Message to liberals: get real on IQ

Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 25 August 2005 08:38.

“For personal reasons I would like to believe that men and women are equal, and broadly that’s true. But over a period of time the evidence in favour of biological factors has become stronger and stronger. I have been dragged in a direction that I don’t particularly like, but it would be sensible if the debate was based on what we pretty much know to be the case.” - Dr Paul Irwing, in The Times, giving liberals the shocking news in a cuddly, empathic way.

Dr Irwing and Professor Lynn (whose earlier, liberal-offending exploits are touched upon at the end of the article) are only saying what anybody capable of surfing internet politics can easily discover:-

Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for “tasks of high complexity”, according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded.

They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees.

When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.

Alright, not new information for us. But it is interesting that the MSM is now prepared to touch the IQ story at last - one thinks of the Guardian’s recent admission that, yes, genes have a role in general intelligence. It doesn’t matter whether these are coincidental swallows. Enough of them will usher in summer, and all scientists for whom the left has proved a censorious foe should think on that.

Human difference, lest one forgets, simply does not lend itself as a foundation for marxian politics. We are a very long way yet from seeing the hopeless expectations of Affirmative Action recipients or the egalitarian obsessions of the establishment or the selfish interests of state employees challenged. But that is the goal. The public acknowledgement - however gradual and haphazard - of a truth that has been (at times, viciously) suppressed for three decades is a necessary start. We need much, much more of it.

Tags: Media

Comments:

Posted by DaveJ on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 11:46 | #

Cool post.

Posted by John Ray on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:02 | #

Yes. I noted that story but the Thunderer is a pretty conservative paper (thanks to Rupert) so it is not nearly as shattering as The Guardian.

Of course psychometricians have known what the article was reporting for around 100 years

But sometimes news percolates slowly. There are none so deaf as those who will not hear

Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 12:54 | #

John,

Would you date the leftist academic assault on sociobiology and psychometry earlier than 1975 (when E.O.Wilson’s Sociobiology was published)? I accept that Galton’s scientific racism was lost to the Boas fraud in 1910. But for our purposes, the Gould-Lewontin inspired suppression of sociobiology and its re-emergence latterly as safe, race denying Toobyism seem to be more germaine to the present argument.

Posted by John S Bolton on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 15:15 | #

Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment has many pages simply on the gender difference in IQ at the high end. There is even a chart showing that female Nobel prizes in sciences and literature have been on a downtrend, for one hundred years! How is the opportunistic, mendacious left, in its antihereditarian faith, to acknowledge this devastating truth? Will they pretend that the socialization for traditional female roles is more intense than a hundred years ago, and has been intensifying in that direction for a century, somewhere this side of Iran? Will they make viciously dishonest propaganda to the effect that discrimination against women has been increasing for a hundred years? The mass production of fainting couches for Harvard’s sexual patronage seekers, cannot obliviate a truth this clearcut. Another jab at the gender quota placeholders in high places: professional sexual patronage seeker sounds like the definition of what? That Delila faint not, I will not say.

Posted by Mrs. Blessed on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 16:02 | #

You mentioned Murrey’s chart showing that female Nobel prizes in sciences and literature have been on a downtrend for the past hundred years. I would speculate that women’s IQs on the right-hand side of the bell curve have been falling (if they have been falling) due to the use of birth control and the entry of women into the work force. It seems that higher IQ women are breedig themselves out of existence. Ironically, it also means that this is a self-correcting problem.

Posted by John S Bolton on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 16:34 | #

If the number of high IQ rarities were decreasing, this should make the competition somewhat less for Nobel prizes. With the male to female ratio somewhat lower at the next level of high IQ downwards, the expected result would be for the female percentage of such prizes to rise.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:13 | #

The issue is not really the mean difference in IQ but the variance or standard deviation from the mean. If men are ~2:1 above 125, then it’s reasonable to presume they are 2:1 below 90 or 5:1 below 80. In otherwords, there are more dumb guys than dumb girls.

Of course, women have probably long known this.

Posted by Svigor on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:44 | #

I’m dying for all the aggregate data to which Mr. Jones is referring. What’s the distribution for the races and sexes? Where can I find this data?

Posted by Amon on Thu, 25 Aug 2005 22:21 | #

You’re right about this: Steve Sailer has said time and time again that while there are more dumb guys, there are also more smart ones.

You can see this for yourself: go into any ESE (“exceptional” student education) or LD (learning disabled) classroom, and almost all the students in it are males.

Posted by anonymous on Fri, 26 Aug 2005 01:29 | #

Of course, women have probably long known this.

That is not correct. If the distributions were normal with a mean of 100 then there would be a 2:1 male/female ratio with IQs below 75, and so on. Of course it gets really interesting at the extremes. A rough calculation suggests that above 170 there would be something like 60:1 male/female ratio.

Posted by anonymous on Fri, 26 Aug 2005 01:43 | #

Guessedworker wrote:
Would you date the leftist academic assault on sociobiology and psychometry earlier than 1975 (when E.O.Wilson’s Sociobiology was published)? I accept that Galton’s scientific racism was lost to the Boas fraud in 1910. But for our purposes, the Gould-Lewontin inspired suppression of sociobiology and its re-emergence latterly as safe, race denying Toobyism seem to be more germaine to the present argument.

You may well be right. However, given the growth in biological and human sciences in recent decades, together with the increasingly cross-disciplinary and multi-author nature of human research, it may be that the ability to create these types of intellectual ruse may be diminishing. In other words, the work of Gould, Lewontin, Diamond and others may come to be seen as historical curiosities, symbolising where science was (and wasn’t) in the 20th Century