Race and IQ Differences: An Interview with Arthur Jensen, Part 1

6,126 words / 47:55

Part 1 of 5 (Part 2 here ^[2])

Marian Van Court ^[3] recorded four-and-a-half hours of interviews with Arthur Jensen ^[4] (1923–2012), who was then a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1986. Jensen was one of the great pioneers in the science of human biological diversity. The following is a transcript of the first part of their conversation, which can be heard here ^[5], or using the player below. The other parts can be heard here: Part 2 ^[6], Part 3 ^[7], Part 4 ^[8], Part 5 ^[9]

There are a few places where the recording is inaudible, and have been marked as such. If you can figure out what is being said, or if you have other corrections, please offer them in the comments below. We would like to thank Hyacinth Bouquet for the transcript.

https://counter-currents.com/radio/JensenPart1.mp3 ^[10]

Marian Van Court: This is Marian.

Arthur Jensen: Right! Ready to go?

MVC: Yes.

AJ: Okay. I’m not all that ready. I’ve looked over this list of questions again, and we haven’t given them as much thought as they deserve. Each one really could be the subject for a whole essay. That’s the problem; but what I think I probably should do is simply think out loud about each one, and you can then paraphrase what I’ve said in the printed version of the interview.

MVC: Yes. Then also, when I send you the final draft, if you think of something else you want to add, you can just write it in there.

AJ: Oh, sure. Yes, I’m bound to have certain afterthoughts. Okay, now, number one: Many people agree that the average IQ difference between blacks and whites probably has a genetic component. I’m glad you put the word “probably” into that, because this still isn’t completely settled, and it’s true that something like 50 or slightly more percent of persons who have some qualifications in this area claim that they believe that a genetic component is probably involved, but no one really knows.

The reason we don’t know is not because we don’t want to talk about it or anything, but because there seems to be no scientific method available at the moment for settling this question that would be acceptable, that could actually feasibly be done. It would involve cross-mating of random samples of the two racial populations, and then cross-fostering of the children. That would probably be able to settle the issue, as well as it could be settled. That’s a standard experimental design that has been used in agricultural genetics; but of course, it can’t be done with human populations, because you would have to have some way of enforcing perfectly random samples of the two populations. Getting people to cooperate in such a thing, that’s just not at all feasible and would be ethically unacceptable to most people.

Now, this is more kind and prudent. These people feel that it’s more kind to blacks — more prudent, generally, in the sense of avoiding dissension and violence — to maintain the illusion that the difference is all due to prejudice and other environmental factors.

It’s very doubtful that it’s due to prejudice. It’s almost certainly not the explanation. All of the popular environmental explanations are probably wrong, or at least inadequate. They simply don’t do the job; but that doesn’t rule out as yet unknown environmental factors that may have some biological basis. For instance, kinds of nutritional factors and factors that haven’t been very thoroughly taken into account, such as children born to teenage mothers and so forth, who start life out with a kind of a prenatal and perinatal environmental handicap that hasn’t been adequately assessed and inspected. Although the perinatal study is a collaborated study that examined the prenatal and perinatal factors in IQ. [You] don’t find anything very dramatic among some 60 different factors that have been investigated along these lines, connected with prenatal condition of the mother, diseases, health factors, smoking — all kinds of things like that, as well as the perinatal things; that is, child’s health, conditions of birth, and so forth. [They] don’t seem to have any very large effect on IQs of children, and probably don’t have much of an effect on the mean difference between blacks and whites.

So very little is known about what environmental factors, if any, are really responsible for the black/white difference.

MVC: But haven’t a lot of people tried, real hard, for a long time, to establish the existence of environmental influences and failed? I mean, it seems like . . .

AJ: They keep trying on the same, few, obvious sorts of differences that do not explain this; and they simply persist in repeating those rather than investigating further aspects of the environment. They probably haven’t really looked at everything, or not very thoroughly, [in] the biological aspects of the environment. They keep talking about white racism doing this, but without being able to explain the mechanisms by which it would lower IQ and all of its correlates.

