The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (31 page)

(4) Control group (1875: social science). Recognition that before and after comparisons of how interventions affect people are usually flawed. We introduce an enrichment program in which pre-school children go to a “play center” each day. It is designed to raise the IQ of children at risk of being diagnosed as mentally retarded. Throughout the program we test their IQs to monitor progress. The question arises, what has raised their IQs? The enrichment program, getting out of a dysfunctional home for 6 hours each day, the lunch they had at the play center, the continual exposure to IQ tests. Only a control group selected from the same population and subjected to everything but the enrichment program can suggest an answer.

(5) Random sample (1877: social science). Today, the educated public is much more likely to spot biased sampling than they were a few generations ago. In 1936, the Literary Digest telephone poll showed that Landon was going to beat Roosevelt for President and was widely believed, even though few had telephones except the more affluent.

(6) Naturalistic fallacy (1903: moral philosophy). That one should be wary of arguments from facts to values, for example, an argument that because something is a trend in evolution it provides a worthy goal for human endeavor.

(7) Charisma effect (1922: social science). Recognition that when a technique is applied by a charismatic innovator or disciples fired by zeal, it may be successful for precisely that reason. For example, a new method of teaching mathematics often works until it is used by the mass of teachers for whom it is merely a new thing to try.

(8) Placebo (1938: medicine). The recognition that merely being given something apparently endorsed by authority will often have a salutary effect for obvious psychological reasons. Without this notion, a rational drugs policy would be overwhelmed by the desperate desire for a cure by those stricken with illness.

(9) Falsifiable/tautology (1959: philosophy of science). The stipulation that a factual claim is bankrupt (a mere tautology or closed circle of definitions)
unless it is testable against evidence. It can be used to explode: a theory of motivation that asserts all human acts are selfish and yet rules out every possible counterexample; the claim that “real” workers by definition have a revolutionary psychology; that “real” Christians are always charitable; and so forth. (Flynn, “Beyond the Flynn Effect.”)

Flynn and his colleague William Dickens add:

Thanks to industrialization, it is likely that the cognitive complexity of the average person’s job has increased over the last century. There is no doubt that more-demanding educational credentials control access to a wide range of jobs. There are far more people in scientific, managerial, and technical positions than ever before. Increased leisure time is another possible trigger for IQ gains, as some activities undertaken during extended leisure (reading, puzzles, games such as chess) may be honing people’s facilities. Radio and television may be factors. It is possible that the machinery we increasingly surround ourselves with (e.g., cars, phones, computers, and VCRs) have increased the demands on our cognitive capacities. The shift to fewer children in each family, affording more time to cater to children’s curiosity and richer individual interactions, may have played a role. Some or all of these may have contributed to a significant attitude shift: The current generation may take abstract problem solving far more seriously than preceding generations did. The direct effects of these changes need not be large. But because they are widespread and persistent trends, they could loom large relative to the many less-constant environmental influences that produce most differences between people. (Dickens and Flynn, “Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects,” pp. 346–69.)

    
Perhaps the most striking of Flynn’s observations is this
:
98 percent of IQ test takers today score better than the average test taker in 1900.

Flynn writes:

The Wechsler-Binet rate of gain (0.3 points per year) entails that the school children of 1900 would have had a mean IQ just under 70. The Raven-Similarities rate (0.5 points per year) yields a mean IQ of 50 (against current norms). (Flynn, “Beyond the Flynn Effect.”)

   This is arguably the most important observation in this book.

    
“Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students
”:
Murray, “Intelligence in the Classroom.”

    
“Even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits
”:
Charles Murray, “Intelligence in the Classroom.”

   
Is Charles Murray a straw man?
This question was raised by some draft readers of this book.
Aren’t his views so ridiculous and outside the mainstream that they aren’t worth critiquing?

Actually, Murray’s views on this subject command a good deal of respect and mainstream attention. He is a fellow at the widely respected American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He continues to write for the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New York Times
, and the
Weekly Standard
and appears on C-SPAN.

    
“small to moderate
”:
“Head Start Impact Study, First Year Findings,” June 2005, Prepared for Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C., Westat, The Urban Institute Chesapeake Research Associates Decision Information Resources Inc., and American Institutes for Research.

    
Children in professionals’ homes were exposed to an average of more than fifteen hundred more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes
.

   And more than three times the children of parents on welfare. Actual numbers: welfare children 616 words per hour; professionals’ kids 2,153 words per hour. Estimate based on fourteen-hour day. Words were spoken live in person—not on TV or radio. (Hart and Risley, “The early catastrophe.”)

    
Not surprisingly, the psychological community responded with a mixture of interest and deep caution
.
In 1995, an American Psychological Association task force wrote that “such correlations may be mediated by genetic as well as (or instead of) environmental factors.” Note “instead of.” In 1995, it was still possible for leading research psychologists to imagine that better-off kids could be simply inheriting smarter genes from smarter parents, that spoken words could be merely a genetic effect and not a cause of anything.

From the APA report:

There is no doubt that such variables as resources of the home and parents’ use of language are correlated with children’s IQ scores, but such correlations may be mediated by genetic as well as (or instead of) environmental factors. Behavior geneticists frame such issues in quantitative terms. As noted
in Section 3, environmental factors certainly contribute to the overall variance of psychometric intelligence. But how much of that variance results from differences between families, as contrasted with the varying experiences of different children in the same family? Between-family differences create what is called “shared variance” or c2 (all children in a family share the same home and the same parents). Recent twin and adoption studies suggest that while the value of c2 (for IQ scores) is substantial in early childhood, it becomes quite small by late adolescence. These findings suggest that differences in the life styles of families, whatever their importance may be for many aspects of children’s lives, make little long-term difference for the skills measured by intelligence tests. We should note, however, that low-income and non-white families are poorly represented in existing adoption studies as well as in most twin samples. Thus it is not yet clear whether these surprisingly small values of (adolescent) c2 apply to the population as a whole. It remains possible that, across the full range of income and ethnicity, between-family differences have more lasting consequences for psychometric intelligence. (APA, “Stalking the Wild Taboo.”)

    
Now we know better
.
We know that genetic factors do not operate “instead of” environmental factors, they interact with them: GxE.

   Recall Massimo Pigliucci’s observation: “Biologists have come to realise that if one changes
either
the genes
or
the environment, the resulting behaviour can be dramatically different. The trick, then, is not in partitioning causes between nature and nurture, but in [examining] the way genes and environments interact dialectically to generate an organism’s appearance and behaviour.” (Pigliucci, “Beyond nature and nurture,” pp. 20–22.)

    
Speaking to children early and often
.
This trigger was revealed in Hart and Risley’s incontrovertible study and reinforced by the University of North Carolina’s Abecedarian Project, which provided environmental enrichment to children from birth, with the study subjects showing substantial gains compared with a control group.

   For example, in the North Carolina “Abecedarian Project”—an all-day program that provided various forms of environmental enrichment to fifty-seven children from infancy onward (mean starting age 4.4 months) and compared their test performance to a matched control group—differences between groups became apparent before the end of the first year. The difference did not diminish over time; the IQ difference between the groups was still present at age twelve. (Neisser, “Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests.”)