Tag: IQ

Liberals and their IQ cake

gollum

by Albert Brenner

Everybody knows it is not very intelligent to want your cake and eat it. Yet, this is exactly what many liberals do when it concerns discourses surrounding the validity and applicability of IQ tests/scores. That the aforementioned is still a very sensitive issue needs no further elaboration.

Unfortunately ill fortune still awaits any serious writer when s/he addresses the IQ question in a frank manner, except when it comes to criminalizing the conservative (heterosexual) Pale Male, of course.

In a recent article in the science section of the left-wing Huffington Post newspaper, “evidence” was provided to prove that “racists” have low IQ scores.

According to the study`s lead author, Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario, “People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice…”

His sentiments were echoed by Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, “ Reality is complicated and messy… Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies.”

Now, seeing that one of the gods of the left, Karl Marx, imposed a “simpler solution” called dialectical-materialism on (the) “complicated and messy” Reality – by, basically, reducing everything to the monopoly of the means of production – it surely must cut both ways.

Meaning that both conservatives and liberals are, ultimately, equally prone to simpler solutions, ergo, being equal in the capacity to be people of low intelligence. Nosek readily admits to this logic; stating that less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal “simplifying ideologies“ as well as conservative ones.

It therefore suffices to say that this research only proved that the opposite of its hypothesis is also true. Rather “scientific”, wouldn’t you say? But that, obviously, did not dissuade the Huffington Post to boldly title this article Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism.

Their prejudice (low IQ?) is even more evident in the opening paragraph of said article, “Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes”.

Another example; in a recent article titled IQ tests: women score higher than men, in the left-wing British newspaper The Telegraph, it was boldly stated that women are more intelligent than men.The article quoted a certain Helena Jamieson… who said: “I think women probably always knew deep down that they were the more intelligent ones – but as the gentler sex we were quiet about it and let men continue to believe they ruled the world.”

Now just imagine if a man had said, “I think men probably knew deep down that they were the more intelligent ones…“ Can you just imagine the furious outcry that would have caused, especially on the part of feminists?

As is glaringly evident in the above examples, liberals have absolutely no qualms in recognizing the scientific legitimacy/validity of IQ tests when it comes to nailing conservative Pale Males. Yet, when it comes to acknowledging the very same instrument as a scientifically legitimate tool to, for example, measure the difference in average IQ scores between blacks and whites, all hell breaks loose!

Be that as it may; the left certainly has a Gollum-like approach to IQ. A warped approach akin to acknowledging that a thermometer can measure warm temperatures, but when it gets cold, it suddenly does not “function” anymore.

The above irrationality is perfectly illustrated by the liberal columnist John Wiener of The Nation magazine. He wrote an article in lieu of the dismissal of Dr Jason Richwine from the Heritage Foundation. Wiener basically accused Richwine of “racism”. In his article, Why Did Harvard Give a PhD for a Discredited Approach to Race and IQ?, Wiener wrote: “Both ‘race’ and ‘intelligence’ are culturally constructed notions, not biological or genetic facts. None of this is hard to understand.”

Yet in his conclusion, he wrote the following: “The last word in this story goes to a study published in 2012 in the journal Psychological Science. ‘In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874),’ the researchers wrote, ‘we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood.'”

It really does seem that liberals want their IQ cake and eat it. It is a pity they do not allow conservative (heterosexual) Pale Males the same Gollum-like leeway. On the contrary; if the latter just mentions the words “race” and “IQ” then they will most certainly be crucified … like Dr Thilo Sarrazin, Prof James Watson, Dr Jason Richwine, et cetera.

The fact that any scientific inquiry into the differences between the races is a political landmine field guarded by the left, has its origins in a deliberate lie told by one of its doyens, Margaret Mead.

As the conservative columnist Christopher F. Chabris notes; “Before World War II, for example, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, presumably basing herself on her observations of non-Western cultures, wrote: ‘We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’ Later, Mead admitted that what forced this conclusion was not the data she had collected but the political goals she espoused: ‘We knew how politically loaded discussions of inborn differences could become. . . . (I]t seemed clear to us that [their] further study . . . would have to wait upon less troubled times.'”

Well, these “troubled times” are still upon us. Difference has not disappeared. On the contrary, it has got progressively worse.

But then, what else could be expected from those who want their cake and eat it?

‘Africans are less intelligent than Westerners’

One of the world’s most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that “equal powers of reason” were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when “testing” suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson’s remarks ” in full”. Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of ” scientific racism”.

Dr Watson arrives in Britain today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to an audience at the Science Museum organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism.

Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: “It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson’s personal prejudices.

“These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels.”

The American scientist earned a place in the history of great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s and formed part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.

But despite serving for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, Dr Watson has frequently courted controversy with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal Science wrote in 1990: “To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script.”

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a “hypothetical” choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that ” stupidity” could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be contacted to comment on his remarks.

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said: ” This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson’s remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: “It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint.”

Postscript: A week after this report was published in 2007, Professor Watson was forced to retire from this post amid an international scandal over his remarks. According to him, “I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”