They talk about socioeconomic status, and it’s a very important finding. I may be responsible for this finding. The pattern of differences across various tests — you see, blacks and whites don’t differ the same amount on every kind of test. The pattern of differences is [more] different for upper- and lower-class persons, within either the black or the white group, than it is between the two groups. In other words, you can’t explain the pattern of black/white differences on various tests in terms of socioeconomic status differences.

MVC: I’m not quite sure what you’re saying. For example, verbal ability would maybe be more highly correlated with social class, and spatial ability would not be so much, and then . . .

AJ: That’s right, whereas the black/white difference in verbal ability, after you get rid of the general ability factor, is absolutely nil.

MVC: Right.

AJ: And yet there remains a sizable difference in spatial abilities. Social classes, within a racial group, do not show very large differences in spatial ability — really none, after [inaudible] is taken out. That’s the kind of thing that shows that the black/white difference is something different from the social class differences. There are other factors involved in it. There are some common factors, general factors, involved in both social class differences and racial differences.

Of course, general factors are not a causal thing; it’s something itself caused [inaudible]. I think that the dogmatic environmentalist stance, and a dogmatic hereditarian stance, has really prevented detailed research on environmental factors and the black/white difference. People haven’t really taken a close scientific look at this, strange as it may seem. The two sides of the argument have simply assumed a position that rules out the necessity for further research on it.

MVC: I’m just curious, do you have any specific things in mind when you talk about possible biological factors that would be environmental? I mean, obviously, if somebody gets hit on the head real hard, that’s not good. Or, if somebody has encephalitis, that could cause a loss of IQ. What kind of biological factors . . .

AJ: I’ll give you an example: Blood incompatibility between mother and child. The kinds of factors that lead to fetal loss. We know that there’s a high rate of fetal loss among blacks. This is true even in middle-class blacks, not [just] among lower-class blacks, but among middle-class blacks with good jobs, college education, and so on. There’s a higher rate of fetal loss than there is in the white or Asian populations. Now, if fetal loss is a continuous variable, then it may be that some children are born with a certain amount of damage that’s less than fatal, and this may be related to lower ability.

MVC: Could this have something to do with the fact that blacks have — I think the average is 20% — white genes in the United States?

AJ: That could have something to do with it. It hasn’t really been looked at carefully. But for example, we know there’s fetal loss in the case of Rh factor incompatibility within any race. When the mother and the fetus are incompatible in Rh factor, the fetus undergoes some damage. The children, the fetuses, that are a woman’s second or third pregnancy, where there’s an incompatibility with the previous incompatibilities, are at risk. Of course, this happens when the mother has one Rh factor and the father has a different one, and the baby has a combination that’s incompatible with the mother. If the mother’s Rh is negative, and the baby’s Rh is positive, I think that’s a combination that leads to trouble. The mother builds up antibodies against the child. So, stillbirths are much higher in second- and third-born children of mothers who have this incompatibility with their fetus on this particular single blood factor.

That hasn’t been investigated with respect to black/white differences, but this could be a continuous variable and could lead to some subtle damage that would lower IQ by one or two points, let’s say. If you have a number of these kinds of very small, micro-environmental effects operating, you could have a considerable effective lowering of the IQ in one whole population, if more of those factors are operating in that population.

I think these kinds of things still have to be looked at. I’m fairly convinced that some part of the black/white difference is tied in with biology, but whether it’s genetic biology or indirect effects of genetics, such as blood-type incompatibility or teenage pregnancies, children get off to a poorer start. I don’t just mean a poorer start in a cultural sense, I mean in a biological sense, and so on. All of these can be some appreciable part of this difference that we see between the average black and the average white.

MVC: But it seems like the people who focus on the environmental aspects don’t ever think about biological things. They just think about the social aspects.

