I’ve been thinking a bit more about the work of Charles Murray, as discussed in my last post. As I mentioned, Murray is controversial because of his book “The Bell Curve.” What claims in the book earned him his notoriety?

I would say these two claims.

1. The claim that the mean average IQ for black people is lower than white people. (By about 15 points.)

2. The claim that IQ is largely heredity and not determined by environment.

Claim 1 sounds shocking and racist, but if it were a “fixable” problem then it would not be so bad. But claim 2 basically says it’s hard to fix.

So how correct are these claims? I’ll let you know right now that I don’t know. I’ve looked into this stuff before and, frankly, it’s a big headache and the data always seems to be changing.

There are a number of possible arguments one can make to counter claim 1. One is that the data is simply wrong. Another is that IQ is a meaningless measurement not correlated to anything that determines human fortunes. Another argument is that the claim is correct but it’s due to structural racism. For instance, it could be argued that a large segment of blacks live in crappy environments with poor nutrition and this drives down IQ. Related to that is the argument that culture at large generally pushes blacks towards non-achievement so they don’t apply themselves while taking the IQ test.

Let’s take those one by one.

The data is wrong
On the web are a number of people who make this claim but it doesn’t seem to be the majority view. A more standard view is to say the discrepancy exits but can be explained by non-hereditary factors.

IQ is meaningless. 
There are people who claim this and it strikes me as having some validity. Intelligence is a pretty vague concept and it’s hard to tie it down to a single digit. Nonetheless, IQ does seem to correlate pretty well to a person’s fortunes Additionally, intelligence seems to apply across a lot of disciplines. By this I mean a high IQ person can become good at math, and language, and music etc. There are few people who are awesome at math but totally baffled by music.

Lousy environments lead to low IQ
In the interview with Sam Harris, Murray seems to make the claim that much (most?) of what determines IQ is hereditary, not environmental. I’m not so sure. There does seem to be a fair amount of correlation between IQ and environment, nutrition etc. (though I’ve found people who dispute this.)

Low achievement culture leads to low IQ
I didn’t come across much discussion of this but it seems reasonable to me.

Personally the last two seem valid to me and could explain the entirety of a discrepancy between any races. (I’m not going to get into the “is race a real thing” debate here, though I have in the past.)

I’ll also say this. This debate is incredibly difficult to wrap your head around. This is true with statistics in general. You can observe trends in anything, but determining what is a cause of a trend and what’s just a correlation is really difficult. As a result, I think reasonable, intelligent people can come to differing conclusions. The automatic supposition that people who say there are genetically caused differences in intelligence are secretly neo-Nazis strikes me as pretty stupid. (Though genuine neo-Nazis surely appreciate their work.)