Having had a chance to catch up on this week’s AB debate about "Jewgenics," and the tendency by Charles Murray, Jon Entine, and certain other social scientists to over-inflate the importance of IQ testing, I wanted to chime in.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell — not a college degree among them. And I think the example of these monomaniacal tech entrepreneurs, who each started at a very good college with similarly "ranked" students, is a good example of the gross reductiveness of IQ as a meaningful measure of a person’s worth, which seems to be the implicit agenda of "Jewgenic," or let’s face it, eugenic thinking. Part of succeeding in business is social skills — being able to relate to people, whether through positive reinforcement, or striking fear into the hearts of your employees (I’m thinking of Jobs here), or in some other way that allows you to achieve goals. And then there is the process of generating those goals — like Gates, Jobs, or Dell you have to imagine products that don’t currently exist, and that people will either want or need. Then you have to engage in a different sort of thinking — strategic business thinking — to achieve those goals.
As Anna and Ruchira both point out, there really are different kinds of skills and intelligences — someone who makes a great brain surgeon might make a lousy nurse, even within the same hospital. Someone who makes a great law professor might make a lousy teacher. Someone who makes a great entrepreneur might make a lousy editor, chemist, cop, husband, or therapist.
This mad struggle to force everyone into the same empirical straitjacket is an insult to human multifariousness, and is a particularly insidious manifestation of the American tendency to reductive empiricism (everyone’s got a number — just look ’em up with the College Board, or whatever faux scholarly organization Charles Murray happens to be signed up with this week). As Adam Gopnik dryly observed in the more trivial case of Robert Parker assigning two-digit point values to each of the world’s wines: it’s as if a man had made love to a hundred women and then assigned each one a numeric value. It’s not that the number tells you nothing, it’s that it’s grossly inadequate to the task of fully describing the phenomena it purports to evaluate.
What is objectionable about the endless obsessing about IQ, and even more so about the heritable qualities of a Jewish "race" (quite deliberately placed in quotation marks because this is an inherently pseudo-scientific category), is the need to mystify the status quo. According to eugenic thinking, we are merely blindly carrying out the imperatives of genes, rather than manifesting an interplay between genes, historical accident (for example, the invention of steel, or the lack of immunity of Native-Americans to small pox and other infectious diseases), cultural factors such as Jewish-American mothers of the 1930s or systemic racism against African-Americans, and the billions of contingent choices made daily by the teeming masses of the world.
And lastly, on the subject of moral choice, freedom does matter. There is certainly a strong case to be made that moral freedom is an illusion, but it does feel real. SAT scores, MBTE or IQ tests or other empirical measures can lead to educated guesses about the choices people make, but they can’t reliably predict them. That’s why some people become accountants, some people ballerinas, some MBAs, some cabaret singers — even if they all graduated from the same good college for which their SAT said they were qualified. And that’s what makes observing the human menagerie interesting, rather than akin to reading the U.S. Census.
(P.S. Emerson’s somewhat sinister but compelling essay "Fate" — which acknowledges the power of statistical analysis of human behavior while nevertheless recognizing that moral freedom is still part of the picture, is worth a read). http://www.rwe.org/works/Conduct_1_Fate.htm
Accidental Blogger 
8 responses to “Kicking It Old-School: Eugenics Edition (Andrew)”
I am really pleased that my irritation with the AEI discussion gave rise to two substantive commentaries from Anna and Andrew on the implications of overplaying the IQ card. My use of the words “Caste System” was not a mere rhetorical flourish. I see real danger here. The original caste system as practiced in Hindu society is a construct based precisely on our supposed “innate” qualities – dictated by the accident of birth and hence “fate.” It is a cruel irony that no one stopped to think that much of that “fate” was decided by the impenetrable social barriers erected by the law of genetics which presupposes and predetermines what a person will or can achieve in life. India continues to pay a high moral and human price for the ignominy of this unjust system.
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Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell — not a college degree among them. And I think the example of these monomaniacal tech entrepreneurs, who each started at a very good college with similarly “ranked” students, is a good example of the gross reductiveness of IQ as a meaningful measure of a person’s worth
they don’t have college degrees not because they were dull, but because they were bright & ambitious enough that credentialing was irrelevant. bill gates had nearly a perfect SAT from what i recall, steve jobs was smart enough to get admitted to reed college, which has pretty good stats re: standardized test scores, and i’d be willing to bet that michael dell was a decent student. so it isn’t an example of gross reductiveness, these, especially gates who notoriously scored very well on a host of standardized tests as a teenager, are grossly misleading examples.
What is objectionable about the endless obsessing about IQ, and even more so about the heritable qualities of a Jewish “race” (quite deliberately placed in quotation marks because this is an inherently pseudo-scientific category), is the need to mystify the status quo.
no, the interest in the rise of the ashkenazi jews is all about why and how an obscure and backward people exploded into a host of intellectually demanding professions after their emancipation in the 19th century. as for the quotations around the term race for jews, they do exhibit pretty good signatures of genetic commonalities (in addition to the admixture with surrounding populations). jews are a genetically rooted ethnicity to some extent.
