Maggie's Farm

Big Al, Sam L, Agent Cooper - If only it were true.

The reality is heartbreaking because we don't know what they hell we should do about it. So we go on believing the myth, that it is culture, or expectations, or family dysfunction that drive minority failure. Those are all partial explanations, and we should do everything we can to change or counteract them.

But the harsh reality resides in the numbers. Without any knowledge of skin color, place of birth, or cultural background, you can look at the junk DNA of a person and tell which continent their ancestors were from (American blacks and the native/black/european mix in Latin America are the major exceptions to this, but even there, you can tell the proportions pretty well). Then if you group them by hundreds, you can predict in advance what the average IQ is going to be and be darn close. All those other variables have been controlled for in many studies, and do not provide the robust explanatory power that genetics do. Social pathologies are strongly influenced by family dysfunction, but academic problems only indirectly.

You have no idea how much I wish this were not true. One hope on the horizon is that adaptability is increasing in its survival importance relative to g-factor intelligence, and may become more important rather quickly. Minorities may match or even exceed whites and asians on that scale.

I don't entirely disagree. Without the additional social and cultural pathologies, a fair number of NAM's would be graduating and succeeding. But we are talking about a 1SD difference in average cases. (.5SD for hispanics) I had something close to one of those. My fourth son, adopted from Romania when he was 13 after as bad an early childhood as you can imagine, probably has an IQ around 90. If he had been a determined, hard worker at academics - if he had been well above average in that category, he would have gotten through reasonably well. But he was only average in that - he arrived a little below average in comparison to other boys his age and left our home for adulthood a little above. That combination meant that we really had to drag him across the finish line for graduation, and he then completed about half of a good auto tech school. The Marines brought some more good things out of him. But when a student is starting in that hole, he can't afford to be much below average in anything else - not in effort, not in social skills, not in resilience.

We love the stories of kids who are in fact above average in all those other things and succeed over obstacles. But effort, and charm, and resilience also seem to have some heritable aspects. If we have them it may not just be because of our wonderful noble characters that we earned every scrap of. Those qualities may have a genetic loading as well, and the idea that "anyone can do it" maybe only partly true.

Should more NAM's with IQ 100 be graduating and doing well? Sure. But It is much harder to get a kid with IQ 85 through HS than most people think.