AJ: That’s right, yes, and I think that this has had a dampening effect on adequate research in this area. Simply by giving these same old explanations, over and over again, that have actually been disproved — or giving explanations which cannot be scientifically tested, like saying that it’s due to white racism, without specifying any mechanism by which white racism could be measured, or adequately defined, or how it could affect mental development — they simply cut off all further attempts to search the environment for possible causes.

MVC: Speaking with Dick Lynn, I think, who wrote an article that said something to the effect that you don’t have white racism if you have all blacks, like in Africa. I’m not really too familiar with what has been done in terms of IQ testing in Africa, but my superficial understanding is that the IQs of blacks in Africa are considerably lower than they are in the United States.

AJ: I don’t put much stock in those arguments. It may be true, or it may not be true. I simply don’t know [if] we have the means for assessing the intelligence levels of persons whose environments have been so extremely different from that of the environments of the white persons who were tested. Do you know what I’m saying? I mean, if you go to the Africans who have not been in contact with white culture, I’m not sure that we have any means at present of testing those people that makes their scores validly comparable with the scores of Europeans, or whites in America, or blacks in America.

If one had some kind of physiological measures that are correlated with intelligence, it would be interesting to see what those are to evoke potentials, and so forth, in black Africans; but as soon as you’re talking about black Africans who are capable of taking our tests on a reasonably fair basis, you’re talking about black Africans who’ve already been brought into the white culture, [and] who have some education along the — have been expected to live up to certain demands of the white school system, and so on. I think that source of data is a very weak basis for argument. I looked at some of the literature on that stuff, but I was never impressed by it.

MVC: Yeah, I know. It is kind of a mess, or at least it didn’t seem exactly rigorous, from what I’ve read about it.

AJ: Well, that’s putting it mildly. Until someone can develop techniques that measure some components of intelligence, what we call intelligence, at a physiological level, I don’t think there’s much we can do with persons who haven’t been brought into the culture in which the kinds of tests we use can be regarded as appropriate. That even applies to purely non-verbal tests like Raven’s Matrices, and so on. We don’t know just what environmental factors influence those kinds of tests. The fact that they’re non-verbal doesn’t mean that they are not in some way experientially loaded.

If one could do an experiment — if one could take a group of black Africans right at birth, and adopt them into white homes someplace, one would have a better chance of assessing this kind of thing. There have been a couple of such adoption studies, and their results are extremely ambiguous because of all kinds of methodological problems, of selection of the adoptees, of self-selection of the subjects who would agree to participate in the study, and so on. One can draw very few scientifically worthy conclusions from any of those studies, in one direction or the other.

The rather disturbing fact is that by lining up with one side or the other on this nature-nurture argument about black/white differences, one really subverts research in this area. [What] I’ve seen as the greatest single obstacle to research in this area is people who too readily assume one position or the other and give superficial explanations for their stance. It’s amazing how little interested those people are in actually researching this topic. There’s probably less research interest in this topic than just about any other topic of psychology. Part of it is that their mind is already made up, and polarized, [and] they’re not interested in looking much further.

MVC: I don’t know which is more unpopular, that or the whole business of IQ and fertility. That’s another unbelievably unpopular area.

AJ: That’s unpopular, too, and it’s related to this, of course. We may get to that in a later question, when this comes up.

Now, you ask what harm there is in soft-pedaling this question — that is, by simply maintaining the illusion that all is due to prejudice or other superficial, I’ll say, environmental factors that have really been ruled out on pretty strong scientific grounds. Scientifically, the greatest damage that’s done by this is that each lie, you might say, or each myth that you try to sustain has to create other myths. It becomes an ever-expanding network of myths that have to be sustained.

