In previous chapters I have examined the history of IQ testing especially in the first half of the twentieth century, although I did consider Arthur Jensen, who is responsible for reviving IQ testing in the second half. In this chapter I will examine the current ‘state of the art’ in IQ testing and examine whether the field is any less fraudulent than when it got started.

How do modern IQ-testers talk about ‘intelligence’?
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In 1981 Stephen Jay Gould published The Mismeasure of Man, which among other things is a refutation of ‘intelligence testing.’ His emphasis is different, but Gould’s book and mine share some arguments in common. Gould argues, correctly, that IQ does not measure ‘intelligence.’ To this Jon Entine replies:

“If, as [Stephen Jay] Gould and others claim, IQ does not measure intelligence, what might the concept of intelligence mean? To do justice to the complexity and elusiveness of what the average person means by intelligence, Yale’s [Robert] Sternberg postulates a triarchic model: analytic intelligence similar to what is measured by IQ tests; creative intelligence; and practical intelligence, or what is popularly called street smarts. He offers the example of Kenyan children who are great at identifying medicinal herbs, indicating high practical intelligence, and can be quite creative, but score low on IQ tests.”[1]

This paragraph is a treasure, so I will unpack it slowly for our mutual enjoyment. Starting at the top, consider Entine’s if-then topic sentence:

“If…[an] IQ [test] does not measure intelligence, [then] what might the concept of intelligence mean?”

What Entine has written is not proper English, so I will make a couple of corrections. The first is that he got the wrong verb at the tail end of the sentence, and so it should read:

“If an IQ test does not measure intelligence, then what might the concept of intelligence be?”

Why? Because a concept is (verb ‘to be’) the meaning of a noun (such as ‘intelligence’). So we can write either “what the concept of intelligence is” or “what the word ‘intelligence’ means.” Instead of using either formulation, however, Entine confusingly combined the two. I think it is easier to think about the statement with the second option, so I rewrite as follows:

“If an IQ test does not measure intelligence, then what might the word ‘intelligence’ mean?”

Also, Entine has removed the true second clause and left it implied, so I reinsert it below (in italics):

“If an IQ test does not measure intelligence, then IQ-testers have been wrong about what the word ‘intelligence’ means. So what might the word ‘intelligence’ mean?”

That all of this is fair is demonstrated by the fact that, in the rest of the paragraph, Entine endorses one proposal of what the word ‘intelligence’ might really mean. Before going there, let us decide whether Entine’s topic sentence makes any sense.

“If an IQ test does not measure intelligence, then IQ-testers have been wrong about what the word ‘intelligence’ means.”

Does it make sense? There is cleverness involved, so it may be hard to decide. Consider this other sentence:

“If an IQ test does not measure intelligence, then IQ-testers have been wrong about what the word ‘music’ means.”

Now, this right away sounds like nonsense.

The meaning of a word is simply a summary of how it is employed, so the only test that can help an investigator find out whether he had previously misunderstood the English word ‘music’ is to ask a large enough sample of English speakers how they use that word. An IQ test doesn’t investigate how people use words, so IQ-test results cannot tell us what the meaning of the word ‘music’ is or isn’t.

But the point is quite general. Therefore, just as it applies to the meaning of the word ‘music,’ it also applies to the meaning of the word ‘intelligence.’ So, if you construct a statement of the form, “IQ-test results are not x, and therefore the meaning of the word ‘intelligence’ is not M,” you are talking a lot of nonsense, because IQ tests do not investigate the meaning of words. But take a look again at Entine's topic sentence:

“If an IQ test does not measure intelligence, then IQ-testers have been wrong about what the word ‘intelligence’ means.”

But there is an even greater absurdity here.

English speakers turn to professional psychologists for an authoritative definition of ‘intelligence,’ because ‘intelligence’ is their technical term. In other words, it is the psychologists who define this word for the rest of us. What this means is that even the proper test of meaning cannot possibly demonstrate that IQ-testers have misunderstood the meaning of the word ‘intelligence.’ And yet Entine is saying that IQ testers have demonstrated that they don’t know the meaning of their own word!

