Intelligence, Race, And Genetics: Conversations With Arthur R. Jensen

240 Pages·2004·1.93 MB·English

by  Frank Miele

INTELLIGENCE,
RACE, AND
GENETICS
INTELLIGENCE,
RACE, AND
GENETICS
Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen
FRANK MIELE
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ISBN 0-8133-4274-0 (pbk)
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To my late father, Edward J. Miele,
and my mother, Cecilia Miele,
who gave me both my genes and my environment;
and to my brother, Edward F. Miele,
who shares them with me.
PREFACE
“Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed.” With that
opening sentence of a 123-page-long article solicited by the prestigious Harvard
Educational Review, Professor Arthur R. Jensen, of the University of California,
Berkeley, went from being a highly respected but little-known educational
psychologist to one of the most controversial figures in science.
Written in 1969 during the tumultuous days of the rioting in the Black inner
cities and White voter disenchantment with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society
programs, Jensen’s HER article set off a firestorm of controversy. The title,
“How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” and Jensen’s
conclusion, “Not much,” made him a headliner in Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S.
News & World Report, and The New York Times Magazine, on the one hand, and
the target of student protests, sit-ins, resolutions of condemnation, and even acts
of vandalism and death threats on the other. The word “Jensenism”—shorthand
for Jensen’s theory that an individual’s IQ is largely due to heredity, including
racial heritage—found its way into some dictionaries.
In this book, I skeptically cross-examine Arthur R. Jensen on Jensenism—
how and why he believes the scientific evidence is even stronger today that:
IQ is real, biological, and highly genetic, and not just some statistic
or the result of educational, social, economic, or cultural factors;
race is a biological reality, not a social construct; and, most
controversially of all,
the cause of the 15-point average IQ difference between Blacks and
Whites in the United States is partly genetic.
The late Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man, Howard Gardner’s
numerous books on “multiple intelligences,” and Joseph Graves’s The Emperor’s
New Clothes argue that Jensenism and the controversial best-seller The Bell
Curve (which draws heavily on Jensen’s work) are marginal science at best,
pseudoscience at worst. Here, Jensen replies to these and other critics. He also
answers the questions I think you yourself would like to ask him. He tells you
why he believes the scientific basis of Jensenism is as solid as the Rock of
Gibraltar, why the experts in the relevant disciplines of behavior genetics and
psychometrics agree with him and not his critics, and why the public has been so
misinformed.
This book also introduces you to Arthur Jensen, the man behind the “ism,”
so that you can understand why he took up such a controversial research
program and why he has pursued it so relentlessly. Finally, it takes you on the
intellectual odyssey of the behavioral sciences over the past third of a century,
detailing the sea changes that have taken place since Jensen and Jensenism first
hit the front pages in 1969.
Frank Miele
Sunnyvale, California
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have written this book without the help and encouragement that so
many people have given me over the years. I would like to give particular thanks
to publisher and editor-in-chief Michael Shermer and the staff of Skeptic, to all
those who have given so generously of their time in allowing me to interview
them for the magazine, and to my editor Karl Yambert and the staff at Westview.
Additionally, the photos in the book were provided by courtesy of Arthur Jensen
and the cover photo by courtesy of Lois V. Jensen, his sister, and I thank them
for their permission to use the photos.
F.M.
INTRODUCTION
Jensenism and Skepticism
Jensenism, n: the theory that an individual’s IQ is largely due to heredity,
including racial heritage; after Arthur R. Jensen (born 1923), U.S. educational
psychologist, who first propounded this hypothesis in 1965.
and
Skepticism, n: the search for provisional, not metaphysical, truth through the
continuous and vigorous application of the methods of science, that is,
formulating hypotheses and gathering data against which to test them.
ensenism and skepticism—what’s the connection? What does a controversial
J
theory linking intelligence, race, and genetics have to do with a growing
movement that promotes better understanding of the scientific method and
greater use of critical thinking by the general public?
On the one hand, one skeptic icon, the late Stephen Jay Gould, who was then
America’s best-known science writer, a distinguished though controversial
scientist in his own right, and a past president of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, once claimed to have debunked Jensenism as
resting on “a rotten edifice.” On the other, Intelligence, the most prestigious
journal in the field of IQ research, devoted an entire issue to honoring Jensen
and his work, which its editor, Douglas Detterman, titled “A King Among Men:
Arthur Jensen.”
If these wildly varying assessments of Arthur R. Jensen and his theories of
race, genetics, and human intelligence don’t invite a skeptical examination and
some critical thinking, what does? As senior editor of Skeptic, I’ve interviewed
some of the world’s leading scholars on differing sides of the race-IQ issue and
related controversies in biological and behavioral sciences. Who better to
interview than the namesake of the most controversial “ism” of them all—the
relation between race, intelligence, and genetics?
I realized that a fair treatment of Jensen and Jensenism would require a book,
not just an article. Jensen accepted, but could he commit the time? That year,
1999, he was based in London, England, working at the Galton Library on