dog is highly intelligent.

But if the concept of intelligence is not precise the concept of IQ is. IQ indexes 'g', which is general problem-solving ability. As Binet discovered over a century ago, it just so happens that people who are good at solving one sort of problem tend to be good at solving all sorts of other problems -- and it is that ability which IQ tests measure and are founded upon.

The Flynn Effect: One of the most interesting things to have turned up in recent years is the "Flynn effect" -- named after Prof. Jim Flynn, who is generally credited with being the first to note it (He wasn't. Richard Lynn was). What Flynn has rightly publicized at great length is that average scores on IQ tests have been rising steadily over the last century. The young people of today seem to be much smarter than their grandparents.

How do we explain that? The participants in the "Slate" debate did not think that they could explain it but I think I can if I put my sociologist's hat on (I also taught sociology for 12 years at a major Australian university):

I see the Flynn effect as just one example of the way modernization has improved various indices of people's physical health and well-being. People also now (for instance) live longer and grow taller than they did a century ago. And IQ is related to general physical functioning. If the body as a whole is working well, the brain should in general be working well too. The brain is after all just another part of the body. And the Terman & Oden (1947) "Genetic studies of genius" did show that high IQ children grew up to be taller, healthier, better adjusted etc.

Note also this academic article on IQ.

Abstract:

"Virtually all indicators of physical health and mental competence favor persons of higher socioeconomic status (SES). Conventional theories in the social sciences assume that the material disadvantages of lower SES are primarily responsible for these inequalities, either directly or by inducing psychosocial harm. These theories cannot explain, however, why the relation between SES and health outcomes (knowledge, behavior, morbidity, and mortality) is not only remarkably general across time, place, disease, and kind of health system but also so finely graded up the entire SES continuum. Epidemiologists have therefore posited, but not yet identified, a more general "fundamental cause" of health inequalities. This article concatenates various bodies of evidence to demonstrate that differences in general intelligence (g) may be that fundamental cause."

(From the very mainstream journal: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004, Vol. 86, No. 1, 174-199)

But why has modernization improved many health and wellbeing indices? The obvious factor is improved medical care generally but two areas of medical care may be particularly important: Mass vaccination campaigns and improved perinatal care. Many illnesses can have a damaging effect on the brain as well on the rest of the body so preventing major illnesses through vaccination should be generally beneficial. And by improved perinatal care I mean better obstetric services (including a now very high rate of caesarians) and more advice and support for new mothers to enable them to look after their babies better. But better nutrition, more widespread hygiene practices, piped water, efficient sewerage systems, basic public health measures, more stimulation by way of modern entertainment media and more years spent in the educational system could also of course play a role. The infant brain is known to develop more complex connections when subjected to a high level of stimulation and there is much in the modern world that is far more stimulating than the village or small-town life of yesteryear.

If I take my sociologist's hat off, however, and re-don my psychometrician's hat, there is another interesting explanation for the Flynn effect: It could be an "artifact" (not a real effect -- i.e. maybe real IQ did not rise at all). Why?

Because, although scores on all sorts of IQ subtests (puzzle categories) rose during the 20th century, they did not rise evenly. And the scores that rose least were for those problems that loaded most highly on 'g' (See e.g. here). The implication is that scores on a perfect measure of 'g' would not have risen at all.

So how do we explain that? There is no general agreement but the commonest explanation among psychometricians is that the rise in measured IQ reflects increasing test sophistication. Kids now spend MANY more years in the educational system than they once did and although there is probably little to show for that overall, kids DO get a lot of practice in passing tests of various sorts. And practice may not make perfect but it would be surprising if test-taking skills and strategies (such as guessing when you are not certain) were not improved by many years of extra practice at taking such tests.

But, whichever way you look at it, it is clear that the Flynn effect does not weaken the case for saying that IQ is substantially genetically determined. It simply suggests what are the circumstances for making the most of our genetic inheritance. And, sadly for those who hate the idea of genetic influences, the IQ increases have not closed the usual big gap between average black and white IQ levels. Negroes have forged ahead but whites have forged ahead too. And, if U.S. education results are any guide, the black-white IQ gap may even have widened in recent years.

Jewish IQ: I have had an interesting correspondence with Richard Lynn about Israeli IQ. He notes that Israelis of European origin (Ashkenazim) have an average IQ of about the European norm (100) whereas Israelis from the Arab lands (Sephardim) have the quite low average IQ of 88.

What does that say about Arab IQ? Seeing that those Jews who are racially mainly Arab ought to be at least no less intelligent than the parent Arab population, it suggests to me that Arabs in general are pretty low on intelligence.

The most interesting question, however, is why the Israeli Ashkenazim are not well ABOVE the European norm. As Rushton summarizes the recent American data: "The average IQ for African Americans was found to be lower than those for Latino, White, Asian, and Jewish Americans (85, 89, 103, 106, and 115, respectively)". So why do not Israeli Ashkenazis average 115 too? I am afraid that the obvious explanation is that it was mainly the foolish (idealistic?) Jews of European origin who have ended up in Israel. The smart ones are in New York.

Lynn points out, however, that the figure for Jews quoted by Rushton is based on limited sampling. Lynn believes that a figure of 108 is better substantiated. In statistician's terms, however, 108 is still quite a high figure (around half a standard deviation above the mean).

Update on Israeli IQ: Since I wrote the above the Israeli IQ picture has become a lot clearer. This article quotes IQ test results from Israeli army intakes -- and army intakes are a traditionally strong source of IQ norms, particularly where conscription prevails -- as it does in Israel. He points out that the Israeli army intakes average an IQ of 100 and relates that to the well-known fact that "Sephardim" (broadly defined) score much lower than that. The obvious deduction is that the Askenazi component of the intake is pulling the army average up so must themselves be scoring around 107 -- which is similar to what we find among Ashkenazim in NYC and elsewhere.

A second contribution comes from smart fraction theory. Israel shows enormously high competencies in all sorts of ways so the idea that their average IQ is unremarkable clashes with that. Smart fraction theory, however, shows that it is not the average IQ that matters to national wellbeing and achievement but rather the IQ of (say) the top 5% of the population. So in an ethnically mixed population, you could well have a very smart top 5% even though the average is low or unremarkable. And that describes Israel very well -- with the Ashkenazim providing that smart fraction.

The most comprehensive look at the black/white gap: But the really sensitive area for discussion as far as IQ is concerned is of course the IQ of American blacks. Since roughly the 1960s the long-standing scientific evidence that intelligence is highly heritable has come to be bitterly and arbitrarily dismissed by Leftists -- now that it is well-known that the same evidence also shows lower average scores for favoured Leftist groups such as blacks and people of lower socioeconomic status (Brand, 1996). The evidence of heritability is now simply denied as absurd or the standard of proof required for the evidence to be accepted is raised so high that no evidence would ever be sufficient (Ray, 1972a). The animosity to even the concept of intelligence has become so great that bans on intelligence testing in schools have been introduced in some American States.

But, if we are interested in the facts, the most authoritative book on the subject is undoubtedly the 2006 book: "Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis" by Richard Lynn. Review here.

The essential thing to note about this book is that it is NOT an expression of opinion. It is an attempt to do something far more difficult -- an attempt to gather together ALL the available scientific evidence on its topic. Let me give you a little personal anecdote to show you how hard that is.

Like Lynn, I am a psychometrician (specialist in psychological measurement) but my interest is in measuring attitudes and personality. And one of my interests is in how to measure ambition (what psychologists call achievement motivation). And roughly once a year somebody publishes a new set of questions designed to do that. But nobody ever seems to be aware of all the previous attempts in the same field. Typically, they seem to know of only two or three attempts to measure ambition in that way. On a couple of occasions, psychologists have published what they thought was a comprehensive survey of the literature in the field but the best of them could find (from memory) no more than 16 such articles in the academic literature. So a couple of years later I published a catalogue of such articles. And I found around 70 such!

How come? It is because the standard resources for searches of the academic literature are very imperfect. They miss heaps. You cannot instantly acquire a knowledge of the findings on a topic simply by doing a search. You have to be a specialist in the field who continually has an eye out for interesting findings and who systematically collects such findings over a period of many years. Richard Lynn is such a person in the field of IQ. Lynn's book is, in other words, about as authoritative as you can get. And in comparison with the measly 70 articles that I could find on my topic, Lynn records over 500 surveys of IQ.

So what the book tells us is not what Richard Lynn thinks. Lynn of course has his opinions and he does express them (he argues, for instance, that an evolutionary history of coping with cold winters selects for high intelligence) but that is not what the book is primarily about. What the book shows us is what the entire body of scientific research on the subject stretching back over the last 100 years or more has shown. And, as all psychometricians know, the findings are remarkably uniform. There is normally a huge gap between the average scores of African-origin populations and European-origin populations. Brilliant blacks do of course exist. The person whom I quote most on my blog is an African-American (Thomas Sowell). But brilliant (high IQ) people are simply much rarer in African-origin populations than in European ones. And all the studies of the genetics of IQ show its transmission to be overwhelmingly genetic.

Confronted with this now very old and very persistent finding, the usual response from those who feel challenged by it has been to dismiss IQ tests. They say that IQ scores mean nothing, do not measure intelligence and are of no importance generally. Lynn of course takes such claims seriously and devotes his opening chapter to such challenges. The essential thing that you need to know in evaluating such challenges is however very simple: IQ is a DISCOVERY, not a product of theory. The whole concept of IQ arose in the late 19th century when educationists began to notice a very strange thing: People who were good at solving one type of problem or puzzle also tended to be good at solving quite different puzzles and problems. There WAS such a thing as a general problem-solving ability. And it is for that reason that the scientific literature does not usually use the term "IQ". In the scientific literature, it is usually referred to as 'g' (short for "general factor"). And that is also why IQ tests normally are comprised of a whole series of quite different and apparently unrelated problems -- because problem-solving ability IS general, regardless of the sort of problem. And something as general as that is obviously of considerable importance.

