Race & IQ Differences:
An Interview with Arthur Jensen, Part 5

6, 150 words / 41:10

Part 5 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 4 here)

Transcript by Hyacinth Bouquet. The following is a transcript of the fifth and final part of Marian Van Court and Arthur Jensen’s conversation, which can be heard here, or using the player below.

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.

Topics include:

Evidence that limits on black and Hispanic scholastic achievement in the United States is based largely on intelligence and not on any form of institutional racism or bias

The interaction of politics and objective scientific findings regarding educational achievement

The lack of empirical experimentation in introducing new social and educational programs; the idea of experimental schools

Jensen’s planned book projects

Unethical critics of Jensen’s work

Personal remarks on exercise and longevity

Arthur Jensen: The main gist of the study is that black kids and Mexican-American kids do as well in school as you would predict from their scores on psychometric tests, on IQ tests, and so forth. We used IQ tests that didn’t overlap scholastic achievement, such as the Raven Matrices, and some other tests of that nature. In fact, if you go to predict scholastic achievement and put in these other predictive test variables, before you put in the racial identity of the subjects, dichotomize the black and white, zero and one, but that racial identity doesn’t add anything at all to the prediction once you put in abilities. If the school systems were, because of their segregated policy, discriminating against, say, black kids, then you’re expected to be doing more poorly in school than the scores would predict, and race [inaudible] scholastic achievement independently of IQ. [Inaudible] one bit.

The next school board that came in was willing to pass a resolution that my report was incompetent and racist. I almost wonder if I could sue them for defamation or something.

Marian Van Court: It seems like they just don’t like the results, so they call it incompetent and racist. It just couldn’t be more stupid, really.

AJ: Right. They weren’t able to offer any specific criticism, apparently. None came out in what I read in the newspaper. Someone down there sent me clippings about it. If it was incompetent, the test experts from the California Test Bureau weren’t able to find anything wrong with it. The journal that published it didn’t find anything wrong with it, and the journal actually solicited commentary from a number of critics who didn’t find anything wrong with the conclusion. So how the school board of non-experts found it incompetent, I don’t know.

MVC: Were the people in Bakersfield — were a lot of them black? I mean, were they elected to the school board?

AJ: I don’t know, because I wasn’t there to see the school board at that time, but they weren’t when I was doing the study. I had met with the school board, and they weren’t black at that time. Now I think they’ve got some blacks on it, or so I had heard. Of course, the newspaper report didn’t spell out the racial composition of the school board at the time they denounced my report.

Those are the kinds of things that happen. It’s all so political that one wonders what difference the results of educational research make to the people who are running the schools.

MVC: It seemed like, from your statement, that one would conclude that you thought that educational research has zero influence.

AJ: Well, here’s the way I think it may have some influence: the research is lying around there, and when the political climate is consistent with particular research findings, those research findings then come into play. People cite them, and base programs on them, and follow them up, and so on. I think when there were a lot of research findings lying around that were contrary to the whole Head Start notion, and compensatory education, and so on, and there were other research findings that would support those kinds of things, and those research findings are the ones that were cited and held up as examples and were springboards to other research in the same vein, and so on — when the political temper was that we’ve got to do something to create greater equality of educational opportunity. You might say that the political climate treats research in a very selective way.

MVC: It seems kind of crazy to me the way people get these ideas, as if we’re going to have busing. I mean there are many, many other ideas that you could cite that are in the same kind of vein. They get these ideas, such as that we’re going to have busing, and then they start this massive program that costs billions of dollars. You would think they would set up one city and say, “Okay, let’s do this, and see what happens; and then if it works well here, then we can try it all over.”

Anybody in his normal, everyday life isn’t going to just make such huge investments of time and money on things that are untried.

AJ: Absolutely, right. That’s because it’s a political thing. No researcher would do it that way. You know, I don’t care who he is, or what his political persuasion is, as a researcher he wouldn’t do it that way.

MVC: Like they’re talking about now [about whether] should legalize all drugs. I don’t really think that much about it. There are some things to be said for it, but there are a lot of things to be said against it, but I thought that maybe they could try it in one little city and see what happens. But no, they’ll never do that. They’ll either do it or they won’t do it.

AJ: Oh, that’s right. What we need much more of, for example, are experimental schools where you take a group of people’s particular views about what it’s going to take to improve the schools, and do it in one experimental school, or a set of schools, where you have a connected grammar school to junior high and high school, working together. Then put a lot of resources into that one school. So it may cost ten times as much as it would to run an ordinary school, just as it costs a lot to develop a computer — a new computer or something.