What survives the absurdities, however, is that Jon Entine has conceded, in the first clause, that IQ tests do not measure intelligence: “If an IQ test does not measure intelligence...”

Now, ask yourself this: What does follow from finding out that IQ tests do not measure intelligence as the eugenicists (or, if you will, the intelligence-testing psychologists) themselves define it? In other words, what follows from finding out that IQ tests do not measure something general, innate, and unalterable? This: That IQ testing is a fraud, because IQ-testers have claimed that their tests measure something general, innate, and unalterable, when they have always known that IQ tests measure no such thing. And what follows from that? That ordinary Americans should demand a stop to institutionalized IQ testing as a way of determining opportunities in American society, and they should demand that psychology departments stop teaching ‘intelligence testing’ as if it were science. But of course Entine’s prose is designed to short-circuit any such outcome, because anybody swayed by his nonsense will then be prevented from drawing the proper conclusion: that we’ve been bamboozled.

But there’s gold in them hills, and we’ve only begun to mine Entine’s paragraph for its charms.

Next, as a ‘solution’ to his absurdly motivated and ungrammatically stated non-problem (“what might the concept of intelligence mean?”), Jon Entine recommends the adoption of prominent IQ-tester Robert Sternberg’s new definition. Here, “what is measured by IQ tests” is called “analytic intelligence”; what is not—repeat not—measured by IQ tests is called “practical intelligence” (or “street smarts,” Entine clarifies).

But this produces the sharpest contradiction conceivable.

As you may recall from chapter 6, Alfred Binet and Theophile Simon, the very people who designed the basic structure of what are now called IQ tests, said that the “fundamental faculty” they were trying to measure was “of the utmost importance for practical life.” And they called this faculty “good sense,” which is more or less what I mean by “street smarts.” As we also saw in chapter 6, another term that Binet and Simon used for the thing they were after was “practical sense,” which is of course synonymous with Sternberg’s “practical intelligence.” The Binet-Simon studies confirmed that culturally local “practical intelligence” was indeed the very thing they were measuring. And yet this is precisely what Sternberg is now saying that IQ tests do not measure...

Next, consider that Sternberg calls the spectacular ability of Kenyan children to identify local medicinal herbs an example of “practical intelligence.” But wouldn’t Sternberg call that same ability, in the head of a Western biologist trained at a university, an example of “analytic intelligence”? I bet he would, because his definition of “analytic intelligence” is simply “what is measured by IQ tests.” And what is measured by IQ tests, as we saw in chapters 6, 7, and 8, is the school culture and pop culture (i.e. the street smarts) of relatively upper-class whites in Western countries.

How convenient.

And let us examine Sternberg’s example closely. Entine writes:

“[Sternberg] offers the example of Kenyan children who are great at identifying medicinal herbs, indicating high practical intelligence, and can be quite creative, but score low on IQ tests.”

So after defining “analytic intelligence” as “what is measured by IQ tests,” Sternberg explains that, whatever that is, a black kid will not have much of it. I don't think we should be surprised. If instead of “analytic intelligence” Sternberg had said the equally vacuous “abstract intelligence,” the only thing to distinguish his views from those of his predecessor, IQ tester Henry Edward Garrett, would be the relative tactlessness of the delivery: “[The Negro] has less of what I call ‘abstract intelligence’ than the white man.”[1a] The well known Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg continues a long tradition: no matter how an ‘intelligence testing’ psychologist talks, you will always hear that blacks supposedly have less intelligence.

And is it a coincidence that, for his example, Sternberg chooses Kenyan children, in particular?

