The politics of intelligence
by David Adesnik | March 30, 2009
It’s the old nature vs. nurture debate. Is intelligence genetic, or does your upbringing matter? Yesterday, the Times reviewed a new book that makes the case for nurture. This comment from the reviewer caught my eye:
When the evidence is ambiguous, it is all the easier for ideology to influence one’s scientific judgment. Liberals hope that social policy can redress life’s unfairness. Conservatives hold that natural inequality must be accepted as inevitable.
Actually, I think conservatives have an equally compelling interest in the case for nurture, rather than nature. It’s all about responsibility. Your family has to take responsibility for your education. Schools can’t do it alone, no matter how much funding they have. Consider the following item from the review:
If I.Q. differences are indeed largely environmental, what might help eliminate group disparities? The most dramatic results come from adoption. When poor children are adopted by upper-middle-class families, they show an I.Q. gain of 12 to 16 points.
So what now? Should the government help poor families become upper-middle class? Or do poor families have to learn from the example of their wealthier cousins? The answer to that may really be about ideology.
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2 Comments - add your own
JayDickB — March 30, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Many years ago, a very wise professor told me: “It’s nature times nurture, not nature versus nurture”
I believe that to be true. A good upbringing can overcome deficiencies in native intelligence, and vice versa.
Many people don’t understand that there are different kinds of intelligence. I have met people who could hardly speak in complete sentences, but could diagnose and fix a computer problem quicker and better than others who speak perfectly but can’t do anything but talk.
IQ tests don’t directly measure any real skills except for test taking. High IQ scores may correlate well with other abilities, but there are enough exceptions to degrade their importance.
Remember, necessity is the mother of invention. To get the best out of anyone, you must give them big, continuous, incentives to produce. That’s how ability is really discovered and measured, not by IQ tests. Providing government payments in return for nothing greatly reduces incentive.
Gabriel Austin — March 31, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I realize that IQ is said to be a measurement of intelligence. I believe it is rather a measurement of the finagle co-efficient: How good are you at giving the answers the examiners are looking for?
Surely a kid living in a slum is savvier than a kid coddled in a suburb.