MVC: It’s like the idea of experimentation, the whole frame of mind that you get from engaging in any kind of scientific research, is completely foreign to the vast majority of people.

AJ: Oh, absolutely. The vast majority of people have no appreciation of how science works.

MVC: If you have an experimental approach to your whole life — and this may sound trivial, but women are all the time trying to think how to make themselves look better. This goes on from age 12, up until the time they die. If you just think, ” I’ll go to the beauty parlor every week, and I’ll buy a new dress, and do this and that.” I mean, you might be able to make yourself look reasonably good, but if you have an experimental approach, and you think, “Maybe I’ll get some tinted contact lenses, maybe I’ll try this, maybe I’ll try that.” On all the different categories of what to do to make yourself more and more devastatingly attractive, if you experiment, you are much more successful.

In any kind of endeavor, trivial such as that or not so trivial, I think that attitude of assertiveness, and trying to always gather more information, and experiment and manipulate and so on — that attitude gets people much farther. Unfortunately, most people are never exposed to that kind of thing. They don’t think that way. I think that’s one thing that education could help people a lot with [in terms of] how to run their lives.

There have been so many things. For example, I have lower back pain. It’s not very bad, but it hurts, so I got a book that was the best and most definitive book on what to do about lower back pain. So far, it has been helping me. It has surveyed thousands of people and found out what was most successful for them. If I didn’t have this book, I would go on for ten or 20 years and not know what to do. I would just try one unsuccessful thing after another. I don’t mean to go into a long harangue about this, it’s just that people are not exposed to these kinds of ideas, and it would be very helpful to them.

AJ: Is there anything more to be said about question 17?

MVC: No, no, I don’t think so.

AJ: I’ve sort of exhausted myself on that one.

MVC: Where do we go on to, question number 18?

AJ: What is my next book going to be about? That’s a good question, because I’ve been debating that point myself. I’ve got at least three books in mind that I want to write, and I hope I will write all of them. It’s just a matter of your energy, and holding out, and so forth, and so far it is. I’m not sure what the optimal order for doing them is. On one of the books, at least, I’m not even sure I would have known what I want to do, because someone may try to stop me.

MVC: Oh, okay.

AJ: I certainly deserve the right to edit out anything that you may say that I think may be to my detriment.

MVC: Sure, sure.

AJ: There are three main books I want to write, possibly even a fourth one, but I’m becoming less and less qualified to write the fourth one that I’ve had in mind for a long time. It would take full-time work to get on top of it enough to write a full book on it. That’s the book on heritability and mental ability. I thought I would call it something like The Inheritance of Mental Ability, but don’t say anything about that, because I may never do it. That field is becoming so technical and specialized, there is so much going on in it now, that I’d have to devote myself exclusively to that, and there are other people who are in a better position to do something with this. I may write some sort of textbook or something on this just to inform people below the high technical level — not the experts in the field, but just for students who want to know what this is all about. [Inaudible] book.

The three books that I have in mind that I’m mentioning is, one, I want to bring together all of the stuff on mental chronometry and intelligence; reaction time and intelligence, and so forth. There’s really quite a lot of research on this now. A lot of it I’ve done myself. It’s reaching a stage of theoretical formulation, and so forth, where one can be able to get [inaudible] that look pretty interesting, and it’s bringing to a focus what was really started by [inaudible] Gaussian [??] a hundred years ago; over a hundred years ago now.

I think a rather compact book that pulls all that together — the methodologies, the fields of theoretical notions around it, the basic empirical findings, and so on — would be a boon to the field. I thought of this partly because I get so many phone calls from people, so much correspondence, people asking about methodological things, and people who want to do research in this area, now. There is an amazing amount of activity in this area, whereas ten years ago, when I started working in this area, I was almost a loner. People scoffed at the idea that there would be anything in this vein. There’s so much in it now that it needs to be organized and brought together so that people who want to work in the field don’t have to go trudging through all of the scattered literature. They’ll have all the essence of it in one sort of [inaudible], kind of like a textbook.

So, that’s one thing I want to do. It sounds totally unexciting to the layman, but it’s very basic to other issues — to the whole question of intelligence and to race differences. Another book that I want to do is a book on the problem of black intelligence. The reason I want to do that now, even though I’ve written a great deal on that in the past, is that there’s so many new things that have come up, and the picture is changing somewhat as a result of reaction time recurrence, and multiple potential recurrence, and theories of intelligence, and what I call the “Fearless Hypothesis.” That is, the finding that the black-white difference is primarily a g-difference and these newly-discovered physical correlates of intelligence, and so on.