If so, this is a coincidence that cannot shake the appearance of having been composed as a tailor-made gift to Entine. For I remind you that the Kenyan kids who, we are told, “score low on IQ tests,” are the same Kenyan kids who, according to a lot of ink spilled by Jon Entine, have the most dramatic biological advantage in sports! And presto, this can be expected to clinch the connection for Entine’s lay readers: thinking with their prejudices, they will construct the following ‘argument’: ‘biologically good’ at sports hence ‘biologically bad’ at Sternberg’s “analytic intelligence.” Those lay readers will not be told that IQ tests are modeled on what happens in Western schools, an environment with which Kenyan kids will have very limited experience, if any. Neither will these readers be told that the Kenyan IQ test would assess one’s ability to identify Kenyan medicinal herbs, which means that, by the logic of Sternberg’s own enterprise, it would show his own “analytic intelligence” to be very low—in Henry Goddard’s terms, at the level of a ‘moron.’

I would now like to dispel any impression that in exposing Sternberg I am being unfair to other IQ-testers. In fact, producing new definitions of ‘intelligence,’ as Robert Sternberg does, is something of a joyful sport. He himself elsewhere confesses with disarming candor that “[IQ-testing] theorists…disagree in the details of their definitions of intelligence.”[2] And even more sharply: “Viewed narrowly, there seem to be almost as many definitions of intelligence as there were experts asked to define it.”[2a]

Though Sternberg’s use of the words “expert” and “theorist” may be loose, I am comfortable accepting his authority on this point: IQ-testers such as himself, when they try to say something more specific (or more “narrow”) about intelligence than “innate and unalterable,” can never seem to agree. But how can people who disagree about what they are supposedly testing be using the same measure? Surely if they are interested in different constructs the same test cannot be serving everybody’s purposes. So the IQ testing enterprise is not only fraudulent but internally incoherent. A madhouse.

There is a long tradition of this, of course. Charles Spearman, the originator of the whole mess, wrote the following in 1927 concerning the question “What is intelligence?”:

“Tests results and numerical tables are further accumulated; consequent action affecting the welfare of persons are proposed, and even taken, on the grounds of—nobody knows what!”[3]

(Not that Charles Spearman was obviously complaining, since he himself cooked his math in order to produce ‘intelligence testing,’ and moreover advocated using the tests to prevent certain people from getting the parliamentary vote, and to prevent them also from reproducing, as we saw in chapter 7.)

The intellectual nausea guaranteed by this ongoing definitional Twilight Zone is precisely what helps Robert Sternberg corral people into the only apparent refuge: defining intelligence as “what is measured by IQ tests.” Of course, he will re-baptize it “analytic intelligence” and this will give the impression that something was actually done.

For a final laugh, I remind you that in our chosen paragraph’s topic sentence, Entine pseudo-motivates the search for a new definition of ‘intelligence’ by conceding that IQ tests do not measure intelligence. And yet the ‘new’ definition will be Sternberg’s, where ‘intelligence’ means. . .“what is measured by IQ tests.”

Delicious.

Since, as the New York Times informs me, “Dr. Sternberg, a professor of psychology at Yale, [is] ...a widely known expert on intelligence testing,” I can almost rest my case against modern ‘intelligence testing’ here.[3a] But it is worth taking a look at the work of J. Phillipe Rushton because he is cited widely these days by those who claim that black people are supposedly less intelligent.

 
J. Phillipe Rushton. . .also makes no sense
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About the work of so-called “race scientists,” Entine says the following: 

“To contemporary race scientists…[their] views are not racist but are in the best tradition of science: objective and value-neutral conclusions. They do not believe they are responsible for hate groups using their data to support twisted ends… [J. Phillipe] Rushton and other ‘race realists’ do in fact draw upon substantial data in documenting a relationship between brain size and race, cranial capacity and intelligence, intelligence and career success or criminal behavior.”[4]

Phillipe Rushton’s prominence is established by the phrase “Rushton and other ‘race realists’”—his name heads the category.

What Jon Entine is saying is that the man whom he thanks as “Phil Rushton” in the acknowledgments section of Taboo is a real scientist, not a racist, and that there is something to Rushton’s claims about blacks supposedly having smaller cranial capacities, which therefore supposedly makes them less intelligent, and in consequence, supposedly, both less wealthy and more prone to crime. Rushton, we are told, is a “realist.”

But it is the easiest thing to argue that the social conditions of black people have been imposed on them from the outside, and one hardly needs to go as far back as slavery to make one’s case.