I will not attempt here to survey comprehensively the various arguments that have been raised about the utility of IQ tests generally or about non-genetic explanations for the findings with Africans and others. That is what Lynn's book is for. Be assured, however, that all the possible objections are well known to experts in the field and have been extensively researched. It is a case of there being "nothing new under the sun" as far as theories of that kind are concerned and most such theories can be decisively rejected in the light of the research available. The one non-genetic but physical explanation for IQ differences that has stood up fairly well is nutrition. Good or bad nutrition in childhood can affect how well the brain develops and hence IQ. The brain is however pretty good at protecting itself so the differences observed due to nutrition are generally very small, much smaller than the black/white difference, for instance. The best diet in the world won't make a dummy into an Einstein nor will the best education or the best anything else. But if you want to get a doctorate it helps a lot if your father has one -- even if you don't live with him or know him.

The adoption test: Of particular interest on the subject of racial differences in IQ is an impressively scholarly article here by Glayde Whitney summarizing the results of the Minnesota study of transracial adoption.

The background of course is that researchers always find a huge gap (of about 15 IQ points) between the average IQ of American blacks and the average IQ of American whites. And American Leftists almost always attribute this to the poor upbringing that black children receive (and since that is not very complimentary to black mothers they then blame black "culture" -- and that, of course, is the fault of whites!).

So the obvious experiment to test the Leftist theory is to have black children adopted into white families and see what happens. Will they grow up with IQs at the same average level as whites? If upbringing is the key, they should. Some well-intentioned whites actually did just such an adoption program on a fairly large scale in Minnesota in the 1970s. The result years later? There was still that same old black/white gap in IQ when the children concerned had grown up. The implication is, as so many other studies suggest, that it is the African gene pool that is responsible for the lower black IQs.

There is an adoption study that focuses on income summarized here which gives similar results to studies of IQ. Excerpt:

The graph below is from a fascinating new paper, What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families?, by Bruce Sacerdote. Holt's International Children's Services places children, primarily Koreans, with families in the United States. Holt has an interesting proviso to their adoption contract, conditional on being accepted into the program, children are randomly assigned. Sacerdote has collected data from children who were adopted between 1970-1980, and thus who today are in their mid 20's or 30's, and their adoptive parents.

The graph shows how parent income at the time of adoption relates to child income for the adopted and "biological" (non-adopted) children. The income of biological children increases strongly with parental income but the income of adoptive children is flat in parent income.

In other words, as with IQ, family environment had NO EFFECT on achievement. Kids adopted into high income households did no better than kids adopted into low income households. Only genetics made a difference: Very contrary to lots of popular assumptions and a bitter pill for Leftists to swallow but those are the facts. And, given that the measurement of income is a lot less controversial than the measurement of IQ, the concordance between income and IQ studies could well be seen as particularly impressive.

The DNA speaks: Under the influence of Leftist political correctness, a lot of biological scientists have in the past pooh-poohed the reality of race and said that all races are more or less the same genetically. It is interesting, therefore, that DNA research establishes what every honest observer has known all along -- that there are different races, that they are genetically different and that the differences in the genes correspond to how people generally group the races. Excerpt:

Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas. The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews. The researchers did not analyze genes but rather short segments of DNA known as markers, similar to those used in DNA fingerprinting tests, that have no apparent function in the body. "What this study says is that if you look at enough markers you can identify the geographic region a person comes from," said Dr. Kenneth Kidd of Yale University, an author of the report.

The issue of race and ethnicity has forced itself to biomedical researchers' attention because human populations have different patterns of disease, and advances in decoding DNA have made it possible to try and correlate disease with genetics. The study, published today in Science, finds that "self-reported population ancestry likely provides a suitable proxy for genetic ancestry." In other words, someone saying he is of European ancestry will have genetic similarities to other Europeans.

The new result is based on blood samples gathered from around the world as part of the Human Genome Diversity Project, though on a much less ambitious scale than originally intended. Dr. Feldman and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of more than 1,000 people at some 400 markers. Because the sites have no particular function, they are free to change or mutate without harming the individual, and can become quite different over the generations.

There is a later report of genetic research with similar conclusions here

Motivation: There is an excellent summary article here on the old chestnut that blacks do poorly on IQ tests because of lack of motivation. The truth is that blacks try harder: When given unlimited time to do tests, blacks tend to stick at it longer. All that seems to be forgotten in the latest bout of weird reasoning, however. Leftist psychologists now say that "Stereotype threat" causes the low scores. The claim is that blacks try less because they fear that their poor results will reflect badly on blacks generally. One would have thought that such fears would cause them to try HARDER but all that is brushed aside. The article concludes: "Lack of evidence and grave methodological defects haven't prevented the stereotype threat industry from taking off. Distortions are now pervasive."

National differences: The book on national differences in IQ by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (IQ and The Wealth of Nations) is finally getting a bit of attention and their findings have also now been used academically (Voracek M. "National intelligence and suicide rate: an ecological study of 85 countries". Personality & Individual Differences, 2003). Lynn & Vanhanen show, of course, that national average IQs vary greatly and that the higher IQ nations are much more likely to be economically prosperous. The lowest averages are in Africa.

As my contribution to the discussion, I have uploaded to the web an article by Nathaniel Weyl which was written nearly 40 years ago and which is now very little known (though it is referred to here). It reports a large and comprehensive body of data on white Rhodesians -- as they then were. They were one of the most intelligent Caucasian populations ever -- now of course thoroughly dispersed and destroyed by the Mugabe regime. Weyl explains the selective pressures that produced such high IQs among whites in what is now Zimbabwe. Details here or here

Nutrition and IQ: It is an old claim that blacks have lower IQs because of their poor nutrition. Apparently fried chicken is really bad for you! Since American blacks have very low average IQs despite America's "obesity (overnutrition) epidemic" (in which blacks share), that has always been a rather desperate claim but there is a potential grain of truth in it. The effect of nutrition on IQ seems to be rather variable. The famous Dutch famine study showed that children born into famine conditions can have higher average IQs because all the weaker children die off. Under more normal conditions, however, about 5 IQ points can be added to average IQ by optimal nutrition (a full range of vitamins and minerals at all times). A 2004 United Nations report (about the "Micronutrient Initiative") has confirmed that -- acknowledging that the people of poor countries (mostly black) are less intelligent!

"But the most disturbing gap between countries with good and poor nutrition is in intelligence, said Cutberto Garza, a Cornell University professor who also leads the nutrition program at United Nations University. "A difference of five to seven IQ points doesn't sound like a lot, but you have to look at the tail ends of the (statistical) curve". *

The report, however, glides past the magnitude of the problem. It states, correctly, that about 5 IQ points can be added by optimal nutrition but neglects to mention that the gap between (say) some European and (say) some African populations is more than 20 points on average!


S.J. Gould: In their hatred of genetics and IQ, something Leftists cling to is a superficially clever book called The Mismeasure of Man by that smug old Leftist propagandist, Stephen Jay Gould. It is a book that would deceive no-one who knew anything about the field and totally misrepresents those who do but as more and more data on genetics and brain function emerge, the sheer stupidity of the work become more and more obvious. Here is a brief summary of Gould's lies and evasions and what the latest brain findings show. An older and more extensive demolition of Gould is here

The Bell Curve: The best known work on group differences in IQ is of course The Bell Curve by Murray & Herrnstein -- which has come under a huge amount of unscholarly attack. Murray himself commented in reply:

"I do not know how to explain the extraordinary discrepancy between what The Bell Curve actually says about race and what most commentators have said that the book says, except as the result of some sort of psychological projection onto our text. Other factors are at work as well. Michael Novak (who has written favorably about The Bell Curve) and Thomas Sowell (who has his criticisms of the book) have pointed out in similar terms that the Left has invested everything in a few core beliefs about society as the cause of problems, government as the solution, and the manipulability of the environment for reaching the goal of equality. For the Left, as Novak puts it, The Bell Curve's "message cannot be true, because much more is at stake than a particular set of arguments from psychological science. A this-worldly eschatological hope is at stake. The sin attributed to Herrnstein and Murray is theological: they destroy hope".

Sternberg's "triarchic" theory: One of the people best known among psychologists for disparaging the importance of IQ ('g' or general problem-solving ability) is Robert Sternberg. He is much less of a lightweight than Gould and his ilk and does acknowledge the reality of IQ but says that it is only one of three types of important mental functioning that can be measured.

But the other two he puts forward are pretty desperate proposals. The second one he himself summarizes as "street smarts" so is nothing more than knowledge of a particular culture or environment -- and nobody has ever disputed that you need both intelligence and knowledge to solve problems well. So while knowledge is important, to refer to it as an "ability" is evasive. And his third alternative is creativity -- which again seems reasonable at first. The problem with creativity, however, is that there appears to be no such thing. Different indices of creativity often fail to correlate with one another. You can be creative in one field and not in another. I myself, for instance, am highly creative at scientific writing or I would not have 250+ academic papers in print -- but I would not be able to write a novel for nuts. So although problem-solving ability is demonstrably general -- which is why we have the concept of IQ -- creativity is not. So Sternberg is still left with IQ as the single useful generalization about abilities.

And the criticisms of his work simply seem to have driven Sternberg to retreat further and further into dishonesty. He simply ignores whole bodies of data -- including things he had acknowledged in his own earlier work -- as Linda Gottfredson (PDF) points out.

