Intelligence: Is There a Racial Difference?

The human is born with a hereditary capacity to be bright, stupid or anything in between. His starting position on the intelligence scale is predetermined--a biological sentence, like the one that orders tigers to give birth to tiger cubs and the human female to produce human babies. But nothing prevents a normal man from enriching his intellectual birthright, if it is allowed to mature in a hospitable environment. The obverse is equally true. Potential geniuses, deprived of suitable stimulation, will never fulfill their endowment.

These hypotheses, which are widely accepted by behavioral scientists, are restated in a lengthy article by Arthur R. Jensen in the current issue of the Harvard Educational Review. But Jensen, 45, an educational psychologist at the University of California in Berkeley, chose to build on such postulates some less plausible ones of his own. He argues that in some ways the American black is intellectually inferior to the American white. And he suggests that the explanation lies not so much in the Negro's deprived environment as in his genes.

Incendiary Value. Whether or not the author intended it, this is an inflammatory statement, and it has reverberated far beyond the modest circle of the Review's 12,000 subscribers. Columnist Joseph Alsop and Geneticist Joshua Lederberg, who writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, have entered demurrers. In a Virginia court, Jensen has been quoted by attorneys resisting the integration of schools in Greensville and Caroline counties. Well aware of the article's incendiary value, the editors of the Review will publish five closely reasoned rebuttals to Jensen's thesis in their next issue.

The charge that Negroes are inherently inferior to whites is not new. Neither is it demonstrable. Among other things, it is a canon of racist faith, invoked first to justify slavery and then the Negro's status as a separate-but-unequal U.S. citizen. But Psychologist Jensen is no racist, as his article repeatedly makes clear. "Since, as far as we know, the full range of human talents is represented in all the major races of man," he writes at one point, "it is unjust to allow the mere fact of an individual's racial or social background to affect the treatment accorded him."

In fact, the reference to Negro inferiority is largely irrelevant to the article's main purpose, which is a declaration of war on those social scientists who discount man's genetic intellectual heritage. "The possible importance of genetic factors in racial behavioral differences," writes Jensen, "has been greatly ignored, almost to the point of being a tabooed subject . . . The slighting of the role of genetics in the study of intelligence can only hinder investigation and understanding of the conditions, processes and limits through which the social environment influences human behavior."

Ability to Reason. To develop this noninflammatory point, and to weigh the genetic contribution to intelligence, Psychologist Jensen relies heavily on the so-called intelligence test. He defines intelligence, somewhat circularly, as "what intelligence tests measure." In education, he says, what they measure is the subject's adaptability to a system that stresses cognition--the ability to reason--and that is designed for normal, middle-class white children. On this contrived scale, the American black typically registers below the American white--on the average, about 15 IQ points. This information is not very new. Moreover, its insight into the relative intelligence of black and white is inconclusive and limited, as Jensen himself admits. Jensen also allows for the elevating effect of a rich cultural environment. But except in cases of severe deprivation, he denies any substantial depressing effect in a culturally poor one. The implication, to him, is that most Negroes--and, for that matter, many low-income whites--are not sufficiently deprived to claim environment as a major factor in low IQ performance. "Various lines of evidence," he argues, "no one of which is definitive alone, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference." The difference, according to him, is found in the highest form of intelligence: the ability to reason abstractly and to solve problems. In what he calls associative learning, or mastering by rote, ghetto children seem to do as well as anyone else.

The author uses his theories to attack compensatory education programs, such as Operation Head Start, which assume that the withered young intellect will bloom if it is properly watered. Jensen contends that if substantial IQ improvement is the goal, all such programs will fail. He proposes instead that the schools broaden their approach to accommodate all levels of intelligence. Jensen writes: "Too often, if a child does not learn the school subject matter when taught in a way that depends largely on being average or above average, he does not learn at all."

Jensen's more thoughtful critics concede some validity to this point. "Our educational systems," writes Geneticist Lederberg, "often neglect a child's strongest capabilities, and hold him back while focusing on his weaknesses." J. McVicker Hunt, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, agrees with Jensen that the child's first exposure to formal education is confining when it should be expanding. Says Hunt: "I am among those few who are inclined to believe that mankind has not yet developed and deployed a form of early childhood education (from birth to age five) which permits him to achieve his full potential."

Mischievous Tests. But behavioral scientists are less willing to define with Jensen's confidence the comparative roles of heredity and environment in human intelligence. "I agree that it is foolish to deny the possibility of significant genetic differences between races," writes James F. Crow, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin, in a response to the Jensen article commissioned by Harvard's Review. "But this is not to say that the magnitude and direction of genetic racial differences are predictable." In American society, he adds, the environmental difference between being black and being white could of itself account for the IQ gap.

This possibility appears to gain support from a well-known study by Geneticists Irving I. Gottesman and James Shields, which was not cited by Jensen, of 38 pairs of identical white twins. Separated in infancy, these twins were reared in different environments. Gottesman and Shields found that, since the twins were presumed to be genetic equals, the environmental factor alone must have accounted for a spread of 14 IQ points--almost the same gap that separates black and white.

Until instruments more precise than the IQ test are developed, any attempt to rank the intelligence of black and white is meaningless--and is bound to be mischievous in the light of its political implications. Too little is known of the genes to justify positive statements about their contribution to the intelligence of mankind at large, much less to any division of mankind. The suspicion that there are genetically determined differences at birth, and that these may contribute to the enormous diversity of the human intellect, is at least as old as Plato. But, as Geneticist Lederberg observes, "it remains just a hypothesis, and we are not much better equipped than Plato was to assess it."

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