4/26/2005 09:00:00 PM|||Dave|||Here's a summary of a new paper by Rushton and Jensen to appear in the June issue of Psychology, Public Policy and Law ("Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability"). An overview of the field, they conclude exactly what Murray and Herrnstein concluded in The Bell Curve: Black-White-East Asian IQ differences are at least 50% genetic. Hat tip: Gene Expression.

J. Philippe Rushton is a professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. Arthur R. Jensen is a professor in the School of Education, University of California at Berkeley. Their paper addresses the following topics:
  1. The Worldwide Pattern of IQ Scores.
  2. Race Differences Most Pronounced on Tests of (g).
  3. The Gene-Environment Architecture of IQ.
  4. Brain Size Differences.
  5. Trans-Racial Adoption Studies.
  6. Racial Admixture Studies.
  7. IQ Scores of Blacks and Whites Regress toward the mean.
  8. Race Differences in Other "Life-History" Traits.
  9. Race Differences and the Out-of-Africa theory of Human Origins.
  10. Do Culture-Only Theories Explain the Data?
A PDF of the complete Rushton/Jensen paper is available here. The paper's abstract:
The culture-only (0% genetic–100% environmental) and the hereditarian (50% genetic–50% environmental) models of the causes of mean Black–White differences in cognitive ability are compared and contrasted across 10 categories of evidence: the worldwide distribution of test scores, g factor of mental ability, heritability, brain size and cognitive ability, transracial adoption, racial admixture, regression, related life-history traits, human origins research, and hypothesized environmental ariables. The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black–White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black–White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics).
|||111456714315503825|||30 Years of Research on Race & Cognitive Ability