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Originally Posted by Jerry
There is a gaping hole, a glaring weakness in this statement. I don't know if it was from a dickhead journo or a dickhead academic, but one of them is probably a dickhead, and I suspect it is the journo. See if you can guess what the weakness is.
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In all honesty I would want to see the research itself before making a concrete judgment on the issue. That is why I said that it is not etched in stone...
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Originally Posted by Jerry
Now I believe the gains in IQ are mostly in the lower half of the distribution and gradually decreased from low to high IQ. This holds well for those on the "nurture" side of the debate, it explains how the Danes and Poms IQ's have effectively plateaued, and the gains made by blacks over the last century. I personally contend black IQ's will reach and plateau at around the same level a decade or two after the highly seemingly unlikely event of their educations ever being funded equally. Until such a time it would be a mistake to prescribe the difference to genetic differences, especially given the gains in black IQ's have followed the gains in their share of the education fnding pie.
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Which would be a fair theory had the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Studies not illustrated that students with two black biological parents by age 17 had an average IQ 89 while adopted children two white biological parents with an IQ of 106. Interestingly enough the Asian students from the northeast scored highest of all in three differing studies though they suffered from environmental weaknesses not experienced by the above control groups...
Interestingly enough Michael G DeGroote of the School of Medicine of McMaster University has claimed a link between brain size and intelligence:
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TORONTO -- Bigger is better when it comes to brain matter, says a leading neuroscientist.
Canadian researchers examined the brains of 100 people who were given extensive IQ tests before they died and found a correlation between cerebral volume and intelligence.
"This is essentially the first study that is actually looking at the size of the brain directly and not through imaging," Sandra Witelson, who headed the study at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, said Thursday from Hamilton.
"What is very clear is that there is a correlation between brain size and intelligence, particularly verbal ability," said Witelson, noting that verbal ability encompasses comprehension of complex sentences, understanding verbal logical information and verbal memory.
SOURCE: 'Study links brain size, intelligence' - CTV News - December 23, 2005.
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What is interesting about this is that the IQ scores cited above seems to correlate to brain size of the subjects:
Three main procedures have been used to estimate brain size: (a) weighing wet brains at autopsy; (b) measuring the volume of empty skulls using filler; and (c) measuring external head size and estimating volume. Data from all three sources triangulate on the conclusion that, after statistical corrections are made for body size, east Asians average about 17 c[m.sup.3] (1 cubic inch) more cranial capacity than whites who average about 80 c[m.sup.3] (5 cubic inches) more than blacks. Ho and colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin analyzed brain autopsy data on 1,261 American subjects aged 25 to 80 after excluding obviously damaged brains and reported, in the 1980 issue of Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, that, after controlling for age and body size, white men averaged 100 grams more brain weight than black men, and white women averaged 100 grams more brain weight than black women. With endocranial volume, Beals and colleagues computerized the world database of up to 20,000 crania and published their results in the 1984 issue of Current Anthropology. Sex-combined brain cases differed by continental area with populations from Asia averaging 1,415 c[m.sup.3], those from Europe averaging 1,362 c[m.sup.3], and those from Africa averaging 1,268 c[m.sup.3].
Using external head measurements I have found, after corrections are made for body size, that east Asians consistently average a larger brain than do Caucasians or Africans. Three of these studies were published in the journal Intelligence. In a 1991 study, from data compiled by the U.S. space agency NASA, military samples from Asia averaged 14 c[m.sup.3] more cranial capacity than those from Europe. In a stratified random sample of 6,325 U.S. Army personnel measured in 1988 for fitting helmets, I found that Asian-Americans averaged 36 c[m.sup.3] more than European-Americans who averaged 21 c[m.sup.3] more than African-Americans. Most recently, I analyzed data from tens of thousands of men and women aged 25 to 45 collated by the International Labour Office in Geneva and found that Asians averaged 10 c[m.sup.3] more than Europeans and 66 c[m.sup.3] more than Africans.
SOURCE: Race and crime: an international dilemma - Rushton, J. Philippe - Society, Jan-Feb 1995 v32 n2
Going back to the IQ tests; specifically 'East Asians' score the highest, whites are a close second while blacks bring up the rear on such tests. In my view this would appear to be a fair argument for heredity being influential in intelligence scoring. I do believe environment plays a part as well though...
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Originally Posted by Jerry
You'll notice the words I put in bold. Despite gains over the last century, the average educational environment of blacks simply isn't as rich as that of whites. You can safely assume black IQ scores will plateau lower than white scores whilst their education remain less a priority than whites, and by and large the US education funding pattern reflects this. So of course these differences in IQ and SAT scores will persist, and there is seemingly a much more valid reason for them than racial differences.
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The problem here is that black students who were placed into the 'Head Start' program seemed to eventually suffer the same regression toward the mean as other black youth. Black youth who came out of the program immediately had an IQ improvement of 30 points...though three years later the same tests placed them back in the 80's score range.
To be specific a study of childhood enrichment in the early 90's produced similar short-term results. J.S. Fuerst of Loyola University tracked and monitored 684 black children who attended specially funded 'Head Start' type programs that were so intense, advanced and far-reaching that Mr. Fuerst referred to them "Head Start to the fourth power." The children remained in these programs for two to seven years, and had significantly better test scores than a control group outside of the program. However, a decade later, after the children had returned to regular schools, their performances were practically indistinguishable from those of children who had not received the special classes. This reflects the results of the Transracial adoption studies.