Race, IQ, and Wealth

Ron Unz at The American Conservative takes a look at the argument that IQ can change over time due to environmental forces. If you are familiar with “The Bell Curve” you know that Murry and Herrenstein argue that IQ has a large genetic component. And the general consensus in the academic field of psychometrics has been that the extreme environmental view is considered to be dubious, as Dinesh D’Sousa writes in “The End of Racism.” But even if IQ is 80% hereditary, that still means that 20% of our intelligence is the result of our environment. In this article, Unz looks at the evidence for environment having a significant effect on raising IQ over time and finds that populations that come to American have shown increases in intelligence over the course of time as those environmental factors take hold. And he also provides statistics from other countries that show differences in average IQ over time even with populations that have few genetic differences.