Everyone must be aware by now of the uproar caused by the recent remarks made by James Watson, the Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the structure of DNA. According to Watson, he feels "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really." Watson also asserted there was no reason to believe different races separated by geography should have evolved identically, and he said that while he hoped everyone was equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true."
I was aware of Watson's hubris long before this latest story broke. He had previously made similarly disparaging remarks about homosexuals and the "unintelligent" among us. I did not write anything about his latest gaffe here because it was widely covered in the media, it followed a predictable pattern and I had not much to add. Also, I had already vented sufficiently at another blog where a discussion on Watson's "ignoble" ways was under way. However, Watson is not alone in his obsession with IQ. Many other "intelligent" people can't leave the notion of IQ out of their evaluation of human worth. Some have made a career out of it.
I am not a post-modernist touchy-feely type myself. I do not believe for a moment that all of us have equal aptitude for everything we attempt to do. I also accept that some of what we are capable or incapable of is determined by our innate heritable traits. But that consideration ought to be limited to "individuals" who need to be evaluated for a specific task at hand. Even when a group consists of individuals with closely comparable traits in some enterprise or the other, it is dangerous to base human interactions on that blanket calculation. Doing so is unfair to the individual. It is a prescription for short changing some and setting up others for failure. The human society for better or worse, no longer operates by the law of the jungle for the most part. The criteria for survival in the modern world are more complex than they were for primitive societies. As important as a sharp mind and sound body, are our aptitude for co-operation, compassion and ability to handle stress. Also, survival in the wilderness and in an urban setting require different kinds of intelligence. Other than the conventional indicators of intelligence like business acumen and academic brilliance, our ability to respond to disasters, stewardship of the environment, good parental and educational insights, developing appropriate ethical and legal groundwork to guide our personal and public lives have become increasingly more important facets of intelligence that ensure success and survival as the world becomes more interactive, urbanized and the insularity of discrete cultural groups diminish. We have also seen repeatedly that an above average intelligence as measured by IQ tests does not guarantee that an individual will make a good parent, be ethical or well adjusted and as in Watson's case, have wisdom commensurate with intelligence.
Yet our society remains in thrall of IQ. I always cringe when this inadequate and even flawed measure is repeatedly used to assign worth (or unworth) to human life. I consider it especially pernicious when applied to entire racial/cultural groups. Once before I had expressed my unease with such stereotyping here. Today I came across an American Enterprise Institute talk discussing Jewish intelligence and other genetic traits. Not much in the discussion is new. But I find this obsession with "positive" group genetics as disturbing as Watson's insult to an entire continent and race based on so called "inferior" DNA. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. Charles Murray, another AEI fellow and IQ worshipper was predictably present as an enthusiastic participant.
Entine, author of the new book "Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People," argued that genetic mutations gave Jews very high IQs. "If you had one of these mutations" -- such as those that cause Tay-Sachs disease -- "it probably could cause high intelligence," he asserted.
Fellow AEI fellow Charles Murray suggested that the rigors of Talmudic study drove out the dull Jews centuries ago. "If you were dumb and a Jew," said the philo-Semitic Murray, "it was a lot easier to be a Christian." Murray, best known for his incendiary book about race and intelligence, "The Bell Curve," explored Jewish smarts in an April article in Commentary titled "Jewish Genius." ....
All this might be traced, Entine said, to diseases that afflict Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe; these genetic mistakes "may promote the growth and interconnection of brain cells." "This is highly debated," the author admitted. "You're suggesting there could be a genetic basis to intelligence and it could be found more in one population than another."
It was not controversial with Murray, however. His only beef was that Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal were smart, too. "You had not only Maimonides . . . you had Jews prominent in business, you had Jews who were advisers to the court," he argued. "Many historians attribute in part the subsequent decline of Spain and Portugal to the fact that they got rid of their Jews." He further credited Jews for the rise of the Netherlands and noted that "one of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew."
William Saletan of Slate and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post were in the audience and reacted with nervousness and humor to Entine and Murray's theses.
Update: For the nitty gritty on how mothers beat genetics, see Anna's post here.
Oy. There's a Shel Silverstein poem, "Helping," included as a song on Free To Be You and Me, the peace-and-love children's tape I listened to growing up, which ends with the punch line:
"Now, Zachary Zugg took out the rug
And Jennifer Joy helped shake it
Then Jennifer Joy, she made a toy
And Zachary Zugg helped break it"
"And some kind of help is the kind of help
That helping's all about
And some kind of help is the kind of help
We all can do without"
The account of the American Enterprise talk had me, as a 5/8 genetic Jew, involuntarily singing those last two lines. It also triggered the original, snarky response that I challenge Murray to sit through the doltish company forced on me through seven years of Hebrew school and continue to believe that we're such a clever lot.
The perniciousness of positive stereotyping as a corollary to negative stereotyping is a discussion Ruchira and I have had before, though maybe it was on the defunct Dissemination blog.