The failure to hide IQ differences: As I mentioned earlier, the black-white gap in average IQ was once standard introductory psychology textbook stuff but heroic efforts have been made since the 60's to hide or explain away the difference. It is impressive, therefore, that confirmatory studies are still coming out. A huge and very careful study of mental abilities came out recently from Johns Hopkins University under the title: "Disparities in Cognitive Functioning by Race/Ethnicity in the Baltimore Memory Study". Blacks were found to have much lower scores than whites across the board. As the study was primarily of memory, the tests used were not all high loaders on 'g' (general intelligence or 'IQ') so the racial difference varied a fair bit from test to test but it was always there. The amusing thing was that the racial difference persisted depite heroic attempts by the researchers to remove it. They even did some things that an Australian would call "shonky" (con-men and frauds are "shonks"). For example, they removed the effect of social class variables such as wealth on their results. In other words, the scores of poorer people were "adjusted" upward. But wealth is a product of IQ! Smarter people get richer! And this particular study was of 50-70 year old people so any effect of intelligence on wealth would have had plenty of time to show up. If the researchers had used parental status indicators only it might have been more defensible. So the fact that the racial difference emerged despite such blatant attempts to mask it is testimony to how strong the difference is.

Policy implications? The only policy implication that I see as flowing from an acceptance of low average black IQ in a decent society is that we may often have to treat some blacks as we do any other handicapped people -- kindly. On the other hand, a policy founded on the claim that the differences do not exist -- as "Affimative action" is -- must in the circumstances be a cruel hoax that imposes unrealistic expectations on many blacks, discriminates unfairly against many individual whites and discredits the achievements of the many blacks who can achieve well under their own steam.

Steve Sailer summarizes the policy implications well. He says that there is no overall equality or inequality between blacks and whites, only differences, and deplores the Leftist habit of denying that any differences exist:

We must finally take seriously the value of diversity. The first step is to drop the fashionable but Orwellian habit of saying "diversity" when we mean "sameness." To pretend that all groups have all the same talents to all the same degree is the antithesis of truly celebrating diversity.

But do Leftists really believe their claim that the black and white populations are inherently equal intellectually? If so, why is the gross discrimination in favour of blacks that is euphemistically called "affirmative action" seen as necessary? Surely if Leftists saw blacks as genetically equal, all that would be needed would be to ensure that blacks had equal opportunity (equal access to education etc.) to ensure equality of outcomes. Instead, however, Leftists see it as necessary to enforce equal outcomes by the weight of the law. Their deeds reveal that Leftists obviously do NOT really believe that blacks are inherently equal to whites.

This Leftist hypocrisy would also seem to show in the current Leftist doctrine that preferential admission of blacks to universities and colleges is needed to ensure "diversity" on US campuses. No testing of the "diversity" of thinking in the relevant candidates for admission is done. Just their blackness seems to suffice as evidence that they will add "diversity". Their backgrounds could be thoroughly middle class but there is still that unshakable confidence that they will add "diversity". This implies that blacks think differently from whites just because they are black. That may well be true but acting on such a principle seems to betray precisely that belief in inborn racial differences which Leftists normally condemn vehemently in others.

CODA

IQ is just the start of the differences that can be genetically inherited and racially differentiated. Note for instance the way the anti-heredity psychologist Jerome Kagan was dragged kicking and screaming by his own findings into acknowledging inborn personality differences between Han Chinese and white children.


Addendum

The Kane & Brand article mentioned above is now subscriber-only so I reproduce below the passage relevant to S.J. Gould:

Perhaps the most cited critic of g was the late Harvard biologist, Stephen J. Gould. His 1981 text, The Mismeasure of Man, is still widely known for its strident condemnation of g, as well as its personal attacks on many researchers who choose to study a general factor of intelligence.  The book was well received by the general public, winning the National Book Critics Circle award.  In 1996, it was re-issued as a refutation to The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray 1994).

The pivotal argument of The Mismeasure of Man is that researchers investigating individual differences in intelligence have intentionally and misleadingly reified Spearman's g. With immodest effrontery, Gould inaccurately paraphrased many scientists, claiming they view g as a "quantifiable thing" and a "single scaleable, fundamental thing residing in the human brain" (p. 259).  Gould claimed this error of reification resulted in the "hegemony of g" (p. 234) as an instrument of bias and discrimination.  In his own words:

This book is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups-races, classes, or sexes-are innately inferior and deserve their status. (p. 25)

However, even a cursory reading of Spearman (1904), Burt (1940), and Jensen (1982) confirms that no expert in the field of factor analysis or intelligence has ever considered g a "thing" to be found in the human body. Fifty years before the first publication of The Mismeasure of Man, Burt (1940) addressed the error of reification in his text, The Factors of the Mind.  From a chapter entitled, "The Metaphysical Status of Mental Factors," Burt warned that "to speak of factors of the mind as if they existed in the same way as, but in addition to, the physical organs and tissues of the body and their properties, is assuredly indefensible and misleading" (p. 218). In a direct response to Gould's misquotations, Jensen (1982) stated:

In the same chapter from which Gould is supposedly paraphrasing my views, I stated unequivocally that intelligence is not an entity, but a theoretical construct.which is intended to explain an observable phenomenon, normally the positive intercorrelations among all mental tests, regardless of their apparently great variety. (p. 126)

Therefore, Gould himself seems to have been the source of the error of reification, rather than Burt, Spearman, or Jensen. The funny thing is that Gould was quite happy to accept other products of factor analysis, the Thurstone-type multiple factors: it was only g that seemed to Gould to involve grievous philosophical error.

A growing body of research suggests that the provenance of g may lie not in factor analysis of mental test items, but in genetic and physical variables and in more "basic" psychological processes.  Kranzler and Jensen (1991) were able to account for 54% of the variance in IQ scores using a battery of reaction time (RT) tasks. Vernon (1990) summarized a number of studies in which measures of g were regressed on subjects' RTs derived from multiple elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs). Various combinations of RT variables accounted for 22% to 56% of the variance in participants' IQ scores. Eysenck and Barrett (1985) found a rank order correlation of 0.93 between the g loadings of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and the subtests' correlations with a composite measure of the average evoked potential (AEP). Similarly, Haier (1993) reported an average correlation of -0.79 between WAIS subtest performance and glucose metabolic rate (GMR).


* CORRIGENDUM

I referred above to a micrionutrient study conducted in Africa.  I was however rather abbreviated in what I said.  I referred to the  effects of iron supplementation but ignored the iodine issue.  This was because lack of iodine causes cretinism and it seemed obvious to me that no cretin born in Africa would live long enough to complete an IQ test.  Prof. Garza obviously had a similar view
 

Rawls: Theory rampant


If all men are equal, why are huge efforts to make them equal required?

By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)

Leftists do of course on occasions attempt to give their fundamentally confused ideas about equality some substance and the work of philosopher John Rawls is best know in that connection. There is a fundamental conservative objection to the Rawls edifice but I will start with some other points first.

For starters: Rawls is a good example of what computer people call GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). If you start out with crazy assumptions you get crazy conclusions and in Rawls's case Leftist assumptions inevitably led to Leftist conclusions. Like all Leftists, he was unable to deal with the complexities of the real world so he invented an imaginary and vastly oversimplified one wherein only Leftist criteria for a good world are even mentioned. So his basic proposition can be summarized simply: If I know nothing about myself and nothing about the world I am about to enter other than its degree of social and economic equality what sort of world would I choose? And the expected answer is? Wait for it! A world wherein everyone is as equal as possible. The compulsory Leftist conclusion has been reached! Good job, Johnny. So now let's make the real world as equal as possible.

But look at how crazy his criterion is. What if the "equal" world I chose turned out to be starving? Would it not make more sense to choose an affluent world, for instance? Or a world in which modern medicine and dentistry were available? Rawls of course would claim that he is speaking ceteris paribus but what if other factors CANNOT be held constant? What if very equal worlds turn out to be in general poorer or more tyrannical? -- as indeed seems generally to be the case.

But aside from that, we just do not live in the imaginary Rawlsian world. We DO know things about the world we are in and we DO know things about ourselves and that does and should influence the type of world we prefer. And even if we did not, it is one big assumption to say that we would choose an equal world. Gambling is a very human thing to do and it seems to me highly likely that many people would choose a world of IN-equality precisely because that would give them a chance of doing well and rising above the herd. And is not that in fact precisely the American Dream -- to start out at the bottom of the heap and by hard work and good thinking to rise to the top? Real people everywhere would like to get to good old unequal America so that they can have a chance of becoming rich. But none of the unreal people in the unreal world of John Rawls do. Funny, that.

Rawls is simply irrelevant. He is popular in academe only because his conclusions are Leftist.

When Rawls died in 2002 there were various comments about his opus on the blog of The Brothers Judd (post of Nov. 29th., 2002) and I particularly liked this comment put up on the Judd blog by Lou Gots:

I spent an interesting semester at Penn disecting A Theory of Justice in a course taught by Bruce Ackerman (!!!) A central part of Rawls' theory (and Ackerman's exegesis thereof) is the notion the the goods of the earth are "manna"--they just drop out of the sky. Thus social justice concerns itself only with distribution and not with production, because when you get up in the morning the manna will be there. Thus Rawls and his disciples make as much sense as a Melanesian cargo cult. We know from human experience that irrational systems fail because they are unproductive. Thanks to Rawls, many of our intellectuals start with the premise that productivity does not matter. As to the "veil of ignorance," it is Rawls' way of getting around this. Since no one is supposed to know that he will not be in the "worst-off class," the just society will always favor the worst-off. This is a sick notion, as such a society will tend ever downward, becoming less and less productive, until all are "worst off." On the contrary, I Would say that the poor in a free society (tempered by charity) are better off than they would be in an unfree. Rawls wrote that envy should not be a factor in these decisions, so relative deprivation should be irrelevant. Furthermore, I would hold that even if the veil of ignorance were more than just more cargo cult nonsense, a rational person would desire freedom because even if he were to be born to the "worst-off class" his wealth and his opportunities to improve his lot would be maximized. De mortuiis, etc., eternal rest and perpetual light, but the works are still meaningless socialist blather.

