SEX DIFFERENCES IN IQ

This issue was in the news not long ago but it has now made the front page of "The Australian", Australia's national daily (issue of Sat., Oct 1) so it is good to see that the "incorrectness" of discussing IQ now seems to be waning. And the article that the headline leads to is unusually comprehensive so I am going to quote a little more from it than I usually would. The article does of course include comments from feminists about the issue but they are long on abuse and short on facts.

"The idea is as simple as its implications are seismic: women, as a group, lack the evolutionary genetic intelligence to master the highest strata of mathematics and the hard sciences. This is the central tenet of a contentious theory forwarded by famed US social scientist Charles Murray, who a decade ago made similarly explosive claims about the inferior genetic intelligence of blacks in his best-selling book The Bell Curve....

He had not intended to delve again into the genetic nature of group intelligence -- he received death threats after publishing, along with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve in 1994 -- until a controversy erupted at Harvard last January over comments made by its president, former Clinton administration cabinet officer Lawrence Summers. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tended to score around the top on standardised maths tests and wondered aloud in casual remarks whether that chasm stemmed from biological differences between the sexes. It was a radical idea and not well received within the academic community. After being shouted down at almost every turn Summers, not surprisingly, quickly backpedalled.

"It absolutely appalled me, the reaction to what was a fairly unremarkable observation that men seem more predisposed to excel in these areas than women," Murray says. "I mean, it's true, isn't it? He had actually done his homework, which is more than I can say for those who attacked him." And so Murray set about writing The Inequality Taboo, which was published in September.

"The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy," he writes. "That assumption is wrong. When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong. "The historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument. The question is whether the social and legal exclusion of women is a sufficient explanation for this situation or whether sex-specific characteristics are also at work." ...

Murray -- who believes intelligence is the most important attribute if society is to become a true meritocracy -- is convinced that new breakthroughs will reveal that biology plays an overwhelming role in intelligence quotient, which in turn helps predict societal success. In examining the differences between the sexes, he cites as proof the fact that, among mathematically gifted students, seven times as many boys as girls scored in the top percentile of the standardised American SAT mathematics test....

"There is nothing inherent in being a woman that precludes high math ability. But there remains a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference has an evolutionary rationale, a physiological basis and a direct correlation with math scores." per cent of Nobel prizes in sciences were awarded to women in the 20th century....

Murray, however, remains unrepentant. "Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified," he writes. In education, he says that the taboo has hurt boys because educators see their development as an aberration and girls as the norm. "I am confronting realities, dealing with the way the world exists," he says. "There are group differences but they don't preclude an individual from rising above them.

(Please read the above excerpts in the context of my own previous comments on the matter here and here)

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ELSEWHERE

The fast-vanishing truth about New Orleans: "In his recent article "Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina," which runs in the Oct. 2005 issue of American Renaissance, Jared Taylor gives an account of horrifying and explicit details concerning the actions of thugs and criminals in New Orleans which severely frustrated, and often completely halted, relief efforts for several days following Hurricane Katrina. The thugs and criminals happen to be black, which is not surprising since 67% of New Orleans population is black. On the other hand 1) nobody else has reported these outrages in the comprehensive manner Taylor has and 2) many black leaders like Jesse Jackson have used the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as an indictment of white people. Apparently fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights acts, when the very mayor in charge of government in New Orleans is a black man elected by its people, the only acceptable discussion of race in America is one that conforms to the dramas of half a century before. Even if black people suffer at the hands of black people, whitey must be somehow to blame".

In the brainless world of the Left, the cure for poverty is to give the poor more money. The concept that poverty in the modern-day Western world may be mainly an attitudinal and behaviour problem is too deep for them. But what happens when the poor ARE given a lot of money through no exertions of their own? This story is pretty typical: "A couple who won nearly $800,000 on Lotto have told how they blew the lot in just seven weeks. Pregnant mother-of-five Donna Lynden described how she and partner Allan Taylor were pressured to give away much of their win to relatives, after buying a house and cars for themselves. She said their winnings quickly ran out and they continued to claim welfare payments to survive, despite hitting a $793,151.87 jackpot in June 2003.... They pleaded guilty this week to charges related to receiving about $29,000 of payments"

Blair disses Europe: "In terms of international diplomacy it was the equivalent of an unprovoked elbow to the back of the head. Tony Blair, speaking to the annual conference of his Labour Party, decided that the easiest way to pump up a bit of pride in Britain and his Government was to have a gratuitous whack at the country's biggest allies in Europe. "This is a country today that increasingly sets the standard," he boasted to a packed conference hall and dozens of TV cameras. "Not for us the malaise of France or the angst of Germany." The offence was magnified because Blair's gibe was so unexpected; in a few weeks he will be hosting a summit meeting with his German and French counterparts. But Blair's swipe was even more wounding because it was deadly accurate".

No underclass in Australia: "It's assumed that Australia, like most Western nations, has an underclass: a group of people who will always be poor. These people are sometimes called the disadvantaged, said to exist in reasonably large numbers and expected, as a social reality, to be always with us. But is it true? New research drawn from data previously unavailable to Australian academics suggests it's not: the underclass isn't vast and, what's more, disadvantage is a transient state, something that some people slip into before clambering up from. "The idea that there is a large number of people who, in crude terms, you might think of as being losers, who are basically beyond help, it's factually incorrect," says Bruce Headey, principal fellow at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne".

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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