This particular form of positive stereotyping strikes me as especially ironic, since a pet theory of mine-- at least as plausible as Murray's inane free-associations about the Talmud-- is that at least one of the complicated reasons for Jews' relative professional success in America is the cultural emphasis placed on the importance of effort, rather than innate ability. We're obligated, to our parents (to give them their "naches") and to the pride of our community as Jews, to achieve, and if God didn't give some of us smarts, so the thinking goes, then we're just going to have to work harder. I never got the sense that bragging about "my son, the doctor," was a boast to having birthed a natural born genius; it was the pride of a mother in having done, and made her son do, what they were supposed to in terms of personal sacrifice. Phillip Roth captures this dynamic well in his fiction. Stanley Kaplan, the child of Jewish immigrants, founded his testing empire on this premise during an earlier period of eugenic hysteria in 1938-- proving wrong those who believed that the NYC Regents' Exam tested aptitude by showing that you could teach to the test. (My own surviving Jewish relative of that generation, when hearing mention of Kaplan, Inc., still responds, without fail, "I remember when we were at City College and Stanley Kaplan was teaching kids for a nickel out of his basement."). I wonder if those Jews who come to believe, smugly, that our general success is somehow innate will lose that sense of the value of effort and end up achieving (or having children who achieve) less? Or perhaps smugness is enough-- I remember reading of a study that showed that children who were told that they had received high marks on an aptitude test in fact later tested higher than those who were not told they had high aptitude.
As for the general over-reliance on and obsession with "aptitude"...
"[C]onsideration ought to be limited to "individuals" who need to be evaluated for a specific task at hand. Even when a group consists of individuals with closely comparable traits in some enterprise or the other, it is dangerous to base human interactions on that blanket calculation. Doing so is unfair to the individual. It is a prescription for short changing some and setting up others for failure."
...Exactly. You should be a disabilities rights lawyer! Individualized determinations are what we're all about.
I could think of a million anecdotes from work to illustrate that somewhat opaque burst of enthusiasm. Just as one example, I had a client with Autism, who is non-verbal, but has held a job at a large hardware store for years (supported by an aide who assists in interfacing with people) on the basis of a strength and love for sorting tools into their proper place. The former client is much loved by family, friends, etc. Could the client do anything? Obviously not, but the client has a valuable role, and is well suited for the particular position. Judging the client's IQ is not really possible, given the social and communication impairments related to the Autism (it's guessed to be impaired), but is moreover not really relevant to any question worth answering: how the individual is best served, or how society best includes and treats the individual.
Posted by: Anna | November 02, 2007 at 02:22 AM
Two clarifications:
1) In my rhetorical question regarding the former client, I meant "anything" in the sense of "anything, without limitation, that the client were to set out to do."
2) I am not arguing that an IQ test is never useful-- it can have a diagnostic utility, e.g. in differential diagnoses between learning disabilities or mental illness and cognitive disabilities, for the purposes of treatment-- just that it begs the questions that people try to use it to answer. Also, any psychologist worth her salt who performs such tests (and I often work with such psychologists and neuro-psychologists as experts) will tell you that an IQ is an average derived from a number of sub-tests testing disparate skills, that socio-economic factors are known to influence testing, and that the test is just one piece of a person's profile. They will also tell you that while carefully validated, such tests will always depend somewhat on the subjective scoring choices of the tester and are not objective medical tests (e.g. of cholesterol or insulin levels), another reason to question social scientific claims based on the "science" of IQ data.
Posted by: Anna | November 02, 2007 at 02:43 AM
Anna:
I was hoping that you'd weigh in here, given your Jewish background but more importantly, your experience of working with the disabled who will not meet Watson or Murray's standards of qualified humans. Yes, that discussion was on Dissemination. I wish I could have retrieved it because several others spoke up and the points of view were illuminating. But as with many other defunct blogs, Dissemination has disappeared into thin air taking our collective wisdom with it.
I am glad you brought up your autistic client and how his special skill makes him a desirable and successful employee in the narrow field of expertize required of him. You, I am sure will also attest to the fact that others with different disabilities too have their special charm and value and deserve a shot at a fulfilling life, however difficult that effort may be in a world that is normalized for modal values. Down Syndrome for example, very often confers on those affected by the condition, a friendlier, kinder and more sunny disposition than James Watson probably could ever hope to possess.
Ah, would I have made a competent disabilities lawyer? Perhaps. But in my previous life as a conscientious teacher who enjoyed the give and take with the students and their varied abilities and aspirations, I guess the experience was not so different.
Posted by: Ruchira | November 02, 2007 at 01:12 PM
Yes, people often talk about a "Prince Charming" personality in connection to Down Syndrome; my clients with Down Syndrome have in fact, without exception, been delightful company. The quirky, difficult adults with schizophrenia can be pretty interesting to interact with, as well, though I try not to worry about whether I "like" my clients, since there are some who badly need help and have good cases but are not very likable, and others who are quite likable, but who need my help less.
A pet rant of mine, on which perhaps I'll post someday, is the failure of secular culture-- of which I consider myself, as a non-believer, a part--to yet come up with an adequate substitute for the various religious concepts-- soul, karma, etc.-- that are used to get at the idea of the equality and sanctity of each human life. As a person with an abiding respect for science, I'm troubled by the instrumentalism of some, like Watson (though certainly not all), in the scientific community, when they turn their focus to their fellow humans.
There are aesthetic ways to think about this-- an appreciation for variety over standardization-- as well.
Really, I'm not doing the topic justice, here, but liked your post.
Posted by: Anna | November 02, 2007 at 02:23 PM
the reason we are enthralled to IQ is that our economy is giving greater and greater returns to education. IQ is one of those things that makes completing college much easier. and the reason we care about education is the income it produces, and the income leads to assets which is how we measure our status in society. ultimately the problem of course is the fact that our society pretends as if worth is judged by moral character and not money, but the reality is that the latter is the true criterion of success. between 1800 and 1970 the wages of the unskilled and skilled closed so that the return on a college education was far less than it is today. now the gap is growing, and continues to grow.
Posted by: razib | November 02, 2007 at 07:00 PM