Replies to ‘A Danish spectre’ by Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail of 2nd. October, 2003
1. “….while an element of intelligence is passed on biologically from parents to children, other elements are not. So if surrounding circumstances are favourable, the children of poor parents – who themselves may or may not be intelligent -- can become highly educated.”
Why not quantify that element? It’s around 40%. Additionally, parents will influence child IQ if they provide poor, unstimulating, discouraging and unsympathetic environments – and that’s just what many low-IQ mothers do (as seen in the figures for child neglect and abuse quoted in The Bell Curve and The g Factor). To say children from low-IQ mothers “can” become highly educated is disingenuous beyond belief. The statistical expectation is that a mother of IQ80 will have children averaging IQ92. In today’s society, IQs at such levels carry serious consequences in ineducability, unemployability, criminality and proness to sexual diseases and unwwnted births.
2. “….there are many, many examples of bright people who come from the lowest social classes (not to mention stupid people from the upper classes). That’s why the low expectations of so many schools in poor areas are such a scandal, precisely because good schooling can make all the difference in raising children out of the disadvantage of their backgrounds.”
Here “many” is the slippery term. “Many, many” sounds a real lot. But what proportion of low-class-born kids become “bright people” [IQ 110 and over]? MP’s argument, if she has one, would be with sociologists* who have long concluded that even a traditional working class environment was a serious handicap in today’s educational world – and the modern single-parenting underclass and its genes are substantially worse.
*"Class inequalities in educational attainment have been consistently large during the post-war period in Scotland. In the late 1970's, middle-class children were more than four times as likely as working-class children to enter an advanced or degree-level course, and they were six times as likely to enter university."
A.F.McPHERSON & D.RAFFE, 1983, Edinburgh University Bulletin.
3. “….even if unintelligent women were to stop having children, this would not reduce the proportion of unintelligent people in the population; on the contrary, it might prevent as many potentially intelligent children from being born.”
The absurd conclusion from MP’s deceitful ‘cans’ and ‘manys’.
4. “….Heavily influenced by the American eugenists, Hitler started sterilising people with congenital illness in 1934….”
The majority of progressive and liberal people approved of eugenics. Feminists were specially keen on preventing rapists and sexual perverts from passing on their genes. Winston Churchill actually travelled to New York to attend a eugenics conference.
"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feebleminded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year has passed. ....after a simple surgical operation [sterilisation], [those treated] could be permitted to live freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others."
Winston CHURCHILL (Home Secretary), 1906. Quoted by A.Roberts, The Spectator, 9 iv 1994.
But Churchill went on to settle for ‘colonisation’ and separation of the sexes as the proper way to limit low-IQ procreation and in 1940 famously condemned the Nazi programme of “perverted science.”
"As the English doctor, A.F.Tredgold put it in a speech quoted by Winston Churchill in a 1910 Cabinet meeting, "....Colony life would....protect the feeble-minded from a certain section of society and society from the feeble-minded." In the U.S., colony provision was supplemented by legislation for involuntary sterilisation of defectives under which tens of thousands of men and women were sterilised in the first half of this century."
Phil FENNELL, 1994, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 21 x. (Reviewing J.W.Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, University of California Press.)
5. “….educated women are having fewer children. That surely is the real problem, because it is causing countries across the developed world to experience a drop in the birthrate of advantaged babies.”
Here MP agrees with Helmuth Nyborg. But her concession sits strangely alongside her Point 3, above. Apparently abstention from breeding on the part of low-IQ women won’t raise IQ; but abstention by the high-IQ will cause problems.
6. “The solution, though, is not to stop the poor having children but to alter patterns of behaviour – patterns which have been so disastrously promoted by those very educated people whom Professor Nyborg extols.”
Here MP introduces her long-preferred moralistic agenda. But she should acknowledge that ‘the permissive society’, with its high rate of divorce and single-parenting, has worked fine for the higher-IQ. It’s at low levels of IQ that the traditional disciplines and supervision provided by church, village gossips and mother-in-law are arguably needed. – A good reason for trying to get down the numbers of low-IQ parents!
7. “The educated classes make a fetish of intelligence. This leads some of them to advocate a draconian approach towards those they think don’t possess it. The result is that they single out the poor for punishment while neatly avoiding facing up to the need to tackle irresponsible behaviour, including their own. It’s not intelligence that matters. It’s behaviour, stupid!”
A ringing conclusion that will go straight into my Quotes about the Importance of Intelligence. Here are some others.
“Poverty, in the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth [tracking 12,000 young people since 1979, when they were 14 to 22 years old], is eight times more common among whites from poor backgrounds than among those who grew up in privilege — yet it’s fifteen times more common at the low end of the IQ spectrum. Illegitimacy is twice as common among the poorest whites as among the most prosperous, but it’s eight times as common among the dullest (IQ under 75) as it is among the brightest (IQ over 125). And males in the bottom half of the IQ distribution are nearly ten times as likely as those in the top half to find themselves in jail.”
Geoffrey COWLEY, 1994, ‘Testing the science of intelligence’, Newsweek, 24 x.
“The most extensive clinical studies of neglectful mothers have been conducted by Norman Polansky, whose many years of research began with a sample drawn from rural Appalachia, subsequently replicated with an urban Philadelphia sample. He described the typical neglectful mother as follows:
She is of limited intelligence (IQ below 70), has failed to achieve more than an eighth-grade education, and has never held....employment.... She has at best a vague, or extremely limited idea of what her children need emotionally and physically. She seldom is able see things from the point of view of others and cannot take their needs into consideration when responding to a conflict they experience.
....The most extensive evidence describes the impulsiveness, inconsistency and confusion that mark the parenting style of many abusive parents [e.g. Smith et al., 1974, Brit.J.Psychiat. 125]. ....The inconsistency can reach mystifying proportions: one study of parent-child interactions found that children in abusing families had about the same chance of obtaining positive reinforcement for aggressive behaviors as for pro-social behaviors (Berger, 1980, Amer.J.Family Ther. 8). ....The reluctance of scholars and policymakers alike to look at the role of low intelligence in malparenting may properly be called scandalous.”
R.J.HERRNSTEIN & C.MURRAY, 1994, The Bell Curve. New York : Free Press.
“Today, as China is now known to have been embarked for the past six years on a vast programme of eugenics (in the Peking area), it is high time for the West to come to terms with IQ and with what is to be done about it. The last Western country to treat the g factor with as much contempt as do Britain and the USA today was Nazi Germany. With awe-inspiring indifference as to how to sustain Germany’s national culture or win a world war, the Nazis ensured the last great migration of intelligence in the West—giving the USA ‘the Bomb’ in the process (e.g. Hobsbawm, 1994*). (The Nazis thus reversed that original massive influx of entrepreneurial talent from which Prussia had so benefited after the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in Paris.) Today, an equally serious question confronts the West: Can the triumph of Western liberal democracy be long sustained without taking intelligence seriously? Although the London School view of IQ has survived the Burt Affair, the importance of IQ and intelligence has still to be properly recognized.”
C.R.BRAND, 1997, ‘The importance of intelligence in Western societies.’ Journal of Biosocial Science (Special Issue, eds N.Mascie-Taylor & C.Brand).
* Hobsbawm (1994, Age of Extremes) observes: “The National Socialists....deprived themselves of the flower of continental Europe’s physical talent by driving Jews and ideological opponents into exile, incidentally destroying the early twentieth-century German scientific supremacy in the process. Between 1900 and 1933, twenty-five out of sixty-six Nobel prizes in Physics and Chemistry had gone to Germany; but since 1933 only about one in ten.”
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