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143  The Meaning of Dr. Jensen's Study of IQ Disparities
     The Washington Post,  March 29, 1969

     "How much can we boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" is a
thoughtful review by Berkeley psychologist Arthur R. Jensen that
should be read and discussed by a far larger audience than is likely
to see it in the winter issue of the Harvard Educational Review.  It
will be much talked about, but unfortunately only secondhand in
response to several popular commentaries that have emphasized a few
controversial (and I would say incautious) remarks at the expense of
a great deal of Dr. Jensen's wisdom and scholarly reserve.

     The meat of his discussion concerns the effort to bridge the IQ
gap between the white and Negro communities in the United States.
There can be no evasion of the raw statistics; which are witnessed by
an average reading retardation of one to three years.  The question
is whether we can design educational programs to erase that painful
statistic.

     Dr. Jensen is careful to insist that we focus on individual 
capability: genius is neither lacking among Negroes nor universal
among whites.  He does point out, wearily, that we cannot overlook 
the social demand for programs that concentrate on compensation for
group handicaps.

     His most provocative statement is his first sentence:
"Compensatory education has been tried and it apparently has failed".
Unfortunately such a remark may deter many proponents of the principle
of compensatory education from reading the substance of his
criticism.  There is little doubt that many programs could not begin
to meet the unrealistic expectations of their enthusiasts.  In this
sense, we could argue that every educational program has failed, and
note that many brilliant men have achieved their successful place
in life in spite of wholly inappropriate educational regimes.  Many
critics believe that compensatory education has hardly ever been
tried, and within our present social framework it may be impossible to
implement with the rigor needed to achieve prompt returns.
Compensatory education programs are experiments, and we will never
find out the ingredients of practical success unless we apply the kind
of harsh criticism of actual results rather than prior hopes that
Dr. Jensen demands and illustrates.

     Unfortunately, Dr. Jensen says almost nothing about the brutal
fact that, in my view, is the central issue in the educational
gap -- the increasingly bitter alienation of the races; the growing
divergence of cultural loyalties.  Taking this into account, I would
have to say that "intelligence" undoubtedly does have a very large and
relatively simple genetic component.  In fact, the genes are all too
visible: they control the color of the skin.  In our present milieu,
these genes may lead a student with the highest intellectual potential
to turn his back on the hard work of learning physics, chemistry and
mathematics (which will measure out as intelligence by middle class
standards) in favor of black studies that he hoped may meet his more
urgent needs in other spheres. 

     The same principle must operate right back to birth, and before.
At the moment we have neither the means to measure its influence
on, say, reading skills, and even less to know how to cancel it, or
even whether we should try.

     Jensen's remarks on the heritability of intelligence have misled
some commentators.  Much of his paper is an informative restatement
of the allocation of heredity versus environment as sources of
variation in intelligence within white cultures.  He concludes (and
I agree) that environmental differences in the groups so far
studied account for less than half the variability, which is to say
that the genes account for more.  We would both stress the
complexities of such a judgment, and how difficult it is to separate
genes from prenatal environment and disentangle specific interactions
of genes and later environments.  For sake of hypothesis, we could
imagine that there are different genes that condition how easily
a child can learn pictograms on the one hand, or alphabetic syllables
on the other.  If so, it will be quite important for the actual
intelligence of a particular child whether he happens to be reared in
Japan or in Sweden, though each country has an excellent educational
system.

     Jensen correctly criticizes the exaggerated environmentalist
bent of many psychologists and educationists who tend to minimize
such information.  He also cautions that "all the major heritability
studies reported in the literature are based on samples of white
European and North American populations, and our knowledge of the
heritability of intelligence in different racial and cultural groups
within these populations in nil.  For example, no adequate
heritability studies have been based on samples of the Negro
population of the United States".

     At this point, Jensen favors the hypothesis that genetic factors
play as large a role in the difference between racial groups as they
do within.  This position will be difficult to confirm or refute by
any experiments that I can foresee as realistically possible in the
face of existing cultural alienation.  Large segments of either
community refuse to be color blind.  How then can we discuss 
experiments like adoption of black children into white families, with
any realistic expectations of their answering such subtle questions
as the genetic basis of the development of the brain?

