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Test your IQ

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Eugenics, Class, and IQ: "The Bell Curve".

 

A classist version of Theodore Roosevelt’s "race suicide" has been resurrected in Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s 1994 book, "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life." Herrnstein and Murray argue that people with low IQ’s are found in disproportionate numbers among the poor, who also have the largest families, while people at the top of the IQ scale (who also tend to be at the top of the class scale in today’s technology-oriented society) have the fewest children. Assuming that intelligence is highly heritable (between 40% and 80%, according to studies of identical twins reared apart), Herrnstein and Murray warn that the average American IQ could drop as much as one percentage point every ten years, unless something is done to encourage high-IQ couples to have more children and low-IQ couples to have fewer. According to Herrrnstein and Murray, we might not even be aware that IQ’s are falling, because school systems keep revising curricula and tests in order to be more all-inclusive of the population. Herrnstein and Murray suggest that the government stop "subsidizing" births among poor women, in other words, cut off welfare and other benefits. They believe that poor women should be economically forced to give up their children for adoption to families of higher social class, which would have the immediate effect of raising the children’s IQ’s through improved environments. On the immigration side, Herrnstein and Murray argue that recent immigrants, who are increasingly from Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, are not as intelligent or ambitious as earlier waves of immigrants because they seek America as a "welfare state" rather than "a land of opportunity." Therefore, immigration should be restricted to educated members of the professional classes. Historically, we’ve heard the Herrnstein-Murray arguments before, presented as "scientific findings" to Congress early in this century, on behalf of banning immigration from Asia, Africa, and Southern and Eastern Europe. The same arguments about inferior intelligence were used against Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Czechs. Birth control crusaders aimed their efforts at poor families, not only because people were having large families that they could not afford, but also out of fear that the children of the poor would crowd out the (more desirable) children of the middle classes. America seems to have survived earlier waves of "low IQ" immigrants and large families born to poor people, with no noticeable drop in population IQ. IQ’s went up as people learned English and spent more time in schools.

 

The basic problem with any argument based on IQ is that no one can be certain what IQ tests really measure. Do they measure the individual’s genetic constitution, the family’s values and aspirations, the quality of the school, the effects of poverty or affluence, or all of the above in varying degrees, specific to each individual’s situation? Although IQ scores may predict who will do well in school, they are not predictive about who will succeed in real life, except at the extreme ends of the scale. Before making eugenic policy recommendations for raising or lowering population IQ, it would be necessary to know far more about what IQ tests measure than we now know or can ever know in a social context of inequality. Herrnstein and Murray’s hypothesis boils down to the basic eugenic distinction between "us" (who turn out to be most people, because the authors really want to find employment and a decent living for almost everyone) and "them" (those who pose dangers to the nation’s IQ - such as new immigrants, single mothers on welfare, and people who score below 80 or 90 on IQ tests). The book has attracted a following because most readers can place themselves in the "us" category. Most of those in the "them" category will not be reading it. Nevertheless, it is a classic example of eugenic thought, made more dangerous by some apparent trappings of liberalism and a readable (to the authors’ credit) statistical appendix.

 

 

Dorothy C. Wertz

 

http://www.genesage.com/professionals/gene...enicsclass.html

 

I was just looking around to see what was out there about IQ tests and came across this. Purty interesting.

o0o

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gOOters Newbie

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that test is not terribly precise...fyi

 

by most recognized standards...

 

155=EvilGenius (see gOOters)

140=genius (see Mensa)

100=avg (see Playaa)

80=s s s stupid (see Mag)

70=tarded (see...I dont have the heart)

 

The types we hear about that have multiple degrees etc. by mid-teens usually have IQ levels that are hard to determine as most exams were not written with these types in mind. But they usually have IQs that hover around 200 and sometimes upward. Often these people are so smart that they find it difficult to integrate into society. Of course, being 15+ years younger than your "peers" probably doesnt help much either.

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dwEEziL Newbie

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True IQ tests don't measure your intelligence but rather your comprehension ability (i.e., the quotient part of IQ). On a true IQ test, your results should be nearly the same whether you took it as a child, adolescent, or an adult because typically, your "ability" doesn't change much...you just learn more.

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