IQ gap among races

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#The_genetic_hypothesis

The modern controversy surrounding intelligence and race focuses on the results of IQ studies conducted during the second half of the 20th century in the United States, Western Europe, and other industrialized nations. In almost every testing situation where the tests were administered and evaluated correctly, a difference of approximately one standard deviation was observed between the mean IQ score of blacks and whites. In the United States, the mean IQ score among blacks is approximately 85 and the mean IQ score among whites is approximately 100; the mean IQ score of Hispanics is usually reported to be between the mean black and white scores. The mean score for people of East Asian and Jewish descent is usually higher than the mean score of whites, but the extent of that difference is not precisely known. However, several studies place the median IQ of Ashkenazi Jews (who make up the overwhelming majority of American Jews) at approximately one standard deviation above the mean for other whites. In a normal distribution, only about 16% of the population is at least one standard deviation above the mean.

Similar gaps are seen in other tests of cognitive ability or aptitude, including the SAT. Likewise, the gap is reflected by gaps in the academic, economic, and social factors correlated with IQ. The practical importance of intelligence makes the source and meaning of the IQ gap a pressing social concern.

Many compilations of average IQ by country place East Asian countries at the top of such lists. Some argue that this is in part attributed to some IQ tests' inherent bias towards testing spatial reasoning. They argue that logographic languages like Chinese or Japanese develop spatial reasoning better than Roman languages prevalent in Europe and America. The same reasoning has been used to explain why students from Asia-Pacific countries (eg Singapore, South Korea) tend to score better than average in tests of mathematics. Some argue that the East Asian advantage can also be explained by more rigorous education programs. Opponents of these interpretations point out that people of East Asian descent who are born and educated in the United States and primarily speak English have a higher mean IQ score than their white peers.

Arthur Jensen was one of the first researchers to propose that the IQ gap between blacks and whites is best explained by a hypothesis that attributes at least some of the cause to genetic factors. His 1969 paper in "Harvard Education Review" also stated that compensatory education was not very effective and that "genetic differences were more important than cultural or socioeconomic differences in explaining individual differences in IQ within the white population."

In 1974, an English biologist named John Randal Baker presented a lengthy argument in favor of innate racial differences in intelligence in a volume entitled "Race" (Oxford University Press, 1974), in which he claimed there had been a systematic, politically motivated suppression of classical biological anthropology outside Germany since the 1930s, and went on to attempt to demonstrate a relation among five historical civilizations (Sumerian, Egyptian, Indus valley, Helladic-Minoan and Sinic) and the supposed biological dispositions of their creators.

Reaction time and IQ

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