I’m also working on a paper reviewing a lot of these physical correlates, some new ones that have come out, since you were interested in that topic. They’re relevant to myopia and the fact that there are racial differences in the expected directions of myopia; and there’s so much that could be put together and [would] make such an interesting and strong case. It really puts the whole issue of black and white differences on a different footing. I want it to be a very rigorous, scientific kind of book. I’m not going to get far afield into big, broad social issues, although I’ll have a chapter that has a good deal to do with the social consequences of two groups being, in a sense, bimodal with respect to such a socially important trait.

That’s another book. That could be very controversial and may even have trouble finding a publisher, but I’d like to have one of the standard publishers publish it. I don’t want to publish it in some little, out-of-the-way place. I’d like one of the major publishers to take it on, as they have done my other books, for distribution purposes and so on.

Then the third book that I would like to do, [which is] kind of a magnum opus idea, is that I want to do a book on what I call the theory of intelligence. Not “theories of intelligence,” but the theory of intelligence, and there’s no really good book on that. There are a lot of textbooks, and books that aren’t very sophisticated, on this subject, but I’d like to do a book that would stand for some time as a good and rather advanced level, senior graduate-level book, and a book for experts on mental ability, basically. I think I’d call it The Theory of Intelligence. That would be a good, practical title. I’d explain in the Introduction of the book that I’m going to get along without the use of the word “intelligence,” as I did in my editorial for the journal, Intelligence. It’s a word, like nature: You don’t find scientists talking about “nature,” or “theories of nature,” and that sort of thing. I put the word “intelligence” in that same category. I’ll write it in the title of the journal, and I’ll write it in popular parlance, but I think it’s scientifically rather a useless term.

MVC: Meaning that it’s too broad and includes too many things.

AJ: It means too many things to too many people. It’s ill-defined, and you don’t really need the term. You can talk about abilities, and factors — and I have a rather unique definition of abilities, too.

I’ll be sending you a paper that I’m in the process of writing right now. [Inaudible] by our Dean here; black, incidentally. It’s really a book [inaudible] Ford Foundation [??] [inaudible] a book on — let’s see what the title of this grand proposal here is: “The Testing and the Politics of Opportunity Allocation.” He’s commissioned chapters from all kinds of people. Among the psychologists he’s got chapters from are Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and myself, and a couple of other psychometricians.

So one’s going to do, for example, a chapter on the history of the use of tests in the military. I’m basically doing an article on the relationship between g and manifest achievement, and what can be done, if anything, to get around “g,” or to ameliorate the bad effects of large differences in g that we find in our population — both individual and group differences, because I don’t think there’s anything that can be done to change the “g.” I’ve told the Dean that. You’re not going to change people’s g except on a biological level, either genetically or by some kind of genetic engineering, or other biological means; so he knows that I’m taking that stance. I still think that things can be done societally, and in the educational system, that will improve the situation we presently see, such as having more different kinds of educational programs for different levels of ability, and so on.

Those are the three main books I’m going to write. I’m debating on whether to do the reaction time book first, or the book on black intelligence first.

MVC: In the book on black intelligence, you would incorporate a lot of information about physiological correlates of IQ and then see if they were [going] in the right direction?

AJ: Right. A lot of the reaction time, a lot of the arguments that depend on the reaction time stuff. What my theory is — it’s already coming to roost — is that some people are getting turned off on reaction time research because they think that it may tie in with racial differences, and that if the reaction time research gets too well accepted, and the conclusions from it become rather scientifically solid, that then it [might be] extrapolated to racial things. If you start doing research with the same reaction time techniques in the racial realm, that will be strong support for certain views that they might oppose regarding racial differences.

MVC: Hasn’t anything been done on this so far? In other words, you haven’t done anything with reaction time?

AJ: In race? No!

MVC: Okay. I haven’t kept up with this for a couple of years.

AJ: Incidentally. What I’ve done has been incidental. I mean, it’s just been a result of there being some minority races in groups that I’ve happened to run into in reaction time experiments. I haven’t gone out, specifically, to investigate racial differences in these things.

MVC: Right.

