Race & IQ Differences:
An Interview with Arthur Jensen, Part 3

5,665 words / 39:15

Part 3 of 5 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

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

There are many 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:

Jewish talent in classical music

Jewish pushiness

Media bias against hereditarianism

Science and ideology and their influence of education

The political corruption of the social and human sciences

The difficulty of discussing scientific ideas in the popular media

Arthur Jensen: . . . Horowitz; every important American conductor has been Jewish. Bernstein, Wallenstein; you name them. Lorin Maazel; there’s just so much talent!

Marian Van Court: I’ve always been sort of pro-Jewish, because I find that I get along better with Jews. I mean, they tend to be more ambitious, and they have a reputation for being a little bit pushy, and I think I’m a little bit pushy. I hope I’m not obnoxiously pushy, but do you see what I mean? They do tend to be smarter, so I myself am to some extent pro-Jewish.

I don’t want to go into a long thing about this, but one of the things that Nathaniel and Sylvia and I came up with was we decided that you might have something like a bimodal distribution. That’s a distribution of assertiveness. It may be that the average Jew is optimally assertive, but then you’ve got this group, which is maybe not quite as big as the other, at the top, which is really, really obnoxiously pushy.

The thing is, I was a house guest for a year in Florida, and there are a lot of Jews in Florida. These Jews who had come down from New York would tell about what people had done, and what people had said. I just don’t see how you could hardly avoid the conclusion that they were . . .

AJ: Yes, that may be. Well, I’ve run into that, living in New York, myself. I’m not sure if it’s just a truly Jewish thing. It may be traits that were brought over from parts of Europe, where this is sort of modal behavior. You don’t find that much among the Jews in the academic community. I think you may find it more in Sephardic Jews than with the Ashkenazi Jews; I’m not sure. I haven’t felt this about Jews that I’ve known in the academic world, whereas the people I’ve known who have dealt with Jews in the business world have felt this.

MVC: I can remember that I went to an optometrist, and I got some glasses. The glasses cost pretty much money, and so I said, “Do I get a glasses case with this?” I hated this guy. I hated him, really, because he was so obnoxious and everything. So he says, “Well, that’ll be $2.00.” It just made me sick, because you don’t want to give somebody a glasses case? It’s a cheap, little plastic piece of junk. They just bought some glasses, and then he’s trying to get two more dollars out of me, right?

AJ: I don’t think we can go much beyond the anecdotal level on that topic.

MVC: I was going to say that I think maybe we should just cross off question number 14, unless you think you have something you particularly want to say. On second thought, I just thought that maybe this is not a very good question.

AJ: There’s not much that can be said that anyone couldn’t answer for himself, in a way. It’s just a matter of getting information out to the people who are concerned.

MVC: Right. It’s like, why am I asking you this question? It doesn’t seem very good.

AJ: Okay, let’s see. Number 16: “Why does the media continue to distort this issue? What can be done about it?”

The only reason that I can give as to why the media continues to distort this is that — well, a couple of things. One is simply ignorance on their part. I run into media people who profess to actually believe the contrary to the views that are expressed on that question, and were very surprised and rather relieved to hear that there are people with a scientific background who espouse these views. They didn’t have anything against them, themselves, they just thought that that’s the way things are. The science says that there are no genetic differences. They [inaudible] otherwise. When they learn that’s not the case, they themselves felt rather relieved. In one case, the guy even thought it was kind of a newsworthy thing, and was glad to report it.

That’s part of it: ignorance. Another part is that a great part of the media are very liberal. Why, I’m not sure, but it does seem to be the case. [Inaudible] liberal people, when I’ve asked them this very question, most of the media are just very much on the liberal side. You ask newspaper reporters, editors, this and that sort of thing, what party they are in, and most of them are Democrats, most of them are the liberal Democratic party.

MVC: I remember reading about a study that tested undergraduates in different fields, such as in business, engineering, various hard sciences, journalism, and literature, about their political beliefs. It’s exactly like you would imagine. The business people, the hard science people, tended to be conservative. The literature and journalism people tended to be very liberal. So it may be that the people who go into journalism are liberal to begin with.

AJ: Yes, I think so. Right. That’s another reason. Then the third reason, I think, is that they think they are appealing to their readership by taking this liberal of a stand on these particular issues. They’re upholding the common man’s desire to be equal to everyone else. I think that they think it’s just good news policy to take the environmentalist side on all these issues. Those are the only two things that I can think of.