According to eugenic thinking, we are merely blindly carrying out the imperatives of genes….
that’s a grossly false characterization of the field of quantitative genetics, which is all about partition components of variance. you can of course get a lot of mileage out of such characterizations from fellow travelers who will applaud your contempt, but no so much if you actually want to engage the complex interplay of genes, environment and contingency which you allude to.
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Razib,
I don’t think anyone of us (at least not I) have claimed that genes do not play any role in determining what we will end up achieving in a societal milieu that values one human achievement over another, given the priorities of a civilization at that particular time. Even the essay by Emerson that Andrew has linked to is heavily slanted towards genetics (Emerson calls it “Fate”) See what I said in my original post that started this particular conversation:
I am not a post-modernist touchy-feely type myself. I do not believe for a moment that all of us have equal aptitude for everything we attempt to do. I also accept that some of what we are capable or incapable of is determined by our innate heritable traits. But that consideration ought to be limited to “individuals” who need to be evaluated for a specific task at hand. Even when a group consists of individuals with closely comparable traits in some enterprise or the other, it is dangerous to base human interactions on that blanket calculation. Doing so is unfair to the individual. It is a prescription for short changing some and setting up others for failure.
The problem some of us have with this kind of generalization especially when directed towards an entire ethnic/cultural group, however statistically true, is that it automatically assigns worth (or unworth) to humans based on their membership in a select group. Individuals will continue to succeed and fail according to the “nature-nurture” equation of their own genetic make up and experience. Why make presumptions based on one or the other for an entire population? And even if you do, culture is likely to play a much more important role in determining group behavior and achievement than genetics.
The fact also is that many “very high” IQ persons choose not to play the rat race of “success.” How do you calculate their worth? By their lack of success, potential for success or just by their IQ? (The reverse is true for not so bright but hugely successful people) There is a paradox and some danger here, don’t you agree? And I say this with the authority of a person who grew up in a culture which made genetically motivated group distinctions on a systematic level without batting an eyelash, thus severely setting back certain groups.
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The problem some of us have with this kind of generalization especially when directed towards an entire ethnic/cultural group, however statistically true, is that it automatically assigns worth (or unworth) to humans based on their membership in a select group.
I would go a step further and argue that it’s not statistically true. Putting aside the problem that IQ testing is absurd because there’s no such thing as “general intelligence” (and even if there were, IQ testing in its present form isn’t capable of testing for it), explanations rooted in racist biology fail to take into account social-environmental factors which are the dominant cause of differences in achievement or intelligence-type testing — i.e., that at best it uses true numbers misleadingly and invalidly.
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Razib’s “they don’t have college degrees not because they were dull, but because they were bright & ambitious enough that credentialing was irrelevant” begs the question. The statement assumes that brightness and ambition are reliably measurable factors. Recall that Andrew was speaking of the “worth” of a person, and not the gro$$ly reductive account of worth. Since when does one need credentials to claim that?
As for dullness, I’ve heard Jobs speak on occasion via the usual mainstream media outlets. He does seem to be a fairly bland guy, but then that might mean nothing more than that I would never recommend him for speaking engagements.
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“the interest in the rise of the ashkenazi jews is all about why and how an obscure and backward people exploded into a host of intellectually demanding professions after their emancipation in the 19th century”
I could quibble with this as a historical account, but, taken on its own terms, since one assumes our genes, unlike our social-political circumstances, haven’t changed that much in the past couple hundred years, this collection of premises in itself suggests that the nurture-not-nature conclusion that our genes were not a sufficient condition for success, and that our emancipation was the critical factor. As a policy matter, this suggests to me that if we’re looking to increase success, we should work on further “emancipation,” whatever we decide that means.
On the more important point that value’s not co-determinate with the dollar amount assigned by a free market, having a fair amount of experience of a variety of types of people, I happily leave to anyone who prefers it over the company of bright and interesting people with less money (both usual suspects like writers and artists and less high-profile candidates such as teachers and librarians and educated and engaged housewives, like some of my co-bloggers) and people who aren’t necessarily bright but are kind, passionate, and good company (random companions met at corner bars and jazz concerts, some of my odd-duck clients, etc.), the company of boring rich people, professional or not (flashback to smugly dull discussions among high schoolers over what designer to wear to this season in the Hamptons; the epiphany that someone could be both legitimately quite bright and entirely uninteresting while being hit on by methodically dull Goldman Sachs bankers at a party a friend dragged me to back when I was 20; reinforcement of that epiphany during teeth-pullingly dull lunches with partners and older associates as a summer associate at a white shoe firm; dull but purposeful networking conversations at fund-raising events…oops! Did I say that?).
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You did say it, Anna, and in one almost complete sentence. I’m exhausted.
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I don’t think anyone of us (at least not I) have claimed that genes do not play any role in determining what we will end up achieving in a societal milieu that values one human achievement over another, given the priorities of a civilization at that particular time.
Anna said it, I said it. Genes do not change that much in a short span of time and when they do, we have little control over how they do. Social milieu does change and we have some say in which direction we want to evolve. Emancipation will do wonders for a “dumb” and heretofore oppressed population.
Jews lacking spatial /visual co-ordination? Hmm. Ask the Israeli fighter pilots (a bookish, urban population choosing to become a militarized one – a remarkable genetic shift within a generation!). Ah, and those engaged and bright “housewives!” I should know – some of my best friends… etc. :-)
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