To expand a little on the first point of that comment, a major flaw in Rawls' theory is that people need to be rewarded for working harder. And since not everybody works equally hard all the time the outcome will be inequality. But why do they need to be rewarded for working harder? They need to be so rewarded both because that is what instinctive morality (which Rawls regards as authoritative) indicates and also because we know as an empirical fact that societies without that incentive (as in the former Soviet empire) are deeply impoverished and heavily reliant on coercion and tyranny to get anything done at all -- and nobody is (at least overtly) advocating either tyranny or general societal impoverishment. So the Rawls theoretical edifice ultimately undermines itself. (More on that in the amusingly-titled article If You Don't Eat Your Meat, You Can't Have Any Pudding by Micha Ghertner).

That leads me to the fundamental conservative objection to Rawls: It is just another arbitrary, dreamed-up theoretical edifice -- as is Marxism. ANY theoretical edifice is of only passing interest to conservatives. Conservatives go by what works and systems of enforced equality are invariably associated with tyranny and poverty. It is theoretical edifices in general that are the problem -- as Burke pointed out long ago. Reality is just too complex to be fruitfully described by any such system. And trying to force the real variety and complexity of humanity into any such systemic straitjacket -- as in the case of Communism -- has a history of failure, usually including mass-murder.

It can of course be argued (rather speciously) that the Rawlsian system of ideas is a moral or ethical one rather than a social or political one but that argument would seem to bring its protagonist into rather amusing conflict with another passionately held Leftist claim -- that there is in fact no such thing as right and wrong! Not an easy hole to climb out of! Conservatives, however, DO believe in right and wrong and a conservative account of morality which makes no mystical or unworldly assumptions can be found here.

Finally, American Nobel-winning economist Edmund Phelps lands a rather crushing blow on Rawlsian thinking by pointing out that it is concerned only with money. And, as Leftists would normally keenly argue, money is not everything. Phelps suggests that self-fulfilment is more important. What Leftist these days would argue with that? Yet, as Phelps shows, as soon as we admit self-fulfilment into the picture, the Rawlsian system justifies capitalism, not socialism! A few quotes below give the skeleton of his argument:

"The American and Continental systems are not operationally equivalent, contrary to some neoclassical views. Let me use the word "dynamism" to mean the fertility of the economy in coming up with innovative ideas believed to be technologically feasible and profitable--in short, the economy's talent at commercially successful innovating. In this terminology, the free enterprise system is structured in such a way that it facilitates and stimulates dynamism while the Continental system impedes and discourages it.....

I would, however, stress a benefit of dynamism that I believe to be far more important. Instituting a high level of dynamism, so that the economy is fired by the new ideas of entrepreneurs, serves to transform the workplace--in the firms developing an innovation and also in the firms dealing with the innovations. The challenges that arise in developing a new idea and in gaining its acceptance in the marketplace provide the workforce with high levels of mental stimulation, problem-solving, employee-engagement and, thus, personal growth. Note that an individual working alone cannot easily create the continual arrival of new challenges. It "takes a village," preferably the whole society....

Suppose the wage of the lowest- paid workers was foreseen to be reduced over the entire future by innovations conceived by entrepreneurs. Are those whose dream is to find personal development through a career as an entrepreneur not to be permitted to pursue their dream? To respond, we have to go outside Rawls's classical model, in which work is all about money. In an economy in which entrepreneurs are forbidden to pursue their self-realization, they have the bottom scores in self-realization--no matter if they take paying jobs instead--and that counts whether or not they were born the "least advantaged." So even if their activities did come at the expense of the lowest-paid workers, Rawlsian justice in this extended sense requires that entrepreneurs be accorded enough opportunity to raise their self-realization score up to the level of the lowest-paid workers--and higher, of course, if workers are not damaged by support for entrepreneurship

Phelps does of course at that point tend to lead us towards happiness studies -- which I treat elsewhere


FINIS

BOOK REVIEW


Since Richard Lynn very kindly sent me a copy of his latest book, I thought it would be a good idea to do a review of it. I have had various reviews of academic books published before. I therefore prepared the review below and submitted it to the mainstream Australian e-zine Online Opinion. I have had one previous article published there. Although initially interested in the idea of such a review, they rejected the review when they actually saw it -- on the vaguest of grounds. That the whole topic suffers from severe political incorrectness is, however, the obvious real reason for the rejection. In the age of the internet, however, such editorial filtering of the information available does not work. So I am posting the review here and in a couple of other places

"Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis" by Richard Lynn. Washington Summit Publishers, Augusta, Georgia, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1-59368-021-3

Review by John Ray (2006)

Maverick academics such as Frank Ellis in Britain and Andrew Fraser in Australia have recently attracted some press with their public declarations that they believe that there are differences in average IQ between whites and blacks. So this book is a timely one.

The essential thing to note about this book is that it is NOT an expression of opinion. It is an attempt to do something far more difficult -- an attempt to gather together ALL the available scientific evidence on its topic. Let me give you a little personal anecdote to show you how hard that is.

Like Lynn, I am a psychometrician (specialist in psychological measurement) but my interest is in measuring attitudes and personality. And one of my interests is in how to measure ambition (what psychologists call achievement motivation). And roughly once a year somebody publishes a new set of questions designed to do that. But nobody ever seems to be aware of all the previous attempts in the same field. Typically, they seem to know of only two or three attempts to measure ambition in that way. On a couple of occasions, psychologists have published what they thought was a comprehensive survey of the literature in the field but the best of them could find (from memory) no more than 16 such articles in the academic literature. So a couple of years later I published a catalogue of such articles. And I found around 70 such!

How come? It is because the standard resources for searches of the academic literature are very imperfect. They miss heaps. You cannot instantly acquire a knowledge of the findings on a topic simply by doing a search. You have to be a specialist in the field who continually has an eye out for interesting findings and who systematically collects such findings over a period of many years. Richard Lynn is such a person in the field of IQ. Lynn's book is, in other words, about as authoritative as you can get. And in comparison with the measly 70 articles that I could find on my topic, Lynn records over 500 surveys of IQ.

So what the book tells us is not what Richard Lynn thinks. Lynn of course has his opinions and he does express them (he argues, for instance, that an evolutionary history of coping with cold winters selects for high intelligence) but that is not what the book is primarily about. What the book shows us is what the entire body of scientific research on the subject stretching back over the last 100 years or more has shown. And, as all psychometricians know, the findings are remarkably uniform. There is normally a huge gap between the average scores of African-origin populations and European-origin populations. Brilliant blacks do of course exist. The person whom I quote most on my blog is an African-American (Thomas Sowell). But brilliant (high IQ) people are simply much rarer in African-origin populations than in European ones. And all the studies of the genetics of IQ show its transmission to be overwhelmingly genetic.

Confronted with this now very old and very persistent finding, the usual response from those who feel challenged by it has been to dismiss IQ tests. They say that IQ scores mean nothing, do not measure intelligence and are of no importance generally. Lynn of course takes such claims seriously and devotes his opening chapter to such challenges. The essential thing that you need to know in evaluating such challenges is however very simple: IQ is a DISCOVERY, not a product of theory. The whole concept of IQ arose in the late 19th century when educationists began to notice a very strange thing: People who were good at solving one type of problem or puzzle also tended to be good at solving quite different puzzles and problems. There WAS such a thing as a general problem-solving ability. And it is for that reason that the scientific literature does not usually use the term "IQ". In the scientific literature, it is usually referred to as 'g' (short for "general factor"). And that is also why IQ tests normally are comprised of a whole series of quite different and apparently unrelated problems -- because problem-solving ability IS general, regardless of the sort of problem. And something as general as that is obviously of considerable importance.

I will not go on here to look at all the various arguments that have been raised about the utility of IQ tests generally or about non-genetic explanations for the findings with Africans and others. That is what Lynn's book is for. Be assured, however, that all the possible objections are well known to experts in the field and have been extensively researched. It is a case of there being "nothing new under the sun" as far as theories of that kind are concerned and most such theories can be decisively rejected in the light of the research available. The one non-genetic but physical explanation for IQ differences that has stood up fairly well is nutrition. Good or bad nutrition in childhood can affect how well the brain develops and hence IQ. The brain is however pretty good at protecting itself so the differences observed due to nutrition are generally very small, much smaller than the black/white difference, for instance. The best diet in the world won't make a dummy into an Einstein nor will the best education or the best anything else. But if you want to get a doctorate it helps a lot if your father has one -- even if you don't live with him or know him.

Perhaps in closing I should mention the one aspect of Lynn's work which has attracted a lot of press. A reporter from "The Times" of London had a look at the book and from it extracted what he claimed were the average IQ scores for various European countries. And, to much hilarity, Germany was shown as having an average score of 107 compared to Britain's 100. German psychometricians (such as Volkmar Weiss) knew of course that this was a nonsense and there is certainly nothing to that effect in Lynn's book. If you take either the mean or the median scores from the results for Germany presented in Lynn's book you get an unremarkable average of about 99.

What happened was that there was one outlying result from one German survey that showed a mean of 107 and the reporter gleefully seized on that as if it were typical of what is found in Germany generally. Which all goes to reinforce the importance of Lynn's book. You cannot rely on just one survey or one result. You have to have a collection of many findings on any given topic or question before you can confidently make generalizations. And no book does a better job of providing you with such data as "Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis".