One has to sustain the myth of culturally-biased tests, and the myth of some kind of unconscious prejudice on the part of teachers, where you can’t find any visible evidence at all of any prejudice on the part of the teacher. It’s one just thing after another; and each of these items then generates further myths, and so on, and you can trace them. They ramify into very distant areas. It’s a very subtle, in a sense, pollution of the whole of behavioral sciences by this particular issue.

MVC: That’s a nice way to put it, actually. I mean, it’s interesting.

AJ: The other harm in it is a kind of social harm, in that as long as you don’t actually get at the facts of the case, and simply work on myth, you’re powerless to do anything about it. Because the myths don’t have any leverage in reality. They leave you with nothing to do about the situation. They also can lead to a kind of social paranoia.

I’m reminded of attending a Berkeley school board meeting once, after the first several years of school integration and so forth. Berkeley blamed practically all of the black/white gap in scholastic achievement on segregated schools. This was about five or six years after the schools had been completely desegregated by two-way busing. They had a school board meeting, and the director of research for the school system showed slides and presented the test results — and they were no different than they were before desegregation. One black woman stood up in the audience and said, “Well, why is this? How do you explain that? Is there something wrong with the test?” The man said, “No, the tests are a fair measure of scholastic achievement, reading comprehension, arithmetic, and things like that.” The mother said, “Well, then, why is it? Why are our children doing so much more poorly? You told us that desegregating the schools would do it. What is wrong with the schools?” He said, “I don’t know,” and sat down.

I think this generates a feeling that there is something going on in the white establishment, you might say, that is inimical to the success of blacks in the educational system. You can see that where if you’re told that it’s not because of anything that can’t be seen and controlled, such as racism among the teachers and so on, then they begin to believe it’s some secret kind of conspiracy. That someone’s got to be to blamed for it, rather than [that] its cause may lie in past evolution or something. It may be an extremely remote set of causes that’s responsible for the differences we now observe.

MVC: Hasn’t the performance of Oriental children sort of thrown a wrench into the whole business about prejudice — the tests are biased because they were made by whites, and so on. How can somebody explain the fact that the Chinese, and Japanese, and Vietnamese children do so remarkably well? A lot of these children came to the United States, they didn’t have a penny, they couldn’t speak the language, and in a few years they were winning prizes and stuff.

AJ: That’s right, yes. It’s interesting that the recent National Spelling Bee Contest, the winner and the first runner-up, were both Asian. One was an Indian — one was born in India, in fact — and the other was Chinese. Out of such a small minority in the total population, they win things like this. I think all of these things certainly make it difficult for the usual popular environmental explanations of the black/white gap.

I’m not sure there is much more I can say on that particular point. I believe that the Asians may be somewhat resented now by certain groups, including white groups, mainly because of their rather conspicuous success. There is some commotion at the University of California now, and in the state legislature, over the fact that such a high proportion of California high school graduates who are qualified to enter Berkeley are Asian. There’s even been talk of changing the admission standards for Berkeley, which would somewhat cut down the number of Asians by putting in other requirements other than academic achievement, high test scores, and that sort of thing — more extracurricular sports activities and things like that.

There have been protests in the Asian community against doing that sort of thing, of course; but Asians are highly overrepresented in the colleges and universities in California — and they are, of course, highly overrepresented in classes for the gifted in the public schools. They are only about 2% of the general population, but they’re about 20% of the population in gifted classes.

MVC: Yes, that’s interesting. I knew they were overrepresented, but that’s quite a bit.

AJ: Oh, it’s a lot. They’re very overrepresented in membership in, say, the National Academy of Sciences. They are overrepresented by a factor of ten for their numbers in the population in the National Academy of Sciences, which is the group of about the thousand most elite scientists in the United States. Both Jews and Asians are highly overrepresented in the membership of any such organization as that, which is based on a very high degree of selection for intellectual accomplishments.

Okay, shall we go on to number two?

MVC: Okay.