     We part company on the impact of racial alienation on
intellectual development.  I believe this is quite sufficient to
account for the statistical observations without having to speculate
about other genetic factors.  Jensen fails to see enough difference
in early environments of children he believes to be in comparable
economic strata, to account for later school difficulties.  We must
point out that "comparable" groups have never been standardized even
for simple physical health or for nutrition during pregnancy.
Jensen's genetic hypothesis is scarcely a new one;  it can be traced
with little change back to Plato at least.

     But it remains just a hypothesis, and we are not much better
equipped than Plato was to assess it.  This situation will not
prevail many more generations, for we are beginning to learn the
specific of the biology, including the genetics, of the growth of
the brain.  By the time we have the biochemical and neurobiological
tools to objectively assay a child's genetic potential for
intelligence, it may be a moot point, for we will know enough to
provide specific remedies for most of the specific defects that we
can so identify.

     The genetic hypothesis is almost irrelevant to Jensen's most
cogent point.  Our educational systems often neglect a child's
strongest capabilities, and hold him back while focusing on his
weaknesses.  He reports very encouraging results in teaching deprived
children how to read by rote learning, leaving more complicated
abstractions to a later stage of their schooling. If the 6 year old
has a deficit in abstract thinking, it is relatively unimportant
for educational policy whether this is the fault of his genes or a
cultural maladaptation.  In many situations, a genetic defect might 
be the easier to repair: certainly we are better equipped to deal
with diabetes or deafness than with overt racial hostility.

     The social crime would be to characterize a child by his color
rather than by his individually tested capabilities, and Jensen
may be doing a great service by insisting on this kind of
differentiation.

     The genetic hypothesis does matter if it discourages educators
and scientists from probing more deeply into the crucial early years
of child development.  The period from one to three years of age is,
in fact, almost a blank page of scientific observation although it
is the crucial period of socialization and language development.
This is no accident: children of that age are hidden in the bosom
of their families; in many states it is even legally forbidden to
establish "schools" for them, in the theory that maternal deprivation
would be fatal to their proper development.  The most crucial level
in compensatory education may be an effort to reach and teach the
mothers of these young children.  Teach what?  We have no scientific
guidelines yet, and there are pitifully few programs along these
lines.

     For this interval of life, physical factors of development must
not be overlooked: we will return time and again to malnutrition; not
over hunger, but dietary imbalance whose importance Jensen has not
overlooked, though he fails to incorporate it in his general outlook.

     "At least one study shows that some undetermined proportion
of the urban population in the United States might benefit
substantially with respect to intellectual development by improved
nutrition.  In New York City, women of low socio-economic status were
given vitamin and mineral supplements during pregnancy.  These women
gave birth to children who, at 4 years of age, averaged eight points
higher in IQ than a control group of children whose mothers have been
given placebos during pregnancy".

     With effects like that, why are we discussing anything else?

     We must add many other aspects of the urban environment, much 
of it poorly defined but remediable with ordinary medical care.  An
astonishing number of kids from old slums still turn up with classical
lead poisoning brain damage from eating flakes of ancient paint.  We
do not ease their problem with lead and carbon monoxide fumes from
auto exhausts.

     Finally, some specific genes are related to diseases known to
be more prevalent among Negroes.  Sickle cell trait in Africa is a
defense against death from malaria, which balances the impact of the
much rarer full blown disease, sickle cell anemia.  About 8 per cent
of American Negroes are genetic carriers of this trait (discovered
by a Negro medical student who examined his own blood).  These 
genetic carriers are not anemic or otherwise clinically ill.
Nevertheless, we need and do not have the kinds of studies that
would show subtler effects on the carrier individual under stress.
For example, we do not know whether carrier children are more or less
intelligent than their normal siblings.  When we have studies like
these, which, needless to say, will involve various genes distributed
among all the races, we can claim to have made some tangible headway
on the genetics of intelligence.
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