The wide spread increase of IQ throughout the Western world keeps niggling at me
It's called "the Flynn Effect." The problem is that the 1.1 differential between Black and White races still holds. We now have over 85 years of continuous testing by Social Scientists on this difference and they don't want to find it but it still prevails. Good schools or bad, on a group race basis, they still line up, Yellow, White, Brown and Black. This is what caused the uproar over the book, The Bell Curve."
Flynn effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day. When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 or 16 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised, they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100.
Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present. For the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, subjects born over a 100-year period were compared in Des Moines, Iowa, and separately in Dumfries, Scotland. Improvements were remarkably consistent across the whole period, in both countries. [1] This effect of an apparent increase in IQ has also been observed in various other parts of the world, though the rates of increase vary. [2]
There are numerous proposed explanations of the Flynn effect, as well as some skepticism about its implications. Similar improvements have been reported for other cognitions such as semantic and episodic memory. [3] Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations, possibly allowing national differences in IQ scores [4] to determine if the Flynn effect continues in nations with lower average national IQs.
The Bell Curve
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the principal conventional meaning of the term "bell curve", see Normal distribution. For other senses of the term, see Bell curve (disambiguation).
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which they argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status, or education level. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence.
The book was controversial, especially where the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed the implications of those differences. The authors were misreported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic. In fact, they wrote in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences." The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with ethnic differences remains unresolved."
The book's title comes from the bell-shaped normal distribution of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in a population.
Shortly after publication, many people rallied both in criticism and defense of the book. A number of critical texts were written in response to the work. |