In the heyday of the eugenics movement, as you may recall from earlier chapters, its proponents called for mass incarceration of the ‘unfit,’ a category that was flexibly and arbitrarily drawn to catch anybody in the working classes whom the eugenicists wanted to get rid of. Those early twentieth century eugenicists didn’t come up with the ‘war on drugs’ which began with the Reagan administration, but one can legitimately suspect that they would have approved of it. For you see, “[t]here is...little evidence that this approach has reduced drug consumption or drug-related crime,” while it is perfectly obvious that it is designed to disproportionately incarcerate minorities (and, especially, blacks). With the ‘war on drugs’ some of the goals of the eugenicists are becoming reality: according to the Harvard Political Review, African Americans are eight times as likely to be incarcerated as whites, and fully 58 percent of these are individuals with no history of violence or high-level drug activity. [4a]

The eugenicists also argued for preventing the ‘unfit’ from having access to equal opportunities in society. By institutionalizing phony ‘intelligence tests’ that are terrible at predicting future achievement—but excellent at discriminating against blacks and others—as a requirement to apply for higher education, the goals of eugenics are also being advanced.

Such institutional attacks against blacks are entirely ignored in Rushton’s argument, and instead the problems of black people are made out to be a natural expression of their supposed innate deficiencies. So when Entine praises Rushton he is defending eugenics.

Phillipe Rushton returns the warm feelings at the beginning of the 2nd edition of his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior, where he eagerly refers to Jon Entine’s book Taboo and makes the deadly connection explicit:

“…admitting these genetic differences in sports leads to the greater taboo area—race differences in brain size and crime.”[5]

Race, Evolution, and Behavior is a tiny, self-published book (a pamphlet, really), that Rushton takes the trouble to mail to people who never requested a copy, such as myself. Anxious that he not be misunderstood, Rushton summarizes his claims on the back cover. The first one goes like this (parentheses are his):

“There are at least three biological races (subspecies) of man: Orientals (i.e. Mongoloids or Asians), Blacks (i.e. Negroids or Africans), and Whites (i.e. Caucasoids or Europeans).”

Immediately below he says that ‘Orientals’ are smartest, ‘Blacks’ are dumbest, and ‘Whites’ are only marginally below ‘Orientals.’ For anyone still wishing to give Rushton the benefit of the doubt, this becomes very difficult the minute one looks in his book and discovers that he goes out of his way to adopt the literary style of a public racist. Here is his opening salvo:

“The first explorers in East Africa wrote that they were shocked by the nudity, paganism, cannibalism, and poverty of the natives. Some claimed Blacks had the nature “of wild animals…most of them go naked…the child does not know his father, and they eat people.” Another claimed they had a natural sense of rhythm so that if a Black “were to fall from heaven to earth he would beat time as he goes down.” A few even wrote books and made paintings of Africans with oversized sex organs.

Sound familiar? All just a reflection of racism? Maybe so, but these examples are not from 19th Century European colonialists or KKK hate literature. They come from the Muslim Arabs who first entered Black Africa over 1,200 years ago (in the 700s), as detailed in Bernard Lewis’s 1990 book, Race and Slavery in the Middle East.

Several hundred years later, European explorers had the same impressions. They wrote that Africans seemed to have a very low intelligence and few words to express complex thoughts…they were shocked by the near nakedness of the people, their poor sanitary habits, simple houses, and small villages…”[6]

One can see immediately that Rushton means to push buttons. For example, why the reference to nakedness? The ancient Greeks walked around naked in public a lot. At the gymnasium, where they trained and learned, it was essentially obligatory, as was homosexuality. But that doesn’t count against them. Why? Because they are the cultural ancestors of white Westerners such as Rushton? Rushton is merely trying to shock the morals of contemporary Western readers, for whom public exposure is a crime because their cultures now have a preference against nudity (even if their own Greek cultural ancestors favored it). And Rushton submits horrified reactions by Arab Muslims at the public nudity of some Africans as a confirmation of the supposed inferiority of ‘black’ people. But such reactions tell us something about the religiously based ethnocentrism of the Muslims, for whom it is orthodox to prevent the slightest exposure of the female body; they tell us nothing about the people whom they condemn.