MVC: I noticed some woman who had written in to Ann Landers a while back, and one of her adopted children turned out to be a juvenile delinquent. Ann Landers’ comment was that an awfully lot more is genetic then people realize. I thought that was sort of interesting.

AJ: Yes, that is interesting — and Ann Landers is Jewish, incidentally.

MVC: On question 17, I think this is another not very good question, because to tell you the truth, what is policy in public education, and where does it come from?

We can either eliminate this question or we can try make some sense out of it, if you want to. Whichever way you want to do it.

AJ: Policy in public education is not any monolithic policy that permeates the entire educational system. It’s whatever a particular school board, and so forth, decides on.

MVC: But I mean, for example, with busing and tracking, or no tracking . . .

AJ: There is national policy; there is policy on state level; there is policy on a local level. [There could be a] general policy that would, say, support a national school busing policy, but we actually don’t have a national policy that supports it. The present administration doesn’t support busing. [Inaudible — can’t hear this passage clearly] in the bureaucracy.

A lot of educational policy continues on in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in the bureaucracy at that level, independently of whoever’s in the White House, or whatever party is in power. It just goes on. There’s a large group of bureaucrats who remain as a kind of constant in the picture across every administration.

MVC: Well, as far as the influence of your research, I heard — maybe from you, or I don’t know where I heard this — that when your 1969 Harvard Educational Review article came out that people in the White House were reading it. And I was just wondering whether if that, as well as your work on FOS and mental testing, might have had a lot of influence as far as sort of putting a lid, or holding back, some of these trends about . . .

AJ: It may have had. It’s hard to say. It certainly hasn’t on any official level, to my knowledge.

MVC: Yes, but they won’t acknowledge it.

AJ: . . . teaching in a rote fashion, and so forth, actually became more widespread after that article. Whether my article had anything to do with that directly, there is no way of knowing. It may just be that teachers shaped by the pupils do whatever seems to work, expecting it to work better than other things, and they were led in that direction.

Programs such as Sesame Street are based entirely on the rote teaching of concepts of letters, numbers, and all of that. It’s almost as if I’d written a prescription for them, and they were carrying it out to the letter. Whether that stems from anything I had done, I don’t really know. I know that a lot of attention was paid to the things that I had written and said, but how much impact it had, I’m not at all sure.

Despite all the research on test bias, court decisions are still being made that go completely against all of that research evidence.

MVC: I’m anxious to find out more about what the recent court decisions have been and whether, and to your knowledge, even before bias and null testing was published, is it just like a situation where you’ve got one case after another that says, tests are biased; we can’t use them? In other words, are there no instances in which the judge says, “No, we have to use the tests”?

AJ: There are, but interestingly enough, it’s the same as this case in Chicago: Judge Grady [??]. The case was just paralleled perfectly with the Larry Dee [?] case. In fact, there was this great overlap in the witnesses they had. They had many of the same expert witnesses as in Chicago. The issues were exactly the same as they were in California. The only thing that was really different was the judge.

MVC: And what year is this?

AJ: Oh, this was close to 1980, and the judge said that, no, he didn’t think the tests were biased. That was the decision he came to, after hearing all the testimony and examining the test itself. He wrote a very long decision, and it was more sensible than the judge in California. I still didn’t like it from the psychometric standpoint, because he really discounted all the psychometric evidence, all the actual statistical evidence and the research. He threw out all the testimony of the test experts, because they disagreed. I mean, one of the experts was [name inaudible], who is the test expert. Since he disagreed with Thorndike, who is a test expert, this guy says, “I’m going to have to throw out all the expert testimony, and I’ll just look at the test myself.”

MVC: That’s terrible.

AJ: [Inaudible] have to go over the [inaudible] and Wexford test, item by item, he came to the conclusion that only a few these items look biased to him. So on the whole, the test is biased. Well, that’s not how you decide whether a test is biased.

MVC: Right.

AJ: At least he came to an opposite decision, which meant the Chicago schools could go ahead and use the test. But what did they do? They went ahead and said, “No, we think the tests are biased, anyway,” and they threw the test out. [Inaudible] in same position that we are in California.

