I would like to chime in in agreement with Alan Isaac here, especially to
reemphasize one important point that is being made. The problem with this
entire debate over the genetic contributions to IQ and talent is that the
debate itself adopts the premise that such differentials are somehow important
determinants of people's rights and opportunities. One side argues that IQ is
heritable, the other side argues it's not, but the real issue is that civil
rights and equal opportunity accrue to all people, regardless of their overt or
innate qualities. If you took a group of white 30 something males and ranked
them according to their IQs would this make a difference in terms of the
responsibility society has toward all of them to provide equal opportunity?
The problem with IQ testing (or the qualification of talent) is that
the very process is tautogolical. It is decided in advance what skills are
valued and the test is designed to produce those results.
When IQ tests were first being designed, one popular test produced higher
scores for women than for men. So the test was redesigned, and lo and behold
men began scoring higher than women.
Unfortunately, in our society, there is often very little correlation
between what our culture deems valuable and what is really necessary to our
survival and well-being. Many of us do work that is designed to understand
this phenomenon in terms of the way markets distort signals and put undue
emphasis on material consumption. Similarly, if blacks and whites, men and
women, or even different cultural approaches to life are fundamentally
different, this does not mean we can rank those differences in order of
importance by using a test designed by the dominant culture.
Similar studies have been done comparing the brains of men and women and
I notice that no one gave a whit at the suggestion that genetic differences
might exist. Specifically, it was said that the connecting tissue between
the two hemispheres of the brain is more substantial in the female. The
conclusion was that while the male brain may find it easier to focus in one
side of the brain or the other, thereby aiding uninterrupted abstract thought,
the female brain was better equipped to transfer rapidly between the two
hemispheres thereby aiding assimilation and coordination of left brain and
right brain activity. How in the world would one say one skill is better or
more valuable than the other? In fact, both are necessary and important to our
culture. Nonetheless, the rules of equal opportunity dictate that an
individual be given the right and the opportunity to decide for her or himself
what social role she or he is most apt or most willing to play. If a person
makes the "wrong" choice in accordance with their skills, well, that is the
ideal freedom we wish to accord all humans: the right to make mistakes.
The bottom line is, it doesn't matter if there are inheritable differences
between the races or between the genders. The fact that our culture is going
to value WHATEVER qualities the white men have is merely a redundancy of
power.
We should stop debating the trivial point of whether something called
intelligence is inherited or not. At the heart of the debate is the very
dominant culture assumptions that "smart" can be defined at all by the dominant
culture and that once done, "smart" people can be deemed more worthy of
comfort and reward than "dumb" people. It's all apologist nonsense designed
to justify and legitimate the primitive accumulation of the dominant class,
race and gender. All the IQ tests do is tell us whose got the rewards of
society worked out in their favor. Big surprise.
In Solidarity,
Carla Feldpausch
