Tapsearch Com EditorIQ and arrogance
January 19th 2007 01:31
The third installment of Charles Murray's IQ series from the Wall Street Journal is up. (I weighed in extensively on the first here).
The new piece gets a little into the "we should read Plato and Aristotle and lead high-minded lives" philosophical blah-blah Murray is prone to, but I love this point:
"We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones."
It's amazing how political correctness sometimes draws attention to human differences and even exaggerates them. It's also interesting how people see intelligence and merit as the same thing. Since genetic IQ differences are out of the question, those in the most demanding occupations must have worked harder.
The new piece gets a little into the "we should read Plato and Aristotle and lead high-minded lives" philosophical blah-blah Murray is prone to, but I love this point:
"We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones."
It's amazing how political correctness sometimes draws attention to human differences and even exaggerates them. It's also interesting how people see intelligence and merit as the same thing. Since genetic IQ differences are out of the question, those in the most demanding occupations must have worked harder.
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Comment by Damo
Are the children gifted or just pushed harder by ambitious parents?
Similar questions are being asked in Australia.
Gifted child is sometimes code for genetically superior parents.
Comment by JohnDoe
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Comment by Robert V
Good point on the environment-heredity question. There's no doubt that parenting matters; IQ can't help much if no one teaches a child to apply it to education.
That said, there have been a variety of adoption and twin studies conducted to sort out the degree to which IQ is genetic. Adopted kids' performance tends to fall between their biological and adoptive parents' (though, I believe, a bit closer to biology), and identical twins correlate closer in IQ than fraternal twins do.
As of 1994 when The Bell Curve came out, estimates of the balance ranged from 40 to 80 percent genetic-- I'm not sure if subsequent work has narrowed that range; I follow IQ news pretty closely and haven't heard anything.
In short, there is such a thing as genetically "gifted" kids, but biology is far from destiny.
Comment by Robert V
"For people living in the prevailing conditions of the developed world, IQ is highly heritable, and by adulthood the influence of family environment on IQ is undetectable. That is, significant variation in IQ between adults can be attributed to genetic variation, with the remaining variation attributable to environmental sources that are not shared within families. In the United States, marked variation in IQ occurs within families, with siblings differing on average by around 12 points."