AJ: That is, in a sense, another next logical step; and some people are beginning to see that this may be something which will come out of this. They’re already denouncing findings about reaction time on the grounds that they may show racial differences.

MVC: Yes, that’s getting pretty far out.

AJ: That’s what I meant by the corruption, this network of corruption of science by this racial problem that sticks in our craw, so to speak.

MVC: I wonder if this same method of looking at the physiological correlates of IQ and comparing the rates, I’m wondering if you could compare generations. I mean, like if [Richard] Lynn says that there’s this 20 point — I think — gap, or increase, rather, from one generation to the next, I’m wondering whether the physiological correlates — whether the parents would be shorter, not as often modeled, and so on. I’m wondering if it would go in the right direction.

AJ: I wrote a paper about that, about the use of [inaudible] techniques to anchor psychometric tests. It was a paper that I was going to give at the American Educational Research Association this last March, but they didn’t accept it. The program committee didn’t accept this proposal for a paper that I wanted to give. They never said why, clearly. The idea for it was stimulated partly by Flynn’s work. I think I sent a copy of my proposal for that paper to Flynn.

Incidentally, I just sent a copy of a letter that I had written to Flynn to you. You’ll probably get it next week. It has a few comments about my ideas about this raising of the IQ over the generations.

MVC: A lot of the data would probably already exist on the easy things, such as myopia and height, as far as when they induct people into the Army.

AJ: Oh, yes; we already know about height. I don’t know about myopia, but we know about height.

MVC: The other thing, such as the business of evoked potentials or reaction time, would be a whole lot of trouble, of course.

AJ: Yes, but one could start gathering data like that so that in the next generation we would have these anchors. We can actually examine the degree of relationship between psychometric tests, such as the Wechsler and whatever, and the reaction time measures, which are not much influenced by environmental things, unless they’re biological environments. Then these same anchors can be used at any other time in history. They’re measured on an absolute scale. They don’t depend upon any particular population sample. Reaction time is a time measurement. You could measure the reaction time of people on Mars, if there were any, and it could be directly compared to the people here. It doesn’t depend upon any population parameters.

MVC: It’s very interesting. That whole business is very interesting to me. Inherently interesting, but all the stuff that you can do with it is what I’m thinking.

AJ: I think by writing a book about the reaction times end of it, this gets a good reception and becomes generally accepted, and people won’t be turned off from researching this. It’s very important that a lot of other people have gotten into the act. Some of my work is now accepted because other people have replicated it and have found the same thing. Even critics who’ve replicated it have found the same thing, and so a lot of this is now generally accepted.

MVC: Would the book about the reaction time and the — what do you call these things, electrophysiological correlates, I guess?

AJ: Right.

MVC: This wouldn’t have anything, really, about black-white differences?

AJ: Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that in this book.

MVC: Right. You would write that to establish it.

AJ: The credibility of these techniques, and of the findings, and the fact that they are related to intelligence, and that this is now generally accepted, and here is a large body of research on it, and so on.

MVC: [Laughs] I was just thinking [that] really, your critics have a really hard time, you know? It would be very difficult. I was just thinking, if somebody’s goal in life was to discredit everything you said, he or she would have an extremely difficult time, and it seems like —

AJ: I guess I get a certain amount of secret pleasure out of trying to get my critics a bad time.

MVC: Yes, and the way you do this, it’s not only just the research and the way you do it, but there’s the strategy of how you’re presenting the reaction time book, and then you come along with this other stuff, which I think is exactly as it should be. It makes life miserable and hopeless for those people who are trying to refute you.

AJ: Right; but see, that’s what I thought of. If the book on black-white differences came out first, it might put a damper on further reaction time [inaudible] and so on. Other people would get cold feet and would get out of the field.

MVC: Also, in the reaction time thing, if you offer a lot of stuff so that a lot of ideas that generate ideas in other people — stuff so that a lot of people will rush around and think, “I can get a good, publishable article about this, or this, or this question.” Then more and more people get involved in it.

AJ: If you go through the issues of intelligence, you’ll see how many references there are to me and my work in this vein. I mean, a lot of people have gotten into the act, and more are doing it for graduate students doing dissertations. Do you know that Kamen[?] has gotten an apparatus just like mine and has done a study already?

MVC: Huh! Is he trying to —

AJ: Oh, yes, he’s trying to discredit me, and of course he’s already talking about the racial aspect of this thing. Unfortunately, in his own study he himself found a correlation between these reaction time measures and intelligence. He’s trying to explain them away as some kind of an artifact. I think he thought he wouldn’t find anything. He’ll probably give up in this area, because he sees that there’s just too much to contend with.