Dr. John Ray was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of NSW until his retirement in 1983

FINIS

Peak oil theory and the ethanol alternative to gasoline



By John Ray

The recent big rise in crude oil prices and hence gasoline prices has really sharpened what has long been a concern across the political spectrum -- the fear that oil is running out. There are probably even libertarians who share that fear. The main concern for libertarians however is that the idea seems to be a fertile source of schemes for government intervention in all our lives -- from making air travel more expensive to herding us all onto buses instead of cars. Any oil supply problems are in fact greatly exaggerated but here I simply want to show why ethanol is in any case a viable alternative to gasoline.

There is an article here that surveys the arguments for and against using ethanol (industrial alcohol) as a motor spirit from a Greenie viewpoint. But what he says is largely irrelevant to how ethanol would be used if its usage was market-driven rather than Greenie driven. Under free trade and under conditions of higher oil prices, ethanol could be produced much more efficiently than it is. For a start, the basic feedstock used for production of ethanol in the USA is sugar extracted from corn. This is lunacy in economic terms as free-market sugar produced from sugarcane is only about a quarter of the price that Americans are forced to pay for their sugar by their government's trade controls. There would be no corn-sugar industry under free trade.

And traditional sugar-mills in countries like Australia and Brazil are powered almost entirely by burning bagasse -- the pulpy waste that is left over when the cane is crushed to extract the sugar-laden juice. So little or no fossil fuel is needed to drive the process of sugar production. The sugarcane in effect crushes itself. And after the sugar is produced, little bugs (yeast) turn it into alcohol. That's how the alcohol in beer gets there. And the bugs are not powered by fossil fuel either. They do it for us for free, all by their little selves -- as they have been doing for thousands of years. You could in fact feed the cane-juice fresh out of the crusher directly to the bugs if you wanted to be really energy-efficient about it. There is no need for an intermediate stage of sugar production. And you could get good hooch out of doing that as well. If I remember rightly, that is how rum originated

I should add that sugar production (and hence ethanol production) could be ramped up very quickly. Most sugar-producing countries are so restrained by EU, U.S. and Japanese import policy that they are producing way below capacity. Australia, for instance, could double its production within a year just by being allowed to. The crushing mills are so under-used these days that a lot have shut up shop. And there is a huge area in Western Australia (the Ord) that is suitable for cane that could be brought into production as soon as mills were built. It takes only one year for a cane crop to go from planting to maturity. .

Some background

Sugarcane is a huge grass that grows like mad in the tropics and somewhat less insanely in the subtropics. It is thus growable on a huge slice of the earth's surface. One year after planting it has huge stems which are absolutely full of sugary juice. And the technology for getting the juice out is prehistoric. You just crush the stems and the juice flows out. In most of the tropics (though not in Australia) there are vendors who will sell you for a few rupees (or whatever the local currency is) a fresh drink of very palatable cane juice which they produce by feeding cane stems through a little hand-powered crusher. So a sugar mill is a very simple thing. The only complexity arises out of the need to extract granular sugar out of the juice.

If however cane-sugar were to be used solely for ethanol production, the sugar-production step would not be needed. You could just feed the freshly-crushed juice to yeast bugs in a nice warm environment (and the tropics ARE warm) and they will excrete alcohol as a waste product of their metabolism. And since alcohol has a different specific gravity from water, it is very easily separated out. And that alcohol can go straight into an internal combustion motor and will make the motor roar like a lion -- which is why racing cars use it.

And in Brazil they do precisely that: the cane goes straight from the fields to a distillery which crushes out the juice and then ferments it. So I am not talking blue sky there.

The only reason ethanol is not widely used is cost. When crude oil was $30 a barrel, ethanol cost about twice as much to produce as gasoline. All those cane-farmers had to be paid. But crude is now around $60 a barrel so if that price stays there fairly permanently, I suspect that you are going to see ethanol-compliant engines going into mass-production worldwide. They already have them in Brazil, of course. Depending on your car, you drive up to either the ethanol or the gasoline pump. There ARE a few adjustments needed to run a car on pure ethanol for any length of time -- mostly to do with corrosion control if I remember rightly.

Because they are such a big producer of cane-sugar, Brazil long ago set in train moves to run everything on ethanol rather than gasoline. They were rightly criticized at the time for making motor fuel more costly than it needed to be (when crude was at $30 a barrel) but they seem to be having the last laugh now.

And producing ethanol from cane is extremely "sustainable". It needs no complex inputs or technology and cane can be grown on the same soil year after year as long as there is a suitable input of nitrates. And the nitrates can come either from superphosphate application or from rotating the crop with legumes (beans and peas). Australian sugar farmers do both -- and have been doing so for around 150 years. So there are no mysteries or significant problems with it.

More on the Brazilian experience

Brazil is not these days as keen on ethanol as it once was as they have now discovered oil -- which is cheaper than ethanol -- but their big experiment with ethanol does show how it would work for everybody if that became needful. I reproduce below some extracts from an excellent summary in Wikipedia -- which tells you all you never wanted to know about ethanol. The excerpt gives some real-life facts on how gasoline could over time be replaced by ethanol with little disruption and with a number of beneficial side-effects. I have highlighted some of the secondary advantages in red.

"In Brazil, ethanol is produced from sugar cane which is a more efficient source of fermentable carbohydrates than corn as well as much easier to grow and process. Brazil has the largest sugarcane crop in the world, which, besides ethanol, also yields sugar, electricity, and industrial heating. Sugar cane growing requires little labor, and government tax and pricing policies have made ethanol production a very lucrative business for big farms. As a consequence, over the last 25 years sugarcane has become one of the main crops grown in the country.

Sugarcane is harvested manually or mechanically and shipped to the distillery (usina) in huge specially built trucks. There are several hundred distilleries throughout the country; they are typically owned and run by big farms or farm consortia and located near the producing fields. At the mill the cane is roller-pressed to extract the juice (garapa), leaving behind a fibrous residue (bagasse). The juice is fermented by yeasts which break down the sucrose into CO2 and ethanol. The resulting "wine" is distilled, yielding hydrated ethanol (5% water by volume) and "fusel oil". The acidic residue of the distillation (vinhoto) is neutralized with lime and sold as fertilizer. The hydrated ethanol may be sold as is (for ethanol cars) or be dehydrated and used as a gasoline additive (for gasohol cars). In either case, the bulk product was sold until 1996 at regulated prices to the state oil company (Petrobras). Today it is no longer regulated.

One ton (1,000 kg) of harvested sugarcane, as shipped to the processing plant, contains about 145 kg of dry fiber (bagasse) and 138 kg of sucrose. Of that, 112 kg can be extracted as sugar, leaving 23 kg in low-valued molasses. If the cane is processed for alcohol, all the sucrose is used, yielding 72 liters of ethanol. Burning the bagasse produces heat for distillation and drying, and (through low-pressure boilers and turbines) about 288 MJ of electricity, of which 180 MJ is used by the plant itself and 108 MJ sold to utilities.

The average cost of production, including farming, transportation and distribution, is US$0.63 per US gallon (US$0.17/L); gasoline prices in the world market is about US$ 1.05 per US gallon (US$0.28/L). The alcohol industry, entirely private, was invested heavily in crop improvement and agricultural techniques. As a result, average yearly ethanol yield increased steadily from 300 to 550 m3/kmy between 1978 and 2000, or about 3.5% per year.

Sucrose accounts for little more than 30% of the chemical energy stored in the mature plant; 35% is in the leaves and stem tips, which are left in the fields during harvest, and 35% are in the fibrous material (bagasse) left over from pressing.

Part of the bagasse is currently burned at the mill to provide heat for distillation and electricity to run the machinery. This allows ethanol plants to be energy self-sufficient and even sell surplus electricity to utilities; current production is 600 MW for self-use and 100 MW for sale. This secondary activity is expected to boom now that utilities have been convinced to pay fair price (about US$10/GJ) for 10 year contracts. The energy is especially valuable to utilities because it is produced mainly in the dry season when hydroelectric dams are running low. Estimates of potential power generation from bagasse range from 1,000 to 9,000 MW, depending on technology. Higher estimates assume gasification of biomass, replacement of current low-pressure steam boilers and turbines by high-pressure ones, and use of harvest trash currently left behind in the fields. For comparison, Brazil's Angra I nuclear plant generates 600 MW (and it is often off line).

Presently, it is economically viable to extract about 288 MJ of electricity from the residues of one ton of sugarcane, of which about 180 MJ are used in the plant itself. Thus a medium-size distillery processing 1 million tons of sugarcane per year could sell about 5 MW of surplus electricity. At current prices, it would earn US$ 18 million from sugar and ethanol sales, and about US$ 1 million from surplus electricity sales. With advanced boiler and turbine technology, the electricity yield could be increased to 648 MJ per ton of sugarcane, but current electricity prices do not justify the necessary investment. (According to one report, the World bank would only finance investments in bagasse power generation if the price were at least US$19/GJ.)

Bagasse burning is environmentally friendly compared to other fuels like oil and coal. Its ash content is only 2.5% (against 30-50% of coal), and it contains no sulfur. Since it burns at relatively low temperatures, it produces little nitrous oxides. Moreover, bagasse is being sold for use as a fuel (replacing heavy fuel oil) in various industries, including citrus juice concentrate, vegetable oil, ceramics, and tyre recycling. The state of Sao Paulo alone used 2 million tons, saving about US$ 35 million in fuel oil imports.

Most cars in Brazil run either on alcohol or on gasohol; only recently dual-fuel ("Flex Fuel") engines have become available. Most gas stations sell both fuels. The market share of the two car types has varied a lot over the last decades, in response to fuel price changes. Ethanol-only cars were sold in Brazil in significant numbers between 1980 and 1995; between 1983 and 1988, they accounted for over 90% of the sales. They have been available again since 2001, but still account for only a few percent of the total sales.