MVC: In other words, the judge ruled that tests can be used, and the school board said, “We choose not to.”

AJ: [Inaudible] Superintendent, who was black, Dr. Ruth Love, who acted as Superintendent to the [inaudible] school, said, “Well, we don’t agree with the judge’s decision. We think they’re biased, and we’re not going to use them, anyway.”

[Inaudible] it’s a school law, and not a state law or city law. It’s things like that, you see. There are still people in our department at Berkeley who [inaudible] the test are biased! This is part of the content of their court [??].

MVC: I know. It’s amazing. I was just thinking, because I was listening to the interview from Wednesday and typing it up and all, and I was just remembering when I was in an anthropology course. I was an undergraduate, and there was really nothing in the course that had much to do with black-white differences in IQ, or the validity of IQ tests. It really didn’t have anything to do with that. The Professor brought in this woman to give us a lecture for an hour about how Jensen is completely wrong, and the tests are totally biased against blacks, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was so angry!

This is when I was looking into this, and I had talked to you and gotten a bunch of papers. But I was so angry, and I argued with this woman, and I raised my hand. It was a huge, huge class, like an auditorium, and I argued with this woman. I was so nervous and angry that I actually couldn’t see! I mean, I was just so upset that I think I was practically blind with rage. I was just not going to let that pass without having my say, and naturally, I think there were some grateful people there. The people who thought, “I’m grateful that someone has said something that is true and reasonable.” Of course, the majority of them thought, “Oh, here’s some reactionary jerk.”

AJ: There’s a professor who teaches Psych 1A at Berkeley who does the same thing. I mean, he gives one whole lecture that denounces me, and the whole notion of heritability of intelligence, and claims the tests are biased, and this, that, and the other thing. [Inaudible] and required reading for the course is this book by Gould, Keegan, and Lewison: Not In Our Genes.[1] That’s the only reading that he requires for the unit on intelligence.

MVC: Is this guy a Jew or not?

AJ: I don’t really know. His name is Seth Roberts.

MVC: That’s Jewish.

AJ: That’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?

MVC: It comes from the Bible. “Seth” comes from the Bible.

AJ: I’ve never met him. I’ve never seen the guy [inaudible] Professor. He’s been at Berkeley about three years now, but I’ve never run into him. Someone got these lecture notes, and there is all of this nonsense in them. So, I called him and told him I thought that the students were being shortchanged in this area, and that he was misrepresenting the field, and so on. I found all his reading is just [inaudible name] stuff. He hasn’t read anything. He doesn’t know the names of the big people in behavioral genetics, for example.

MVC: How did he respond to you?

AJ: I told him that I’d seen his notes. He has his notes mimeographed, and he gives them to the students. His whole lecture is mimeographed, and he gives them out to the students. He says, “Oh, what did I leave out?” He talked as if he thought he was giving an objective account of the true state of affairs, and that this was the common belief.

I told him what to read, and so on. I told him that I almost felt like demanding equal time. He said he would be glad to have me in his class as a guest lecturer the next time he gives a course — next year, if I’m willing. So I said, “Sure, just let me know at least a week in advance, and I’ll give your students a lecture.” He felt a bit sheepish, actually.

MVC: Did this happen just recently?

AJ: Just a couple of months ago.

MVC: So that means that this time next year he’ll give the class?

AJ: Yes.

MVC: I see. That should be interesting.

AJ: He gives only one lecture on intelligence, and this is what he gives. It’s such a waste! He spent quite a lot of time talking about [inaudible name], fraud of [inaudible name], and accusing other people of dishonesty, and so on. He brings in all the, you might say, dissident things. I can see where he got practically all of it with [Inaudible name]

When I called him, I asked him what he had read in this area. I found he’s read really nothing of any importance. He didn’t know the names. For example, he didn’t know Bouchard. He didn’t know Sandra Scarr. He doesn’t know any of the prominent people in behavior genetics, such as Robert Plomin. He didn’t know about the Minnesota Twins Study. Imagine! And yet he keeps talking about the heritability of intelligence.

MVC: I always get really upset when I feel as if a whole bunch of people are being grossly misled, and so I think it’s good that you’ll be able to talk to them.

