Kevin Drum stepped into a firestorm the other day by suggesting that intelligence is a meaningful trait. He suggested two other issues related, but I’m going to primarily focus on that claim because it is at the core of the issue. One can’t continue to argue past that until one understand whether one disagrees that intelligence is meaningful or not.
Apparently Kevin and I missed indoctrination day for liberals on this one. I would say that measuring intelligence is more difficult than I think Kevin allows for, but that isn’t the core of the argument to me.
The ability to process information has its limits. Humans have a vast range of abilities, but we are limited in what we can accomplish intellectually. Within humans, that range varies by person. A significant portion of that range is usually determined by environment. What kind of environment was one brought up in, was there lots of stimulation, did the parents understand how to encourage learning and were they capable of teaching. But also, part of that is heritable. While parents with limited intelligence may have children with low intelligence because of the environment created, it is also true that by heredity the individuals will be lower intelligence on average.
Given inherit ability is a range, to some degree the individual has a range of intelligence they may fall within. Environment then decides within that range how well potential intelligence is actualized. However, there are intelligence speed limits for those born with bad genetics. Some mentally disabled individuals could not be Einstein regardless of the environment around them. And some incredibly bright children will never have high intelligence because they suffer from lead poisoning. We do not question whether these situations are real differences in underlying intelligence.
The problem seems to be that this discussion gets caught up in race because of twits like Murray. What no one seems to be pointing out is that race is essentially a social construct. Race is little more than how much melanin one has. Melanin does not affect intelligence. Duh.
Race in America is seen as some unchangeable thing, but we know this to be not the case. Race depends on socialization. How many stories do we know of where individuals passed as white before the Civil Rights Movement? So categorization of race is not even scientific. Beyond that races have long interbred in America so that while many darker skinned indviduals may be African-American in context of the social setting they live, they are not objectively any single race. Murray and Herrnstein seem to assume this unpleasant complication away when there is no justification to do so. Worse, they like many of their predecessors, want to take their work to inform public discourse despite its failings.
Individuals have different inate abilities. Intelligence, athleticism and other characteristics exist within a range for an individual. The problem comes when those like Murray try and sell the observed differences of complicated process as being caused by simplistic factors. Intelligence is the result of a series of factors including heredity. However, simplifying heredity as race is stupid theoretically and empirically.
Stephen Gould was right to be critical of many of the policy uses of intelligence in the past. Those initiatives assumed we understood intelligence much better than we do and resulted in horrific results often.
The mistake by others is to automatically throw intelligence out as a useful concept. We don’t question it as a useful concept when describing the damage done to children who have lead poisoning because we understand that environmental factor has significant impacts on the child’s intelligence. If anything, our understanding of the importance of environment in shaping even the most genetically capable children should motivate us to fight for opportunity in every child’s environment.
And $15 million for lead abatement, ain’t gonna do it.