AJ: I wrote in this module book, “Any prescription of eugenic overtones is almost certainly doomed for the twentieth century, and one can only speculate about conditions in the twenty-first century that may bring about a change on this issue.” You ask what I can speculate about these conditions and about what eugenicists might do to hasten the process along.

I think there are two kinds of catastrophes that may result in a changed attitude about eugenics, [and] that may actually make some eugenic measures a necessity. One is something that no one would wish for, and that we are all working toward not happening, and that is some kind of a nuclear holocaust.

It’s been suggested by others — this is not my own idea, I simply read it in other places — that if there were a nuclear holocaust, the fallout from it would be such that there would be a great many genetic mutations, and there would be so many children born with birth defects, and so forth, just as there were after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. There were a great many children born who were, for example, microcephalic imbeciles, [and] things like that.

There would be so much of that worldwide from nuclear fallout that it would be — the governments that are set up, they wouldn’t be the governments that still exist in all probability, and the world would be so disorganized that new governments would have to be formed. The governments that did exist would probably have to institute certain kinds of eugenic laws about who could and couldn’t breed, sterilization of people who have produced children who were defective, and so on, as well as the sterilization of defective persons as a result of these genetic mutations. Because it would be almost inhumane to try to maintain them in a world that was as upset by all of this as it would be. The facilities for taking care of that many genetically disabled persons would be impossible. Because eugenic measures would have to be taken very seriously then, it would probably be instituted by all governments that wanted to take care of their people. That would kind of break the ice, you might say.

Now, that’s one scenario we hope will never occur. The other scenario, that seems to me is virtually bound to occur, is the one of population pressure — particularly in undeveloped nations.

India, for example, has doubled its population, [and] almost doubled its population, since it gained independence in 1947. At that time, it had a population of something like 350 million, and now it’s pushing 700 million, maybe even slightly over that now. This kind of population pressure is going to finally cause governments to do what China is doing. Of course, only a totalitarian government at present could do this, but it may be that other governments that are not totalitarian are going to see the necessity of doing this just in order to preserve a reasonably decent standard of living for the majority of people in the country.

First of all, this is going to have eugenic effects. One can be quite sure that the limitation on family size, now being enforced in China, will have positive eugenic effects due to the differential birth rate, as one goes from the low to the high end of the ability spectrum. Now, we don’t know much about this in China. I’m not aware of any research that’s been done there. But in all countries where this has been researched, it’s found that persons who marry or mate without the benefit of marriage — either one – [and] who are in the lower half of the IQ distribution, particularly in the lower fourth — that would be IQs below 90 — tend to have larger families than persons in the upper quartile of the distribution. Fewer of them marry or mate, but the ones who do have larger families.

If you uniformly restrict family size throughout the population, then there will be a more optimal balance between the high end and the low end of what you might call the IQ distribution.

MVC: But it seems like that would be eliminating a dysgenic situation, but you would just be breaking even if everybody had the same number of children, wouldn’t you?

AJ: Well, we’re breaking even as it is, so you would actually have a eugenic situation. We seem to be breaking even, at least within the white population, [as] studies show, because as you go below average IQ on down toward the low end, the percentage of people who have any children at all decreases. But those who do have children, have more children than do people in the upper half of the distribution. More of them have children, but fewer of them.

MVC: Right, but I’m going to have to take issue with you on that point, because my research when I was at the University of Texas on IQ and fertility covered from about 1894 to 1984, almost 100 years. It was a huge sample, and they had this little bitty IQ test — but for statistical purposes, it was useful. Out of all the — I think it was 15 – cohorts, almost every single one had a statistically significant negative correlation, with the exception of the Baby Boom generation, which had just about a zero correlation between fertility and intelligence.

The Baby Boom generation was the main one that all these people — I can’t even remember the names; Reed and, you know, [inaudible] did a study, and some other people — that’s the generation that most of those people focused on. Also, they didn’t have really representative samples. So the conclusion that I came up with was that throughout this whole century, up to the present, there’s been a negative correlation almost the whole time.