AJ: He has a thousand students in that course, each year. See, that’s going on at a major university, like Berkeley. What’s happening in other places? So much ignorance, and willingness to believe the other side. [Inaudible] understand it; and yet, the survey here isn’t as smart as these people [inaudible] survey. These various experts [inaudible].

MVC: I watched this guy on TV who wrote this books about AIDS. He’s a journalist from KQED, I think. I can’t remember his name. Anyway, he was saying how the response of the public and of the government was so unbelievably slow and inadequate. I wondered if almost anybody who discovers that something is not right about what the public believes, and about public policy, and these kinds of things, and what people should be doing about these different problems. I just wonder if there might be a whole host of really grossly inefficient and stupid things that are going on in the world. Then if you went into other fields — I mean, I think our field must have; more than most, certainly. But if you went into some other fields, I wonder if you wouldn’t find all kinds of unbelievable, stupid things that were going on, and you might wonder, “How can all these people go along believing in these things, and why doesn’t society sit up and take notice, and for God’s sake, do something?”

AJ: I think that’s true, although I do think that the social sciences are the worst in this respect, partly because there are so many vested interests, as well as the issues that are dealt with by social science, that touch people directly and personally. Whereas, arguments about the nature of black holes and white dwarfs and the size of the known universe, and things like that, don’t touch people very closely.

MVC: Yes, exactly. It seems that the people who oppose IQ tests, and the whole idea of a genetic basis of individual and group differences, always manage to come out like they have the moral high ground. We are depraved, and maybe it’s because we are all from upper-class backgrounds, so, therefore, we’re just trying to hold on to our class privileges.

AJ: That’s right, yes. That’s an extremely popular belief. It’s a disgusting kind of belief, too.

MVC: Yes, disgusting. Of course, we think we have the moral high ground, and that’s because, in my opinion, we do; because if you’re a scientist, then it’s just self-evident. I mean, you try to figure out what’s true.

I thought some of the things that [William] Shockley had said and done are really funny. I mean, I admire him; but he just seemed so undiplomatic a lot of times.

AJ: Oh, absolutely. Don’t ever quote me on this, but he’s got what my wife refers to as negative charisma.

MVC: That’s funny! He even seems kind of belligerent.

AJ: Yes, he is.

MVC: He said a while back — this was many years ago, when people would disagree with him — “Okay, we’ll talk about this, and we’ll hook you up to a lie detector test.” The thing about it is, I would never say such a thing, and I might not even think of such a thing, but I certainly wouldn’t say it, but there’s some real truth to that. I do think that a lot of these people are just lying, because they think that this is not true, that [our] beliefs are completely erroneous, and it’s going to cause social harm for these facts to be known. You see what I mean?

AJ: Yes, that’s true. Incidentally, speaking of Shockley, I got a call Thursday. I guess it was from The Morton Downey Show in New York. You know that crazy show?

MVC: Yes.

AJ: They asked if I would be on it, because they were going to get Shockley on it, too.

MVC: Oh, great! Listen, be sure and let me know when that’s going to be on.

AJ: Well, I said I wouldn’t be on it. I had seen it once, and I’d read about it, and there was something on the Ted Koppel show about it. He had Morton Downey, Jr., on as a guest.

It’s such a rowdy affair. It’s one of those things like a wrestling match on TV. It’s just crazy. I didn’t think it was the proper forum for discussion of a really serious topic, because his discussions never get anyplace. I watched it last night, because Shockley was going to watch it, and I wanted to see what he might be saying, so I stayed up to see it. One of the guests who was invited on was actually dragged off the stage by a couple of Downey’s security men. This guy had a script in his hand, as Shockley very well might have. He says, “No one uses a script on my program. What’s the matter? You can’t talk without reading?” He grabbed this out the guy’s hand and walks across the stage, and the fellow was very suddenly angered, and he ran across the stage and grabbed it back from Downey. One of Downey’s security guys ran out there and grabbed this guy around the waist and began tussling with him, and another guy came. It was a little wrestling match for a few seconds.

They just dragged this guy off. Downey says, “Get that slimeball off of this stage!”

MVC: [Laughs] Yes, it’s really crazy.

AJ: He calls all his guests [inaudible] pukers.

MVC: I know. I can’t stand to watch it. Sometimes I just watch it for a few minutes, but then I can’t take it for very long.

AJ: They never did pursue a line of reasoning or argumentation on that program.