Ethanol-fuelled small planes for farm use have been developed by giant Embraer and by a small Brazilian firm (Aero~lcool), and are currently undergoing certification.

Domestic demand for alcohol grew between 1982 and 1998 from 11,000 to 33,000 cubic metres per day, and has remained roughly constant since then. In 1989 more than 90% of the production was used by ethanol-only cars; today that has reduced to about 40%, the remaining 60% being used with gasoline in gasohol-only cars. Both the total consumption of ethanol and the ethanol/gasohol ratio are expected to increase again with deployment of dual-fuel cars.

Presently the use of ethanol as fuel by Brazilian cars - as pure ethanol and in gasohol - replaces gasoline at the rate of about 27,000 cubic metres per day, or about 40% of the fuel that would be needed to run the fleet on gasoline alone. However, the effect on the country's oil consumption was much smaller than that. Although Brazil is a major oil producer and now exports gasoline (19,000 m3/day), it still must import oil because of internal demand for other oil byproducts, chiefly diesel fuel (which cannot be easily replaced by ethanol).

The improvement in air quality in big cities in the 1980s, following the widespread use of ethanol as car fuel, was evident to everyone; as was the degradation that followed the partial return to gasoline in the 1990s.

So the scare about running out of oil is nothing like the problem people pretend. If American cars were kept going by tankers of ethanol from Australia and Brazil rather than tankers of oil from the Middle East, what's the problem? You would have a lot more price stability that way too. And since the tropics are the best place to grow cane, it would give much of the third world a cash-crop alternative to subsistence farming -- which would undoubtedly be of benefit to all concerned (though Greenies would find fault of course. There is no such thing as a happy Greenie)


FINIS

IMMIGRATION AND CONSERVATISM

With particular emphasis on the Hispanic influx into the USA



By John Ray


Tribalism

One of the great divides between Left and Right in the 20th century was over human nature. In their zeal to control everything, Leftists claimed that there was no such thing and that a "new Soviet man" could be created by education and by altering the material circumstances in which people lived. Conservatives however recognized that man did indeed have a "fallen" (or selfish) inborn nature and that this was a major constraint on which policies would succeed.

Exactly what is inborn and what is not, however, could not be decided a priori. That was essentially a scientific enquiry and what the geneticists came up with is more extreme than even conservatives imagined. Abilities, personality and even attitudes have been shown to be far more heavily determined by genetics than by family environment. (See e.g. here and here and here).

One of the weaker genetic influences, however, would appear to be tribalism. Primitive human societies are invariably very tribal. Which tribe you belong to is of paramount importance in your life, and morality towards members and non-members differs greatly. High standards of reciprocity are expected between members but non-members are essentially "fair game". We would therefore expect that a profound suspicion and hostility to outsiders would characterize civilized man too. But it is not so. Even in the empires of ancient times -- such as Persia and Rome -- there was little prejudice against members of other races, tribes and linguistic groups. Your legal staus as citizen, slave etc mattered but not your ethnic group. The various ethnic origins of Roman Emperors, for instance, are notable.

So how come? I am afraid we have to say that tribalism is one of the areas to which the Marxist analysis does seem to have considerable application. The tribalism of primitive people seems to have been a reflection of competition over scarce food supplies -- and the more ample food suplies characteristic of civilization cancel such concerns out to a large extent. Nonetheless, something as anciently human as tribalism does not vanish overnight and we do see it bob up from time to time in the form of racism. Nazi Germany was of course a very clear example of revived tribalism. In general, however, civilized societies throughout the last 200 years have been very tolerant of ethnic mixing. Whole societies -- such as the USA, Australia and Canada -- are the product of some very vigorous ethnic mixing.

So why has such mixing generally been successful when there clearly are some residual instinctive pressures against it? A major lubricant to it would seem to be the assumption that the incomers would assimilate to the existing society and culture. It was assumed, in other words, that the tribe and its identity would not be threatened or altered. And we can perhaps see the importance of that assumption in the case of the Jews. It is a core claim of the Jewish religion that they are a chosen and special people and that they should therefore hold themselves apart from the rest of society. For religious reasons they cannot assimilate wholeheartedly. And that fact has of course always been known to members of the host societies that are themselves Judaic in beliefs (i.e. Christendom and Islam). It is difficult to hide your thoughts from close relatives who know you well and routinely read your sacred book. So Jews have always borne the brunt of tribalism. Their unwillingness to lose their identity in the tribe has led to their being treated as tribal outsiders always are -- with suspicion and hostility. Fortunately for Jews, however, the onrush of secularism in the modern world has now rendered their religious differences of minor interest so they are generally well accepted as members of the tribes they dwell among.

There are, however, two major areas of concern in the modern world where assimilation seems to be fairly crippled: Hispanic immigrants into the USA and Muslim immigrants into Europe. And both matters are the subject of an upwelling of popular concern. Most Anglo-Celtic Americans seem to want Hispanic immigration stopped and there have been some very vocal noises coming out of Europe lately about Islamic immigration. With their love of disrupting the existing society, Leftists are of course generally in favour of continued immigration by the resented groups. It falls to conservatives to devise a sane and balanced policy about the matter.

And the policy of one of the great immigrant-accepting societies -- Australia -- would appear to have been very successful and greeted with great popular approval. Under conservative leadership, Australia takes large number of selected immigrants but relentlessly pursues and locks up immigrants not chosen by the Australian government -- i.e. illegal immigrants. So the only real ethnic tensions in Australia today stem from the relatively small number of Muslim immigrants who came to Australia before the crackdown on it. So it would seem clear what a conservative policy on immigration is -- one that insists on control of immigation and one which uses that control to help ensure that the immigrants accepted will assimilate.

But that policy is not really available in the USA. There is no point trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. There are so many Hispanic voters in the USA that any party that was perceived as hostile to Hispanics would lose office. So GWB has done the best he can to ensure that official policy does not treat the illegal immigrants as outsiders. He seeks to at least remove official BARRIERS to assimilation. So the policy options left to American conservatives realistically amount only to doing what they can towards assimilating the Hispanics who are already in the country and -- perhaps -- minimizing a further influx by some increment in border security.

There is no doubt that the Hispanic influx has changed the character of the USA and many conservatives worry about that. The USA is by many criteria the world's most successful society so will the change in the character of that society threaten any of the success? Will a society built by Northern Europeans be damaged by the transition to a much more mixed society? Only time will tell but I am inclined to see the Hispanics as descendants of people who built one of the great empires (the Spanish) and people who without outside assistance or inspiration built the remarkable civilizations of Meso-America (Aztecs etc). I cannot be very pessimistic about the progeny of such people. Compared to Europe, America in fact has it easy. At least America's problem group are Christians, not the Muslims that Europe has to cope with. I have no doubt that European policy towards Muslims will eventually be very heavy-handed. Heavy-handedness towards their population does after all have a very long tradition in Europe.




Immigration and culture

There is a now well-known view that Hispanic immigration threatens the dominant Protestant-origin culture of the USA. I doubt that is true. I am in fact broadly sympathetic to the view that Protestant culture has created the modern world as we know it and I certainly think that the Christian influence generally has made the world much more humane than it otherwise would be. I am a keen student of history so know full well how inhumane even the great civilizations of antiquity were.

In fact, I seem to have greater faith in the power of Protestant Christianity than many others do. What I see is that New Testament Christianity keeps renewing itself. People keep rediscovering it. The Catholic church forgot it in the middle ages and the Protestant reformers rediscovered it. The great Protestant churches went to sleep and forgot it and a host of new evangelical Protestant churches sprang up that have now largely eclipsed them. The story of New Testament Christianity is a story of continual revival. And the word "revival" is of course for that reason well-known in connection with Christian evangelism. So New Testament Christianity is a faith of enormous power that keeps bobbing up with evergreen freshness time and time again.

And it continues to make new conquests. The largest Anglican communion in the world is now Nigeria and their enthusiasm for the original faith is great. To them the hollow shell of Anglicanism that is the Episcopal Church of the USA is contemptible and heretical. And Christianity in China is on a roll. On some estimates there are over 100 million Chinese Christians. The Chinese authorities even encourage it as a modernizing influence -- though they do treat harshly congregations that they perceive as being under foreign control. And there is also of course a great expansion of Protestantism under way in Latin America.

So I just don't see Protestant culture as being under any threat. Islam is certainly the most minor threat to it. The one substantial threat that there is to it comes from the modern Left. The postmodernist and politically correct crowd are doing their best to suppress it at every turn and remove it from public view. But such attempts are really laughable. They may even be doing Christianity a good turn. Christianity has always thrived on persecution.

And the Catholic church is certainly no longer any threat to Protestantism. The post-Vatican II church is itself now essentially Protestant. A Catholic Mass is now virtually indistinguishable from many Anglican ones and obedience to the official teachings of the church is mostly just a memory. There may be some people in rural Ireland who still obey the church's teachings on contraception but there are not many like them elsewhere in the Western world. A few plaster saints are about all that makes a church Catholic these days. So any cultural threat of religious origin posed by the Catholic Hispanic immigrants into the United States is imaginary.

But there is of course more to culture than religion. Hispanic societies are notoriously corrupt and feudal. Do Americans want those values in their midst? Obviously not. But Humpty Dumpty has fallen I am afraid and I see no prospect of putting him together again. The Hispanics are now there in their many millions in the USA and there is no realistically conceivable way that they will ever be removed. America already lives with a large and apparently permanent black underclass. It may have to live with a fairly permanent Hispanic underclass too. But millions of Hispanics have risen out of the underclass into middle-class American life so the ultimate size of the Hispanic underclass problem remains to be seen.