I somehow managed to disprove this business of the really stupid people sometimes not marrying and not having any children. That was the case in one study that was done around the Great Lakes. I can’t remember whose study it was, because it’s been so long. They said, “Oh, we’ve got the answer to this paradox, and it seems plausible” — but they’re wrong!

It’s been so long since I’ve thought about this, I can’t quite remember why they’re wrong.

AJ: You may be right on that; I’m just not sure. I’m familiar with your article on that. One thing that’s a sort of a mystery in this field right now is why there seems to be this secular increase in IQs on both verbal, or culturally fair sorts of tests, as well as the verbal tests, and more culturally loaded tests. In fact, it seems to me that [it’s] tests like Raven’s Matrices, the non-verbal and so-called culturally fair test, [the] culture-reduced test, that show the largest increases in average scores over the last couple of generations. Do you have any ideas about that?

MVC: The only thing I can think of is that you have said — and this seems absolutely reasonable — that the “G” is a dominant trait. I think you had an article about spatial ability where cousin marriages showed an increase in spatial, therefore we think that’s recessive, but general intelligence is dominant. The greater increases in transportation and communication and so on means there’s going to be more outbreeding, I guess you might say. So the extent to which it’s dominant, you know . . .

AJ: Yes, that could be. I think it may be related to whatever the factors are that have caused this secular increase in height and the rate of maturation. These things have been going on over the same period of time, and it may be the same biological factors, because they seem to affect the whole population quite uniformly.

MVC: Okay, let me ask you about the decline in SAT scores. Do you attribute that solely, or partially, or what, to the fact that they’re trying to make everybody stay in school, and a lot of people are taking the test nowadays who would have just dropped out long before? Is this the cause for that?

AJ: Right. A large part of it is due to that, but this so-called blue ribbon panel that was appointed to investigate it — and it had very competent psychometricians on it — found that some small part of the variance, the lowering of SAT scores, could not be explained by that factor. I think [it] may simply be changes in the composition of the population. That is, what have been the birth rates, and so forth, in different segments of the population that take the SAT? These intergenerational changes, or changes that take place between decades, can simply reflect slight differences in the composition of the population.

MVC: But what I can’t understand is how can you reconcile that with Flynn’s stuff about how we’re supposed to be having an increase in intelligence. It just doesn’t seem to make sense, unless you say that it’s all because more people are taking the test who wouldn’t have otherwise.

AJ: Of course the total population isn’t taking the SAT. It’s some rather select part of the population. It’s a fairly large proportion of high school graduates, but it’s certainly not a representative sample of the total population. That may be part of the explanation. Also, the SAT is heavily educationally loaded, so the kinds of things that are stressed in school, and the kinds of demands that are made by schools in order to get through, would be reflected in SAT scores more than in most IQ scores.

MVC: I see! So, in other words, a decline in education would be sufficient to explain that.

AJ: Yes. Education watered down to accommodate a larger number of persons getting through, and so on; standards lowered, grade inflation, all of that sort of thing. Something like 40 to 50% of the population can go on to college because they’re high school graduates. Then the educational standards are lower, and so forth. It may be that even the top achievers are not achieving as much as they did at some other time in our history, simply because the demands on them are not as great.

I know of cases where children have switched from one school system to another, and the differences in standards between different school systems is quite marked, depending largely on the nature of the population in the areas served by those school systems.

MVC: Oh, yes. I can just say, like myself, I went to a public school for most of my life, and then in high school I went to a private school, and it was such a difference that it was just unbelievable!

AJ: Right. People have noticed that in going from big city schools to suburban schools, for example. The standard of achievement expected in one place is very different from that in another. Children simply have to work much harder, do more homework, take their studies much more seriously, and read books at a higher reading level, and so on.

MVC: Let me ask you one other thing about this Flynn business. Is he the only person who’s got ahold of all these data, or is this stuff accessible to anybody who wants to get ahold of it?