MVC: It’s interesting, because they don’t let anybody say more than two or three sentences.

AJ: Oh, right, they just go off onto irrelevancies. For example, at one point Downey said, “What’s the matter? Are you afraid to express your opinion? You afraid to speak out, you mealy-mouthed academic?” This (other) guy said, “Well, no; I’m willing to answer any question. Ask me any questions, I’ll answer it.” He (Downey) says, “Okay! I’ll take you up on that: How many times have you been unfaithful to your wife?” The guy says, “Never.” Downey says, “Okay, how many times have you had sex with your wife? I’ll bet you’ve never had sex with her!” The guy says, “Well, I wouldn’t know that.” Downey pauses and says, “What intelligent woman would lie there and let a fat slob like you get on top of her?”

MVC: Oh, that’s a disgrace! That’s an unbelievable thing to say.

AJ: Isn’t that terrible? It’s just unbelievable! Now, who’s going to go there as a guest and put up with that kind of thing?

MVC: I don’t think anyone should. The thing is, I was thinking Shockley is more belligerent, and he likes to argue.

AJ: That’s right, yes.

MVC: But the thing is, this guy (Downey) calls the shots. I mean, it’s his program, and he calls the shots. He’s not a smart guy. He has no manners whatsoever. He’s vulgar and rude, and so I think it would be a big mistake for him to be on it, too.

AJ: I think so, too. Downey just walks away from guests. When he doesn’t like what they’re saying, he walks away with the mic. They just cut them off, and then he calls on somebody in the audience, or something else. He’s in complete control.

MVC: It’s really awful, I think. The thing is, too, that the kind of arguments that are involved in all the things that we’re concerned with, they are arguments which cannot be stated in one sentence or in two words.

AJ: Oh, absolutely.

MVC: So, if you don’t get a chance to at least get in a paragraph every once in a while — really dumb people, they just kind of grunt, and uh-huh, and groan, and you know. Then, if you get a little smarter, you get to one-liners. Then, you get a little smarter still. Really smart people tend to talk in paragraphs. They don’t just say one sentence. They might have three things that lead up to a conclusion, or something like that, and if you’re not given the opportunity to say more than two sentences, you’ll never get any point across.

AJ: That right, absolutely.

MVC: It’s interesting, because I saw a panel discussion with Jean Kirkpatrick. She has a panel discussion where each person says everything he or she has to say and then stops. Then the next person says something. I think that is so much nicer, and more civilized, and more beneficial to the people who are listening than these other political programs, which of course aren’t nearly as bad as this Downey guy.

AJ: Things like Crossfire.

MVC: They interrupt people all over the place. You can’t reach any kind of conclusions. You can’t have an intelligent discussion when you have that atmosphere.

AJ: [Inaudible] program is good in that respect. He lets people talk, and then he follows up on it. There’s some thought going on there; some analysis, and some real argument. Not just shouting back and forth.

There was one point where Downey was shouting back and forth with one of his guests, and it was all bleeped, because of the language. Bleep, bleep, back and forth.

MVC: If Shockley does decide to go on that program, the fact that — I know this is just a guess — it doesn’t look like a good idea may not deter him, but if he does go on it, I’d like to know when so I can watch it.

AJ: I’m going to call him again to see if he’s really going to it, because if he is I want to see it. It might be pathetic, but . . .

This business about education and politics. I think politics has an awful lot to do with educational policy. I’ve seen examples of that right here in California. For example, there was a rather conservative group in the Bakersfield schools who wanted me to come in and do an evaluation of school segregation problems. I did, and I wrote an article called “School [inaudible] for Minority Children.” They paid for a big project. I mean, they gave me a grant of something like $70,000 to go in with a system and test something close to 5-6,000 kids and do a lot of statistical analysis to determine whether kids in segregated schools were doing worse than kids in integrated schools, and that sort of thing. Because such a huge part of the budget in Kern County is taken up by busing to the school, and [since] school districts are so far apart, the bus is extremely [inaudible] a school board meeting in writing. That school board actually hired a team from the California Test Bureau to go over my report and make a report on it, at the same meeting. They gave it a complete bill of health, and they said I did everything right, statistically [inaudible] analysis [inaudible]was able to support the conclusions, and so forth.