MVC: Have you talked personally to these people, such as Lewontin and Hirsch, and all these kinds of people?

AJ: Not for years, not for years. I’ve met all of them, and I’ve talked with them at times, in the distant past.

MVC: I just wondered if they were capable of having a reasonable conversation, or if they were so much opposed to what you were doing that they didn’t even want to talk about it?

AJ: Oh, no. The only one of them, of that bunch — again, this isn’t quotable — I don’t think of them in the same terms as Jerry Hirsch. I don’t know if you know anything about Jerry Hirsch of Illinois.

MVC: Is he the one who wrote that crazy, thick book about inequality? That’s somebody else.

AJ: Oh, yes, that’s somebody else. You’re thinking of Christopher Jencks. He was at Harvard then. He’s now at the University of Chicago, I think. No, Christopher Jencks is a reasonable guy.

MVC: I can’t exactly remember. The name Hirsch is very familiar, but I can’t remember what he’s done.

AJ: I think again [inaudible] he is kind of a nut. I mean, there’s no accounting for what and why he does some of the things he does, whereas people such as Stephen Jay Gould and Lewontin and Kamen are very predictable and consistent. If you were a good Marxist yourself, you’d be doing very much what they’re doing. You might admire what they do. You’d say, “I wish I could do as good a job of being a good Marxist as they are.”

They’re not crazy people. They’re just people with a particular ideology that dictates what they do. They’re bright and knowledgeable and so on. I mean, Lewontin is a world-famous geneticist, a full Professor of Genetics at Harvard. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, but he quit over some dispute. He’s a dissident type, but he’s a brilliant kind of person. Kamen is no fool. I mean, he’s a smart guy, but he just has this philosophy. None of them are Morton Downey types. I’ve met all of them socially, at cocktail parties, and things like that; at meetings. I’ve been on the platform with both Lewontin and Kamen. Although both of them are quite dishonest and underhanded in the way they do things, they do it in a polite way. You don’t have to worry they’re going to come up and punch you in the nose, or call you names, or anything, like Morton Downey does.

You know, Morton Downey slapped some gays he had on his program in the face.

MVC: Oh, that’s unbelievable!

AJ: Yes, he slapped this guy. He wanted to sue him, and Downey complained that the guy had gotten in his way when he was waving his arms around.

MVC: He might not be on the air for very long, because he’s going way too far.

AJ: How did we get on to that? Well, it doesn’t matter.

MVC: What about the reaction time?

AJ: Oh, right. Well, you see, that’s what I’m saying. I’ve kept the race stuff out of it very much, except where it would have been sort of unethical not to have broken down my data by race and reported stuff, and in a couple of places I reported blacks and whites, but just as part of the table, without any comment. Just like black junior college students and white junior college students, and I give the statistics on them, but no comment. Just breaking it down the way you would by sex, or anything else, and I’ve made nothing of it. People can see it themselves, and we don’t really know what the picture is. We won’t know until I am able to do some actual systematic research on this. I’m hoping I might be able to do it, but it remains to be seen. The picture may be different than anyone imagines at this point, including myself. I can think of different scenarios.

I may do the reaction time book first. It would be easier to do, in some ways. On the other hand, I don’t like the idea of letting things go too long when they are of such crucial importance that the information [needs to] get out. There is a lot of stuff, aside from reaction time and all of that, there is so much that hasn’t been realized and seen about black-white differences that I can put together, that needs to be consolidated in one place for scholarly people who want to see it; for professors of psychology, someone who really wants to know what is known here. Not in the sense of Shuey’s [??] enormous book, or the book done by Osborne and McGirt, which are just compendia of psych abstracts of studies that have tested blacks and whites. See, they didn’t make any effort to make any real sense out of the whole thing. It’s all right. It’s useful to have that. It really [inaudible] is an annotated bibliography, is all you’ve got in those books.

I want to go way beyond that, some kind of a coherent account of what all of this adds up to. I don’t want to push it so far back that there may be some risk that I may never do it. You never know what will happen to you. I’m in the age bracket now where I’m seeing colleagues falling by the wayside, so to speak.