Hispanic IQ

So far in this article I have bypassed the issue of Hispanic IQ. There are in fact solid average IQ differences between Hispanics and Americans of Northern European origin. "Godless Capitalist" of Gene Expression has gone to great trouble to set out the relevant statistics in the comments section here.

So do I accept that Hispanics are of genetically inferior average IQ? If they are, the case for keeping them out would certainly be very strong. My answer is that I doubt it. But my doubt is not just a "gut" thing as it might be from a Leftist. It is based on solid scientific caution. I have after all been a psychometrician for nearly 40 years so I have had time to think about it. And, as I explained long ago here, I do think that SOME real differences between the average IQs of different races can convincingly be demonstrated. That does not mean, however, that ALL interracial differences in mean IQ can be accepted. Psychometric measurement is a difficult task and lots can go wrong.

And I think I should mention some cases where it has, in my view, clearly gone wrong: The extraordinarily low results reported in Lynn & Vanhanen for some African countries just do not seem to be compatible with minimal adult function; the low IQ of Ashkenazi Israelis is clearly wrong; the low IQ of Afrikaners is clearly wrong. I know Afrikaners well and they are as competent a group as their Northern European ancestors would lead one to expect. I have elsewhere explained the low recorded IQ of Israelis by saying that only the dumb Ashkenazi Jews go to Israel. The smart ones end up in New York. But that is largely a jocular explanation. Israel's undoubted per capita pre-eminence in high tech industries clearly shows that an amazing number of very smart Jews have ended up in Israel too. If Israelis have low IQs, it discredits the IQ test. And Indian IQs are low too despite the great commercial success that Indians outside India always have. To say that such a successful population is dumb is just not reasonable. And note that some of the successful Indian populations outside India are of almost wholly coolie origin. They arrived in places like Fiji as bottom-rung farm labourers. Their descendants, however are the businessmen and professionals who run Fiji. Clearly, good genetics has eventually triumphed over considerable adverse odds there.

So where do the tests go wrong? I am not in close enough touch with the original research to say much about Israel but if the testing oversampled kibbutzniks we may have an explanation. Because it does seem that largely rural populations -- such as Indians and Afrikaners -- routinely fare badly on IQ tests. Why? IQ is known to be developed by very stimulating environments so it seems likely that the difference could reflect the fact that city environments are much more stimulating than rural ones. And the largely rural origins of Hispanics would fit in with that too. Though the fact that second and third generation Hispanics in the USA do poorly on IQ tests too does clearly render that explanation insufficient by itself.

But to get to the meat of the matter: My doubts about the mean Hispanic IQ are based on genetics and history. As we know, Amerindians are Asians racially. And Asians are the brightest large human population. The Amerindians HAVE been separated from other Asians for a long time but the idea that selective pressures were less in the Americas than in Asia seems unlikely to me. There was clearly plenty of competition between rival Amerindian nations. So the remarkable achievements of the Meso-American civilizations (Aztecs, Toltecs, Incas etc.) were just what I would expect of their genetics. And those are still the genetics in them today. So I think that the depressed actual achievements are cultural. Don't forget that only two thirds of the variance in IQ is genetic. The remaining third can make a lot of difference. Let me say a little more about that:




Hispanic IQ and culture

Illegal Hispanic immigration into the USA has undoubtedly brought troubles in its wake -- particularly in recent years. There is a high level of criminality in the resultant population and a high level of almost every social pathology you can name. See here and here for background. Most conservatives attribute the troubles with the illegal immigrant population to the way they have been mollycoddled and allowed to get away with anything by the American Left. If there is no pressure to be law-abiding, why should the immigrants be law-abiding? And I heartily agree with that analysis. I think it is mainstream America that has created most of the immigrant problem by bowing down to the unending demands for "tolerance" from the American Left.

"Godless" at Gene Expression, Randall Parker and others, however, believe that the problem is more deepseated than that. They believe that with the best will in the world the Hispanics would still be an underclass. They base that view on the low average IQ recorded not only among the immigrants but even among their children and grandchildren. They take that low recorded IQ to represent a permanent genetic handicap. I am broadly sympathetic to that sort of reasoning and believe that some intergroup differences are real and important and do have large explanatory value.

In my many years as a psychometrician, however, I have developed a healthy awareness of what can go wrong in measuring psychological attributes, and in my own work I have always placed an unusual degree of emphasis on looking carefully at the criteria used to validate any given test or scale. And that emphasis has been greatly rewarded from an academic viewpoint in that I have on occasions been able to show a convergence between the psychometric measuring instrument and other indicators of what it purports to measure that is far greater than is normally obtained. A corollary of that, however, is that I am also unusually skeptical of a psychometric instrument that does NOT show a good convergence with other indicators of what it purports to measure.

And that is why I am skeptical of the Hispanic IQ data. It seems to me that the Asian origins of the "Hispanics" -- really Amerindians -- and their historically recent achievements in building notable civilizations without outside input (the Aztec, Toltec, Olmec and other empires) do NOT suggest an unusually disadvantaging gene pool.


To make that point vivid, look at this historical comment:

"When Columbus landed, the new research suggests, the Western Hemisphere wasn’t filled with scattered bands of ecologically pure hunters and gatherers. Instead, it was a thriving, diverse place; a tumult of languages, trade, and culture; the home to tens of millions of people - more, some researchers believe, than Europe at that time.

Then, the majority of native Americans lived south of the Rio Grande. They were not wanderers with tepees; they built up and lived in some of the world’s biggest, most opulent cities. Tenochtitlán, the greatest city in the aggressive military alliance best-known as the Aztec empire, may have had a quarter-million inhabitants - more than London or Paris. It glittered on scores of artificially constructed islands in the middle of a great lake in central Mexico. On first encountering this metropolis, the conquistadors gawped like yokels at the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades. Hundreds of boats flitted like butterflies around the city’s canals and the three grand causeways that linked it to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains to the city. Perhaps most astounding to the Spaniards, according to their memoirs, were the botanical gardens - at the time, none existed in Europe.

I am inclined to think that the above description is a bit overblown but if even half of it is true (and I am fairly sure of that) Amerindian genes do seem to be well up there with their relatives in East Asia.

So if it's not the Amerindian gene pool that is causing their low IQ scores, what is it?

I think that what has happened is that a poorly-educated rural population has arrived in the USA only to be thrown into a behavioral sink, the behavioural sink of America's predominantly black underclass. Because of their lack of skills, education and urban (particularly scholarly) culture the immigrants have from the beginning found only low-paid manual work and thus been forced to live very cheaply. And living cheaply has meant by and large living in predominantly black slums. And that slum environment has given their children values that are anti-intellectual, to say the least. And in his many essays on the subject Theodore Dalrymple has documented graphically how hard it is to climb out of such an environment. So the low recorded IQ of the Hispanic immigrants themselves is attributable to their rural origins (rural populations normally score badly on IQ tests) and the low recorded IQ of their children is attributable to the moronic environment in which they have grown up. Only about two thirds of IQ is genetic. The rest is cultural. And there could be few worse cultures for the development of intellect than the slums of (say) L.A.

In ideal circumstances, a home environment formed by a culture that has been obsessed with education for 2,000 years (as in the case of the East Asians) might have allowed the children to rise above that handicap, but the Hispanics do not come from such a culture. So my belief is that if the children of the Hispanics could be got into good schools and put into a good environment generally, they would eventually merge into the American mainstream. I may well be wrong but given the unlikelihood that the Hispanic population of the USA will ever decline, all Americans should hope that I am right.


An email from an Hispanic

Below is an email I received from an Hispanic woman in response to my observations above. I helps to remind us of the genetic diversity in Hispanics. She points out the high achievements of many of those like her. With a serious effort at immigration control, the USA could have a lot more like her and a lot less of the criminal class. Australia controls its immigration and the nation that put the first man on the moon could do so too if it wanted to.

"My name is Erica and I am Hispanic with Mexican ancestors. I call myself a Mexican-American. I get criticized by other Hispanics and I am sure that many people would consider me in some way un-American. I call myself Mexican-American because when people look at me they are confused, I am fair skinned and according to my students, "I talk like a white person."

I am sending this e-mail in response to the article posted on your website regarding Mexican IQs. Well, I have never been tested as an adult, but as a child I was put in the gifted and talented programs at school, as were many of my Mexican- American friends. My boyfriend, who is also Hispanic, as a child in Wisconsin (a very white, Anglo area of our country) was also enrolled in gifted and talented programs along with his siblings. I was a teacher for 8 years, making a meager living, and I dedicated myself to raising other people's children (some white). Now, I am a law student at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. My mother and father were both teachers with the Texas public schools. My father's mother was a teacher. I just wanted to let you know about a few Hispanic people who have Mexican ancestors. Perhaps now that you know of a few, you can state with confidence that just because a person has a certain heritage does not mean that person has a low IQ. It is a fact that in Texas there are many "Mexican" teachers, lawyers, doctors (my first cousin is a doctor in Indiana, specializing in kidney transplants), judges, and government employees. Also, recall that President Bush, whom I voted for, has nominated, for the US Attorney General, a "Mexican" from Texas, Alberto Gonzales"

-------------------

Footnote about Afrikaners: Yes. I have heard lots of van der Merwe jokes but they are typical of the jokes that city people have always told about rural dwellers.

Methodological Appendix

Razib (of Gene Expression) has expressed surprise to find himself more hereditarian than I am. I think he is mistaken. I think the truth is that I am more cautious. I have been a practicing psychometrician since 1968 (my 1968 work was later published here) and from my first two published papers onwards (See here and here) skepticism about what established measuring instruments really measure (what psychologists call "validity") has been a constant feature of my work.

