History of the race and intelligence controversy

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The history of the race and intelligence controversy concerns the historical development of a debate about possible explanations of group differences encountered in the study of race and intelligence. Since the beginning of IQ testing around the time of World War I, there have been observed differences between the average scores of different population groups, and there have been debates over whether this is mainly due to environmental and cultural factors, or mainly due to some as yet undiscovered genetic factor, or whether such a dichotomy between environmental and genetic factors is the appropriate framing of the debate. Today, the scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[1][2][3]

Pseudoscientific claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have played a central role in the history of scientific racism. In the late 19th and early 20th century, group differences in intelligence were often assumed to be racial in nature.[4] Apart from intelligence tests, research relied on measurements such as brain size or reaction times. By the mid-1940s most psychologists had adopted the view that environmental and cultural factors predominated.

In the mid-1960s, physicist William Shockley sparked controversy by claiming there might be genetic reasons that black people in the United States tended to score lower on IQ tests than white people. In 1969 the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen published a long article with the suggestion that compensatory education could have failed to that date because of genetic group differences. A similar debate among academics followed the publication in 1994 of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Their book prompted a renewal of debate on the issue and the publication of several interdisciplinary books on the issue. A 1995 report from the American Psychological Association responded to the controversy, finding no conclusive explanation for the observed differences between average IQ scores of racial groups. More recent work by James Flynn, William Dickens and Richard Nisbett has highlighted the narrowing gap between racial groups in IQ test performance, along with other corroborating evidence that environmental rather than genetic factors are the cause of these differences.[5][6][7][8]

  1. ^ Ceci, Stephen; Williams, Wendy M. (1 February 2009). "Should scientists study race and IQ? YES: The scientific truth must be pursued". Nature. 457 (7231): 788–789. Bibcode:2009Natur.457..788C. doi:10.1038/457788a. PMID 19212385. S2CID 205044224. There is an emerging consensus about racial and gender equality in genetic determinants of intelligence; most researchers, including ourselves, agree that genes do not explain between-group differences.
  2. ^ "Intelligence research should not be held back by its past". Nature. 545 (7655): 385–386. 22 May 2017. Bibcode:2017Natur.545R.385.. doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22021. PMID 28541341. S2CID 4449918. Historical measurements of skull volume and brain weight were done to advance claims of the racial superiority of white people. More recently, the (genuine but closing) gap between the average IQ scores of groups of black and white people in the United States has been falsely attributed to genetic differences between the races.
  3. ^ Panofsky, Aaron; Dasgupta, Kushan; Iturriaga, Nicole (2021). "How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 175 (2): 387–398. doi:10.1002/ajpa.24150. PMC 9909835. PMID 32986847. S2CID 222163480. [T]he claims that genetics defines racial groups and makes them different, that IQ and cultural differences among racial groups are caused by genes, and that racial inequalities within and between nations are the inevitable outcome of long evolutionary processes are neither new nor supported by science (either old or new).
  4. ^ Williams, Vernon J. (2009). "Fatalism: Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology and the IQ Controversy". Journal of African American Studies. 13 (1): 90–96. doi:10.1007/s12111-008-9074-1. JSTOR 41819194. S2CID 143910026.
  5. ^ Dickens, William T.; Flynn, James R. (2006). "Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples" (PDF). Psychological Science. 17 (10): 913–920. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01802.x. PMID 17100793. S2CID 6593169.
  6. ^ Nisbett, Richard E.; Aronson, Joshua; Blair, Clancy; Dickens, William; Flynn, James; Halpern, Diane F.; Turkheimer, Eric (2012). "Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin" (PDF). American Psychologist. 67 (6): 503–504. doi:10.1037/a0029772. ISSN 0003-066X. PMID 22963427. Retrieved 22 July 2013.
  7. ^ Kaplan, Jonathan Michael (January 2015). "Race, IQ, and the search for statistical signals associated with so-called "X"-factors: environments, racism, and the "hereditarian hypothesis"". Biology & Philosophy. 30 (1): 1–17. doi:10.1007/s10539-014-9428-0. ISSN 0169-3867. S2CID 85351431.
  8. ^ Birney, Ewan; Raff, Jennifer; Rutherford, Adam; Scally, Aylwyn (24 October 2019). "Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer". Ewan's Blog: Bioinformatician at large. 'Human biodiversity' proponents sometimes assert that alleged differences in the mean value of IQ when measured in different populations – such as the claim that IQ in some sub-Saharan African countries is measurably lower than in European countries – are caused by genetic variation, and thus are inherent. . . . Such tales, and the claims about the genetic basis for population differences, are not scientifically supported. In reality for most traits, including IQ, it is not only unclear that genetic variation explains differences between populations, it is also unlikely.