MVC: That reminds me, I got a letter from this guy in Sweden. He’s really cute. He’s 20 years old, and he believes in eugenics. He’s really advanced for his age. Anyway, I wrote back to him and answered all his questions, and then I said, “PS, be sure to wear your seatbelt and don’t ride on motorcycles.” [laughs] Because he’s one of the very few young people I know who believes in eugenics. So I was thinking, you were saying that you’re at the age where your colleagues are falling by the wayside. I’ve been hearing on TV, and reading amazing stuff, that if you take an aspirin a day, it’s supposed to be really good for you.

AJ: I do that.

MVC: Oh, good! Okay.

AJ: I take a baby aspirin every day. I’ve been doing that for maybe the last three years.

MVC: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so glad to hear that.

AJ: I do quite a few things that I hope will preserve me long enough to get all the things done that I want to do.

MVC: [Laughs] Okay.

AJ: Then there’s the other problem: I’m getting to the point where my wife wants to do things in the way of travel, and so on, and I’d like to do them myself. She says it’s not going to be very long before we’re going to be too old to want to do some of these things. Getting around the world takes a certain amount of energy and good health, and your resistance has to be up, and so on. You run the risk of coming down with illnesses and so forth [that] you wouldn’t otherwise have gotten by traveling and all of that.

MVC: Yes, that’s true.

AJ: I owe something to her in doing some of those things, and I want to do them myself. There’s that competition between wanting to do the things that people do when they get around retirement age and still wanting to do some of these other books and research and so forth that remains to be done, so I’m going to have to do both.

MVC: How old are you?

AJ: I’ll be 65 in August.

MVC: I’ll be 40, myself.

AJ: 65, compared with some neighbors and things around here [inaudible] I mean, I swim a mile every day, at a time of the year up here when the lake is cold enough that nobody else goes in swimming.

MVC: Oh, that’s excellent! Yes, that’s great.

AJ: . . . and things like that. A lot of people my age don’t do half the things I do.

MVC: Did your parents live for a long time?

AJ: I have a mixed background in that way. My father’s side of the family have all lived into just their 60s and 70s. The oldest of my father’s family is his younger brother, died at 83; my father at 76. My mother’s side of the family have all gotten up into their late 80s and 90s. I still have one aunt, my mother’s younger sister, who is now 96, and still doing extremely well.

MVC: The real thing is, how long can you last while you still can function?

AJ: That’s right. On my mother’s side they function a long time. They’ve been enjoying life and doing things, and they’ve retained their brightness and so forth up to a very old age. I mean, this 96-year-old aunt is still just like anybody else we know.

MVC: Yes, that’s something. Well, that looks pretty promising.

AJ: That’s fairly good, but you never know. There are some people in our department that — I won’t mention any names — but one very brilliant person who’s really world-famous in his field, and a brilliant person, who has had some health problems in recent years, and he’s just gone way down. I wonder now he would make it as a grad student if he had it to do over again.

MVC: Yes, it’s really sad when those kinds of things happen.

AJ: Right, yes, and he’s younger than I am by four years. He’s had to take early retirement for health reasons.

MVC: I think that swimming is really the best kind of exercise. I think if you can swim a mile every day, I believe that’s really good for you, and the fact that you are able to do it means you must be in good shape to begin with.

AJ: I always feel very good. Another thing is I don’t have — you know, some people have good days, and bad days, and moods, or periods when they’re depressed and can’t get anything done, and so on. I’m not that way at all. I may feel a little tired, or disgusted, by the end of some days because of things that have happened, but I always get up in the morning raring to go and ready to enter the fray again. As someone said, I’m just lucky to have good body chemistry.

MVC: That’s really great.

AJ: I can keep going as long as I can on these things, but I do want to take some time out to do some of the things I want to do, and traveling around. But whenever I travel, I also do a certain amount of what might be called missionary work. I mean, I lecture at universities. I’ve got invitations all over Europe now. Whenever we go there, I’ll be giving lectures every few days at different universities.

I did that in India. I lectured at, let’s see, 14 or 15 different universities and institutes in India. I gave something like 40 lectures at some 14 or 15 different universities in India, all over India – and yet, we saw India. I had what I considered a good time, even though it kept me pretty busy doing these other things. It seems to make it worthwhile. I don’t feel I’m wasting my time in those places if I can give people lectures about the heritability of intelligence, and this, that, and the other thing, and I get plenty of invitations to do it. As long as I can do that, too, I will. Of course, it helps pay your way around.

Well, that’s about it! I think I’ll write this book on theories of intelligence when I’m too old to feel like traveling around, and so forth, anymore. I don’t know, but I’d like to have all of this done in the next few years.