AJ: I think practically all of it’s accessible to anyone who wants to get ahold of it. It’s such a Herculean job to do what he’s done with the data, however, that I doubt if anyone has, or will, reanalyze these data in the way he has to see if they come out with the same conclusion.

I’ve been fairly closely in touch with him. I’ve corresponded with him fairly regularly over the last two or three years. In fact, I just got a letter off to him this week. He’s still looking for more data, and he writes to me for data. I just recently sent him some data that I got from the Berkeley School and the Baker School. I don’t know what he’s going to do with it, but he seems to me to be an honest investigator.

In his big article in the Psychological Bulletin ^[17], he gives references to all of his data sources; and presumably, anyone else who wanted to could go out and dig those up. I myself was one of the referees on that article; and I, of course, didn’t feel inclined to go out and redo all of the research he had done. It would take me four or five years to dig into all that material the way he has done. So a referee simply takes his word for it, and one does that in refereeing nearly any kind of an article. I didn’t find anything methodologically wrong with what he had actually done.

Now, how select his data are, I don’t know. He claims he’s taken all of the data that are available and suitable for this kind of research. That is something I [gap in audio — silence] likelihood that there’s some kind of sampling problem. There may even be differences in the laxness with which tests are given over time. It may be that teachers and so forth took tests less seriously in recent years than they did earlier, and this could affect levels of performance. For example, not observing time limits strictly, and so forth. Of course, much of the data that he’s based this on is standardization data put out by the test publishers themselves, and they have usually given the tests under very rigorous conditions.

MVC: I guess until you really get into it, you just have no way of knowing what might be the . . .

AJ: That’s right, and he is going to have to come up with some kind of explanation for this. He can’t just throw it out there and expect others to explain it, because he’s on top of the data and is in a better position to try to find an explanation. I doubt very much that the differences he’s finding in some places, such as in Holland, represent real differences in basic intelligence.

MVC: It’s hard to believe. Actually, I think you wrote somewhere, maybe in this latest book, that if people were that much smarter than their parents, somebody would notice it!

AJ: Oh, yeah, it would be noticeable.

MVC: It’d just too big of a jump to say that in society there would be many different things where it would come out. Teachers, who are kind of old, would think, “Wow, look at these new kids!”

AJ: That’s right. I’ve been a Professor at Berkeley for 30 years now, and the students now aren’t one whit smarter than they were 30 years ago. I’ve saved a lot of exams from 30 years ago, and I’ve known a lot of students, I’ve read a lot of dissertations, I’ve been on a lot of oral exam committees, and so on, and I can’t see any real change in the students’ ability level between then and now.

MVC: Also, it just seems intuitively implausible. Maybe this doesn’t constitute a reason for anything, but just looking around at the miserable mess that things are in, you just think to yourself, “If all these people are so much smarter than their ancestors, my God, those people, how did they even manage to put their shoes on and make it to work in the morning?”

AJ: That’s right, yes! I don’t think Flynn himself believes that these changes in test scores reflect real changes in intelligence. I think that the point towards which his research is converging, in his opinion, is to discredit confidence in the test scores, so that we do not have any confidence in the fact that the black/white difference in test scores has any real meaning.

MVC: I see, I see. That’s interesting.

AJ: That’s the basic argument. That’s what he wants to accomplish.

MVC: But it also has another effect, which I consider deleterious, and that is I am worried about the relationship between intelligence and fertility, considered as a whole — the black population, the white population. If people think that for some reason or another we’re actually getting smarter, then any dysgenic trend is going to be dismissed and not taken seriously. What he’s doing, I don’t know, for a long time it’s kind of worried me.

Let’s see, we’ve strayed a little bit.

AJ: We’ve gotten off onto subjects that are not contained in the question.

MVC: That’s okay. I’ll just put it all together and it’ll work out great, I’m sure.

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