Thanks for sending me the item on IQ and falling birth rates from the Atlantic Monthly. I missed it. After reading it, I had a good night's sleep and sat down at my trusty C-64. Voila. Bonjour.
In one of Asimov's pieces there is something called the Second Law of Futurics:"Consider the obvious seriously, for few people will see it."
From a column in Newsweek by George Will, September 14, 1987,:"She has authored a miracle, a government report that does not read like something written by a fractious committee united only by hatred of the English language."
From a book, Word Smart, by Adam Robinson and the staff of the Princeton Review:"Despite what most people think, most intelligence or aptitude tests are tests of vocabulary."
From a book, Teach Your Child To Read in 60 Days, by Sidney Ledson:"More than one thousand reading research studies are carried out every year."
From The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould:"Millions of people are now suspecting that their social predjudices are scientific facts after all."
Richard Herrnstein is a leading oracle on IQ in the American intelligensia. According to the book, The IQ Controversy, an article titled simply "IQ" was published in the Atlantic in 1971. His interest in the relationship between success and IQ is persistent and he was then a Harvard psychologist.
Two of my major interests are mentioned in this essay, the (+.5) correlation between success and intelligence, and the bell-shaped distribution curve.
My basic assumptions about intelligence and literacy lead me in other directions.
Something about our society's affinity for statistical norms strikes me every time I turn on a television set or hear an AM radio station. Try it. Listen for the magnificent inability of the majority to acknowledge the very existence of the most literate half of the population. Then turn to the careers page of a major metropolitan daily. Notice the emphasis on excellent sommunications and interpersonal skills. Notice the daily search on Earth for computer programmers with nice personalities. Notice the incessant search for sales pros who can actually read and write.
In most of what I read about IQ tests, I find myself thinking that the most important questions have been ruled out of bounds or are never asked. Why is literacy to be considered genetically inherited in the first place? Who profits? Who gains? Why should the most intelligent or literate 2% of a population be less successful than that 3% which is usually identified as morons,idiots and imbeciles?
Academics are occasionally given to pointing out that many with IQ scores beyond 100 cannot read. Obviously they were not using written tests to acquire such data.
What is it about an IQ score of 100 that predicts that half of all the owners of new cars who drive through the intersection of Bloor and Yonge in the city of Toronto, in any given hour, will be no more literate than 12-year-old children in the fourth grade, and slightly more than a third will be completely illiterate?
What is it about the inability to speak English that has made it a near prerequisite in sales, politics and the corporate boardroom? It is only that the majority prevails. Earth is still a planet of medium messages and for untold centuries will continue as such. The entire body of social sciences known to man is based on the logical assumption that average is normal and perfection of the human personality necessarily coincides with the language proficiency of a child.
The reference in Herrnstein's article to a validity coefficient of (+.53) for success and intelligence is news to me. It may mean that the progression of literacy over the centuries is somewhat faster than I thought. The average Roman soldier stationed on Hadrian's Wall could, as far as I know, write a letter to relatives at home. But his adversary could not. Each would have represented the statistical norm for his society. One of them would be the near equal of a modern politician. The other would be little advanced from the bronze age. One thousand years is still needed to produce - Beowulf.
Somewhere I've read that the IQ scores of 50% of married pairs coincide after 7 years. It seems reasonable that parents and children tend to be comparable. Japan has a higher average IQ than the U.S. They also have newspapers with the first, second and fourth highest circulations in the world, but their upper 10% would not be able to match the upper 10% of English speakers. Originality and creativity are not their strong points, but if the population base increased to parity, this would no longer be the case.
Excellence by subjective measure tends to be mediocrity by any objective measure, but I keep wondering if this would be the true if the participants knew the objective scores of the participants. For instance would the winners still be the winners if voters knew the reading scores of politicians? Would it be a bad thing for prime time television shows and political speeches to be clearly marked "Grade Four Level"?
What would happen if the students in our schools knew the objective reading scores of their teachers and that nearly half of all students (somewhat higher for drop-outs) are superior to their teachers?
Published suicide statistics for the United States account for some eight million lives during the past 25 years. The suicide note is an established artifact of our culture. Even the American Mensa Bulletin has noted a study reporting higher IQs as at risk throughout their lives. It seems to me that future researchers may establish that the loss of life due to ignorance about IQ and reading scores in the 20th century is beyond anything we now suspect or imagine.
For sheer perversity, see how the income of a North American improves when he becomes a drug addict or an alcoholic. Given a solid analysis of the brains of politicians, corporation executives or television audiences, can you doubt it?
For sheer perversity see how the income improves in some fields of human endeavour when the participant becomes a homosexual.
For sheer perversity see how women react to literate men.
For sheer perversity see how men react to literate women.
The race is still not to the swift. And, I can't help but wonder, will turtles always win the race?

This item by George Noviss was included in MC2 (Mensa Communications) July/August 1989

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