Jensen and Flynn
by Thomas Sowell
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Anyone who
has followed the decades-long controversies over the role of genes
in IQ scores will recognize the names of the two leading advocates
of opposite conclusions on that subject – Professor Arthur R. Jensen
of the University of California at Berkeley and Professor James
R. Flynn, an American expatriate at the University of Otago in New
Zealand.
What is so
unusual in the academic world of today is that Professor Flynn's
latest book, Are
We Getting Smarter? is dedicated to Arthur Jensen, whose
integrity he praises, even as he opposes his conclusions. That is
what scholarship and science are supposed to be like, but so seldom
are.
Professor Jensen,
who died recently, is best known for reopening the age-old controversy
about heredity versus environment with his 1969 article titled,
"How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
His answer
– long since lost in the storms of controversy that followed – was
that scholastic achievement could be much improved by different
teaching methods, but that these different teaching methods were
not likely to change I.Q. scores much.
Jensen argued
for educational reforms, saying that "scholastic performance – the
acquisition of the basic skills – can be boosted much more, at least
in the early years, than can the IQ" and that, among "the disadvantaged,"
there are "high school students who have failed to learn basic skills
which they could easily have learned many years earlier" if taught
in different ways.
But, regardless
of what Arthur Jensen actually said, too many in the media, and
even in academia, heard what they wanted to hear. He was lumped
in with earlier writers who had promoted racial inferiority doctrines
that depicted some races as being unable to rise above the level
of "hewers of wood and drawers of water."
These earlier
writers from the Progressive era were saying, in effect, that there
was a ceiling to the mental potential of some races, while Jensen
argued that there was no ceiling but, by his reading of the evidence,
a difference in average IQ, influenced by genes.
When I first
read Arthur Jensen's landmark article, back in 1969, I was struck
by his careful and painstaking analysis of a wide range of complex
data. It impressed me but did not convince me. What it did was cause
me to dig up more data on my own.
A few years
later, I headed a research project that, among other things, collected
tens of thousands of past and present IQ scores from a wide range
of racial and ethnic groups at schools across the United States.
Despite serious limitations in these data, due to constraints of
time and circumstances, these data nevertheless threw some additional
light on the subject.
A feature article
of mine in the Sunday New York Times Magazine of March 27, 1977
pointed out that any number of white groups, here and overseas,
had at some point in time had IQs similar to, and in some cases
lower than, the IQs of black Americans. During the First World War,
for example, white soldiers from some Southern states scored lower
on army mental tests than black soldiers from some Northern states.
Professor Jensen
read this article and came over to Stanford University to meet with
me and discuss the data. That is what a scholar should do when challenged.
But the opposite approach was shown by Professor Kenneth B. Clark,
who earlier had sought to dissuade me from doing IQ research. He
said it would "dignify" Jensen's work, which Clark wanted ignored
or discredited instead.
Unfortunately,
Professor Clark's ideological approach became far more common in
academia, so much so that Jensen's attempts to speak on campuses
around the country provoked dangerous disruptions, instead of reasoned
arguments.
Years later,
Professor James R. Flynn created the biggest challenge to the hereditary
theory of intelligence, when he showed that whole nations had risen
to much higher results on IQ tests in just one or two generations.
Genes don't change that fast.
Professor Flynn
told me that he would never have done his research, except that
it was provoked by Jensen's research. That is just one of the reasons
for having a free marketplace of ideas, instead of turning academic
campuses into fortresses of politically correct intolerance.
November
28, 2012
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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