Jefferson M. Fish - Race and Intelligence: Separating Science From Myth

Preface

xi

Contributors

xvii

A Scientific Approach to Understanding Race
and Intelligence

Jefferson M. Fish

Part I

Homo sapiens has no extant subspecies: There are no biological races.Human physical appearance varies gradually around the planet, with the most geographically distant peoples generally appearing the most different from one another. The concept of human biological races is a construction socially and historically localized to 17th anal 18th-century European thought. Over time, different cultures have developed different sets (folk taxonomies) of socially defined races.

The Genetic and Evolutionary Significance
of Human Races

Alan R. Templeton

The Misuse of Life History Theory: J. P. Rushton
and the Pseudoscience of Racial Hierarchy

Joseph L. Graves, Jr.

Folk Heredity

Jonathan Marks

The Myth of Race

Jefferson M. Fish

Part II

Racial categories are developed to serve social ends, including the justification and perpetuation of inequality. IQ testing has been a part of this process of stratifying groups.

Science and the Idea of Race: A Brief History

Audrey Smedley

The Bell Curve and the Politics of Negrophobia

Kimberly C. Welch

Part III

Cultural content, values, and assumptions are an inherent part of IQ tests. Formal schooling teaches people new ways of thinking, which are then measured by the tests. Access to schools, school quality, modes of instruction, attitudes toward formal education, and educational values vary cross-culturally.

An Anthropologist Looks at Race and IQ Testing

Mark Nathan Cohen

African Inputs to the IQ Controversy, or Why
Two-Legged Animals Cant Sit Gracefully

Eugenia Shanklin

Cultural Amplifiers of Intelligence: IQ and Minority 241
Status in Cross-cultural Perspective

John U. Ogbu

Part IV

Biological-sounding concepts, especially heritability, have been misused to imply a genetic basis for group differences in IQ scores. There are many cognitive abilitiesa single general factor of intelligence is inadequate to account for current knowledge in psychological measurement or cognitive science.

How Heritability Misleads About Race

Ned Block

Selections of Evidence, Misleading Assumptions,
and Oversimplifications: The Political Message
of The Bell Curve

John L. Horn

Part V

A wide variety of data, including reanalyses of data presented in The Bell Curve , imply that group differences in IQ are social in origin and can change as the result of changing social circumstances or social interventions.

Test Scores, Education, and Poverty

Michael Hout

Intelligence and Success: Is it All in the Genes?

Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Fienberg, Daniel P. Resnick,
and Kathryn Roeder

Compensatory Preschool Education, Cognitive
Development, and Race

W. Steven Barnett and Gregory Camilli

Author Index

Subject Index