Well, at the next election a new school board came into power, and at one of their first meetings, they denounced my report as incompetent and racist, and voted to have its conclusions and everything stricken from the minutes of the [inaudible] of the previous board meeting. [Inaudible] written up in the Bakersfield newspaper.

That’s an example, and I’ve seen the same kind of things happen in the Berkeley schools, where there are political groups that actually dictate the policies adopted by the school board. There are pressure groups, such as lobbyists and various kinds of pressure groups. [Inaudible] A lot of these school policy decisions are being made on the basis of these political pressures.

MVC: Let me ask you about this Bakersfield thing. Was your conclusion that a greater degree of segregation was not going to be harmful?

AJ: That’s right.

MVC: They didn’t like that conclusion.

AJ: We had three groups to compare: white; Chicano or Mexican-American, as we call them; and black. If you look at the non-verbal IQ, race matrices [inaudible] non-verbal, things that aren’t taught in school, these things predict scholastic performance on achievement tests just as well for these segregated groups as they do for groups that aren’t segregated and for the white group. The regression lines are the same for all groups.

MVC: I mean, they do have a eugenic law there, in Japan, but I think it’s basically ignored. But they are eugenics conscious. For example, if somebody as a young man has a brother who has some kind of disease, or something, then no one wants to marry him. They are very much conscious of that kind of thing.

AJ: Apparently this is being pushed in Singapore. I’ve read about the eugenic efforts there.

MVC: I haven’t heard anything lately.

AJ: I haven’t heard anything lately, either, so I don’t know how it is working out. It’s only been in the last few years that they’ve been thinking along those lines, as far as I know. They’ve been doing something about this, thinking along those lines, let’s put it that way.

I can finish off item nine, if you want to do that.

MVC: Okay.

AJ: I can still simply tell you that I haven’t kept up on the legal aspects of mental testing, and I don’t know what’s going on in that since I wrote my book, [inaudible]. I hear things now and then, but I haven’t made any systematic survey of what the situation is. Other countries do not have nearly as much trouble, because they have far fewer minority populations than we have in places such as Britain, Canada, and Australia, and so forth, [and they] are not experiencing the same problems we’re having.

[inaudible]

but they are nothing like what we have in this country. They’re not as big an issue, and that’s about all I can say about that. If you ever want to talk to anyone about that sort of thing, the person who probably knows more about it than anyone I know is Barbara Lerner. Do you know her?

MVC: No, I don’t. I’ve read her stuff, but I don’t know her personally.

AJ: . . . lawyer, with a PhD in Psychology. [inaudible] now she’s working for a private consultant [inaudible] clients are all people with legal problems connected to testing.

MVC: Oh, that sounds really interesting. I think I’d like to talk to her about this.

AJ: She lives in Princeton. I don’t have her address here, but I have it down in [inaudible]. She’s a very bright woman. I’ve met her; had lunch with her one day at [inaudible] and she’s very articulate — a heck of a writer. She’s written a lot along these lines. I think she has probably kept up [inaudible]. So, that’s the person I would refer you to for this question [inaudible].

MVC: Okay.

AJ: We were on item number ten, unless there was something else you wanted to backtrack on.

MVC: No, you’re right. It’s number ten.

AJ: I realized after I hung up with you last time that I said something wrong. I can’t remember just what question it was on, but I said that a five-point difference in the mean between two groups would result in a two-to-one ratio difference, I think. When you’ve got one standard deviation above the mean, it’s actually a little less than that. It’s 1.72 ratio difference. A five-point difference in the mean, but if that should come out in the thing, I can check that when…

MVC: I haven’t gotten to that point yet, where I’m typing it.

AJ: When you get to that, and when I see it, I’ll recheck that; but I actually looked it up, in the table of normal distribution. I was thinking it was about two standard — in percentage terms, the percentage that falls above one standard deviation is about 16. The percentage that falls above 1-1/3 standard deviation, which would be a group that was five points lower, would be to fall at the same point, the scale would have to be a 1-1/3 standard deviation out from this, [and the] mean would be about 9%. The difference between those, between the ratio of those two, 9 to 16, is approximately 1.7.

MVC: Right.

AJ: One may not have to be that precise. I’ll have to see what I actually said before you type it up.

MVC: Okay, I can keep an eye out for it.

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Note

[1] Prof. Jensen was actually mistaken; the book’s authors are Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin.