3.25 Seminar 5 - IQ

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25. Seminar – IQ

Tommy stands, to bring Seminar to order. Usual participants are in usual chairs.

   He begins: “The IQ started in 1900 Paris to predict public school dropouts. The first test was thirty questions in ascending order of difficulty, using normal kids for controls. They found an average of correct answers by age. The six-year-old's averaged 15, the seven-year-old's, 18, and so on. Follow-up showed higher dropouts for kids who scored poorly for age.

   “IQ became a word in 1912. The raw score was the number of correct answers a kid made, and when standardized for age norms it gives ‘mental age’, or MA. So if a kid age six makes the same number correct answers average for age eight, he is an MA of 8. Dividing his actual, or chronological age, or CA, into MA gives his IQ.”

   Tommy writes IQ equation on chalkboard, behind left. “MA/CA, in the example, 8/6 = 1.33 x 100 = 133 IQ.”

   “But this IQ number was misleading. The arithmetic for rounding off numbers dictates that numbers from MA/CA x 100 give a quotient with the number of digits not larger than the lowest number of digits in the fraction. So IQ calculated from anyone between ages 10 and 99 should be rounded to two digits. My IQ 144 should be 14.

   “Another confounding factor is that chrono age, or the CA, is not as exact as its figures indicate. A child age six may be 6 years and some months, and especially in that low single-digit age group, six months is nearly ten percent of the child’s age. And the CA does not take into account the actual body age at birth. Many children are born up to 2 months premature and many others up to 2 months past the usual 40-week gestation and this has effect on the MA relating to CA that is independent of brainpower.

   “This partly explains the bad reputation of early IQ tests. Then came World War 1 and with it a racist eugenics movement. An early IQ test given to 2 million U.S. draftees showed worse scores for Negroes. So the IQ – originally meant to help poorer kid get educational benefit – began excluding young people from better education and jobs.

   “This use of IQ is a twisting of the idea of intelligence, which should mean a generalized set of abilities to acquire a wide range of knowledge and to act on it to achieve success in life, and teach others to create new knowledge. With IQ, it seems intelligence is a number for bad comparison. So if you have an IQ 104 and I have 105, I am thought to be more intelligent, or better than you.

   “IQ raises questions: What is intelligence? Is it superior brainpower, expressed as greater capacity to store and retrieve knowledge? Can intelligence actually be measured by test with accuracy or what does the testing measure? To what extent is IQ inherited, and is it a physical attribute like skin color, and does it differ among races? Is IQ fixed for life from age 15 as some claim or can one improve one's IQ by acquiring wisdom?

   “So next comes David Wechsler. His Bachelor of Arts came just as the first IQ test is liberated over America. Wechsler is drafted and assigned to proctor Army IQ testing. Dave, a son of non-English speaking immigrants faces the practical problem of a written test discriminating against culturally deprived illiterates. And Dave is not just a scientist, he is a real guy who don't see himself giving tests that discriminate against farm boys, immigrant lads and colored troopers who are being shipped as cannon-fodder. He volunteers for combat and gets it.

   “After the war, back in the U.S., Dave knows what he wants: To make the ideal IQ to solve the problems of the tests as he sees them in 1920 – statistical flaws, cultural bias and outright White racism to keep Negroes in their inferior cultural and economic place. He goes and gets a Ph.D. in psychology and, after practical experience in child guidance, becomes Chief Psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, New York where he is now in 1939. He revolutionizes IQ.

   “His contributions: 1) Replacing the MA/CA = IQ with a statistically rigorous test scoring and IQ placement; 2) Introducing the performance IQ as balance against the verbal IQ to correct for cultural bias against the less literate test taker; and 3) making the IQ a test also to spot abnormality in particular part of brain and as help to diagnose brain tumor, small stroke and early stage dementia such as seen with Alzheimer disease.

   “What is called ‘intelligence quotient’ is still referred to as ‘IQ’ but now, actually, it is no quotient anymore. This raises the important question of how an IQ number is arrived at today.”

   Tommy makes sign to Kimi who unfolds a white paper and puts it up over a board.

"What you see is the famous Bell Curve of IQ scores. Basically it is a comparison of each test-taker to the others within a similar test-taking group that takes into account variables of age, geography, gender and that is updated every few years. It is more accurate than the old MA/CA x 100 IQ."

   Tommy stops. His audience, all hanging on the words and Boris furiously scribbling notes, visibly relax.

   “Let's open for questions.”

   Kimi asks: “I got no education. So I guess I low IQ. Can I up IQ, with you?”

   “In my opinion you up IQ every minute you study under me, kid.”

   Kimi smiles happily.

   Boris comments: “Comrade, do you favor perfectibility of intelligence by education and improving social conditions? Our esteemed leader, Iosif Vissarionovitch has said just that in writings.”

   Tommy has not read Stalin but he prefers to avoid argument. He uses the opportunity to answer another IQ question. “Thank you, Boris, and also for calling me Comrade. Apropos of environment versus heredity, we have data from Sweden where identical twin versus non-identical and non-twin sibling studies suggest fifty-percent input of genes in the IQ. That leaves the other half for us educationists to work with – and that's quite a bit. According to geneticists, many genes determine IQ. It is what is called a polygenic trait. This is important from the standpoint of a eugenics policy because it suggests genetically less pure populations should have, on average, individuals with higher IQ than pure races owing to a greater possibility of having, in their mixed bag of heredity, more genes that donate to higher IQ. It suggests the fallacy of simple-minded racial eugenics.”

   Kimura interjects. “Then you are against Eugenics?”

   “No, definitely not, Ken; what I am against is stupid eugenics by uneducated assholes that use it to hype national or racial type. I think present IQ testing is a handle to physicalize, the quality we may call ‘brainpower'. I mean a handle to put what was previously an un-measurable mental quality into a physical category where differences and similarities can be measured. And having said that, it seems reasonable – although it remains to be tested – that genetically isolated populations, so called ‘racially pure people’, should have on average a differing IQ number between each group and that the IQ number may be increased by selective breeding, using individuals with a polygenic mix that ups IQ. Today, there are less and less ‘pure’ populations: Blacks in central Africa, Eskimos in Greenland, Brazilian jungle Amerindians? The rest of us result from racial mixing. That's good for a polygenic trait like intelligence and probably explains why mixed-race peoples today dominate and pure races are only found in rare, unpleasant environments. But difference of IQ between races is small and only notable by testing huge populations and averaging out. When it comes to individual intelligence, it is nonsensical to suggest that a person's low or high IQ has anything to do with race. So with no data to the contrary, the question should be closed because of its potential for divisiveness, which we have more than enough of.”

   Harumi raises hand. “How can this IQ knowledge help the New People?”

   ‘New People’ makes Tommy's heart beat faster. He answers.  “Basically, it is important in that it represents a scientific quantification of the most important human quality. I take it as self-evident that the higher the average intelligence of Homo sapiens, the better civilization we shall have, as measured in terms of creature comforts, creative leisure, and intellectual advancement in knowledge of the Universe. Better for all of Earth's inhabitants, not just the affluent or the North Americans and Western Europeans, and not only for humans, but for the other animals and for the inanimate beauty of this planet because a higher-intelligence population of humans will be conservators not killers and destroyers and polluters like present humanity.”

   “Once we New People are in charge of Earth, we can design educational and eugenic experiments to improve IQ. And under a Science Civilization, many aspects of educational policy can be made experimental, and answers can be obtained by using IQ results of experimental versus control groups.”
   Tommy sits down. “OK, there is much more. My purpose is not so much to answer all questions but to give you the intellectual tools to scientifically ask the questions and pose experiments to get the correct answers. I want to give you a solid factual basis on IQ. Now you have it. The seminar is at an end." He turns to Kimi. "OK, now for the Eats! My Kimi girl has cooked up a storm!”

         To read on, now, click 3.(26-27) Seminar 6 - Science Civilization - End S...