My field is of course the measurement of attitudes and personality rather than the measurement of ability (though I have made some very minor contributions to the academic literature on IQ -- e.g. here) but most psychometric principles remain the same regardless of the field. And what I have repeatedly found is that a test which may be valid on one population may not be valid on another. And cross-cultural validity is a particular problem in that regard. Most psychologists do not report their failures but I do so you will see here a very graphic example of a breakdown in validity when a test was applied cross-culturally. So my caution has been shown to be more than just a disposition in me -- it is something that is justified by the data. In other words, a test that measures (say) IQ in Britain may not be a good measure of IQ in Lesotho. And it may not be a good measure in Lesotho even if it is also a good measure in (say) Nigeria. Validity breakdown is very common and, as I have also shown, is substantially unpredictable.

So are all cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons of IQ inconclusive? Not necessarily. The most widely recommended (but rarely followed) approach to validity assessment in psychology is a multi-method, multimodal approach. It is that approach which guides my thinking. In other words, I usually need evidence from more than one source before I conclude that a difference is real. The exception to that is interesting, however. The exception is where the validity of the test has been demonstrated on BOTH populations being compared. That is rarely done -- though I imagine there are some exceptions in India -- and the only case I can think of is the case of the Queensland Test devised by Kearney, McElwain and others (Summarized about half-way down the page here). The QT was in fact constructed to be valid among Australian blacks (Aborigines). It used only items that discriminated within Aboriginal populations. It was, in short, actually biased against whites! It relied on Aboriginal culture rather than white culture. I am sure that nobody who knows Aborigines will be surprised by the results when the QT was administered to whites, however: Whites still scored a whole standard deviation higher on average! So I have no doubt about what the reality is in that case.

But in most cases I think we need corroboratory evidence from other sources to validate conclusions about mean differences in IQ. And that evidence is clearly forthcoming in the case of Africans. I think it is kindest to draw a discreet veil of silence over the record of sub-Saharan Africa in matters to do with intellectual achievement and the development of civilization but certainly there is ample evidence to confirm what the IQ tests tell us there.

But there are ALSO cases where evidence from other sources does not corroborate what the IQ tests tell us, and, as I have already set out at some length, the "Hispanics" (Mesoamericans) seem to be a case of that -- so I am not at all convinced at this stage that they suffer from any genetic disadvantage in IQ. If someone has however shown reasonable levels of validity for Raven's PM (or other tests normally used) among the inhabitants of the Hispanic ghettos of Los Angeles (for instance) I will of course have to think again.


Statistical Appendix


* In 2002, 23 percent of all births in the United States were to immigrant mothers (legal or illegal), compared to 15 percent in 1990, 9 percent in 1980, and 6 percent in 1970.

* Even at the peak of the last great wave of immigration in 1910, births to immigrant mothers accounted for a slightly smaller share than today. After 1910 immigration was reduced, but current immigration continues at record levels, thus births to immigrants will continue to increase.

* Our best estimate is that 383,000 or 42 percent of births to immigrants are to illegal alien mothers. Births to illegals now account for nearly one out of every 10 births in the United States.

* The large number of births to illegals shows that the longer illegal immigration is allowed to persist, the harder the problem is to solve. Because as U.S. citizens these children can stay permanently, their citizenship can prevent a parent’s deportation, and once adults they can sponsor their parents for permanent residence.

* The large number of children born to illegals also shows that a “temporary” worker program is unrealistic because it would result in hundreds of thousands of permanent additions to the U.S. population each year, exactly what such a program is suppose to avoid.

* Overall, immigrant mothers are much less educated than native mothers. In 2002, 39 percent of immigrant mothers lacked a high school education, compared to 17 percent of native mothers. And immigrants now account for 41 percent of births to mothers without a high school degree.

* The dramatic growth in births to immigrants has been accompanied by a decline in diversity. In 1970, the top country for immigrant births — Mexico — accounted for 24 percent of births to immigrants, by 2002 it was 45 percent.

* As a share of all births in the country, Mexican immigrants accounted for one in 10 births in 2002. No single foreign country has every accounted for such a large share of births.

Source


2007 UPDATE:

The Harpending and Cochran thesis about rapid human evolution in the last 10,000 years does rather undermine the view that the East Asian origins of native South Americans should be a guarantee of their intelligence. See also the work of Bruce Lahn on the rapidity of recent human evolution.

I must admit that in my observations, Latin Americans are much more party-people than the studious and serious people of China. Latin Americans may look similar to East Asians but they don't behave that way.


2009 UPDATE:

Losing Ground: Hispanic children fall behind their peers quickly, a study finds

All the studies show that Hispanic illegals and their offspring have markedly lower average IQ scores than the white average. My orientation in psychometric research has however always been great caution about the validity of any tests used and I initially felt that the remarkable success of ancient Central Americans in building rather advanced civilizations despite being cut off from the major source of human progress (the Eurasian continent) implied a higher IQ for their descendants than the tests showed.

That is however a fairly arguable proposition and, combined with the persistent low IQ of Hispanics across the generations, the findings reported below have changed my mind. I think that the findings below confirm what the IQ tests say. The results below show what I very "incorrectly" call the "chimpanzee effect". A month old chimpanzee is much smarter and more capable than a human infant of the same age but the human does of course far surpass the chimp eventually. In other words, low IQ is less evident in the early years and most evident in adulthood. We find a similar effect in blacks. Average black IQ is closer to average white IQ in childhood than in adulthood. Beyond the early teens, black IQ stops rising but white IQ does not. White IQ peaks at about age 16.

And what is reported below is precisely another example of the chimpanzee effect: Intellectual achievement gap smallest in early childhood but rapidly increasing with age. I must stress that I am NOT saying that either blacks or Hispanics are similar to chimpanzees. ALL human beings of any race are much smarter than chimps. I am just using chimps as a vivid demonstration of what seems a general truth: That real gaps in intellectual ability become evident later rather than sooner -- and the Hispanic developmental pattern is exactly what we expect of an average IQ that is indeed lower

A forthcoming study on Hispanic children’s cognitive skills underlines the challenges the country faces in aspiring to close the achievement gap between these children and their white and Asian counterparts. Hispanic “children fall behind their peers in mental development by the time they reach grade school, and the gap tends to widen as they get older,” reports the New York Times. “The drop-off in the cognitive scores of Hispanic toddlers, especially those from Mexican backgrounds, was steeper than for other [low-income] groups and could not be explained by economic status alone. . . . From 24 to 36 months, the Hispanic children fell about six months behind their white peers on measures like word comprehension, more complex speech and working with their mothers on simple tasks.”

This new study, from the University of California–Berkeley, may be unusually blunt in its assessment of Hispanic cognitive development, but it is hardly unprecedented. A 2004 study by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office found a similar decline in Hispanic students’ ability to keep up with their peers in learning English. Children from Mandarin- and Spanish-speaking households begin kindergarten with similar levels of English proficiency, but their paths quickly diverge. The Mandarin-speaking students make continuing progress in mastering English, while the Hispanic students’ advance stalls out in the second and third grades as the demands of California’s English-proficiency test grow more difficult. Mandarin kindergartners establish oral skills in English in one year, the legislative analyst found, and by the beginning of second grade, they have begun developing a mastery of reading and writing, unlike Hispanics. The widening English-proficiency gap between Asian and Hispanic students may reflect parental willingness to expose children to English at home, but the gap occurs in math as well.

This summer in Southern California, I observed Hispanic students who had been taught in English throughout their school careers, yet who possessed very weak formal language ability. An in-class reading assignment at Locke High School in Watts asked students to answer the question: “Why is it important to use all your skills during your teen years?” A ninth-grader wrote in response: “To make it better.” Another question, “What sudden insight came to the engineer?” elicited the answer: “How to put the little mirrors.” While diagnosing the student-written sentence, “The pigs squealed loudly because the’re [sic] bored at the barn,” a high-school English teacher in Santa Ana asked his class: “Why does the dependent clause need to be in the past tense?” A student answered: “Because you’re talking about a lot of people.”

The Berkeley researchers speculate that the early decline in Hispanic students’ language and reasoning skills may reflect inadequate maternal stimulation in the home. And indeed, a Santa Ana elementary-school principal recounted to me her largely unsuccessful efforts to get parents to teach their children such basic kindergarten-survival tools as cutting with scissors and the words for colors. “Kids come in not knowing the alphabet in Spanish or the sounds of Spanish,” she said. “They use three-word sentences; they come in without oral-language ability.”

The Berkeley study will inevitably be used to buttress the Obama administration’s plans to pour billions of federal taxpayer dollars into early-education programs. As a matter of education policy, such efforts represent wishful thinking. Head Start has been repeatedly shown to have no lasting effect on students’ academic performance. Even the most successful and lavishly-funded of such early-intervention programs — the iconic Perry Preschool Project from the early 1960s in Ypsilanti, Mich. — explained only 3 percent of the earnings of its participants at age 40, and about 4 percent of their educational-attainment levels, wrote John J. Miller in NR in 2007. Replicating the Perry Project’s services on a national scale for Hispanic children would be extraordinarily expensive and produce only modest results. Many children who receive early intervention provide inferior intellectual stimulation for their own children, whether for innate cognitive or for cultural reasons.

But the more interesting implications of the study and others like it are for immigration policy. Our de facto immigration policy is currently weighted to a population that appears to require massive additional government education spending — even before formal schooling begins — to be made academically competitive. This choice would not seem to be economically rational, at least so long as we aspire to universal college-going. If the country remains committed to sending a far greater number of students to college, as even many conservatives continue to be, we better get ourselves a different mix of immigrants if we don’t want to bankrupt our education budgets. Alternatively, if the open-borders lobby prevails and Latin American migration continues to dominate our immigration flows, it’s time to acknowledge that many students never will be college material, nor do they need to be to lead productive, fulfilling lives.

SOURCE

FINIS