The same goes for Rushton’s entirely gratuitous accusation that the Africans were unsanitary. He wants to shock you. But it is quite impossible that the African societies from which the slaves were taken were less sanitary than the medieval European towns from which their attackers came, brimming as they were with human and animal excrement, and sundry other forms of filth that regularly caused all sorts of epidemics.[6a]

These are only the milder provocations in what Rushton has written above, of course.

But underneath all the button-pushing, what is Rushton’s basic argument? He is saying that, since the views about blacks that Europeans later expressed were similar to earlier views expressed by the Arabs, such opinions cannot be racist prejudices, because otherwise how come two completely different cultures came to the same conclusion as a result of coming in contact with blacks?

Rushton’s argument requires the following two premises:

1)  that the Arabs and Europeans are making independent observations of Africans, rather than the Europeans getting their ideas from the Arabs;

2)  that the similarity between Arab and European ideas of Africans is unconnected to the fact that both Arabs and Europeans oppressed Africans in similar ways, and needed to justify this.

If either of the above two premises should fail, Rushton cannot submit the fact that Europeans and Arabs have expressed similar opinions about blacks in defense of the objectivity of his own similar views. So this is a real pratfall, because both premises fail, as I will now demonstrate.

The relevant question here is this: Where and when did the European trade in black slaves begin? That would be in fifteenth century Portugal. The Portuguese, from Iberia, which had been under Arab Muslim rule for centuries, had therefore been in extensive and intimate contact with Arab Muslims, and the Arabs, for their part, had already been conducting a vigorous African slave trade for centuries before the Portuguese got in on the act.

“When the Portugese forged contacts with the Islamic civilizations and traders of North Africa, they diverted much of this trade to Europe, including the Muslim traffic in black slaves. The Portugese, however, were not content with trade with North Africa and pushed down the western coast of Africa. In 1444, a group of Portugese stumbled on a village of black Africans and, out of a desire to make some money, attacked them and kidnapped as many as they could. Thus began the European traffic in black slaves.”[7]

Given that it was from Arab Muslims living in close contact with Christian Iberians that the latter took up the African slave trade, it is natural that Iberian ideas about blacks were first Arab ideas. And given that it was the Iberians who pioneered the European trade in black slaves, it is natural that broadly Western ideas about Africans were first Iberian ideas. A straightforward chain of transmission: Arab, to Iberian, to European, to American.

Indeed, in an article titled The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, historian James Sweet explains that,

“The racist ideologies of fifteenth-century Iberia grew out of the development of African slavery in the Islamic world as far back as the eighth century. From 711 until their expulsion in 1492 [Arab] Muslims controlled a significant portion of the Iberian peninsula... Wide-ranging Islamic influence had profound effects on the thinking of Iberians and, in many respects, charted the course of emerging racial hierarchies.”[8]

That Arab ideas concerning Africans should have become Iberian ideas and then Western ideas more broadly should surprise nobody because, in practically everything, it was the Arabs who taught the ruling classes of Europe how to think, through Iberia.

“In 1085, Toledo, Spain was taken from the Muslims by Alfonso VI of Leon. It soon became the capital of Castile and a community of scholars. There, the transmission of ancient knowledge reached its peak through the School of Toledo where translations were made from Arabic to Latin and later to Spanish, and helped the scientific and technological development for the European Renaissance.

Under the leadership of French Archbishop Raymond, who reigned from 1126 until his death in 1152, the Toledo School’s Bureau of Translation attracted first rate scholars from all over Europe. Raymond knew the wealth of knowledge and scientific expertise which the Muslim world possessed, and desired that Christendom gain access to its riches.”[9]

But if European ideas about blacks were Arab ideas first, then it is false that Arab and European ideas are independent, and Rushton’s argument is invalidated by the failure of his first premise.

Although Rushton already stands refuted, it will give me great pleasure to refute him again by demonstrating that his second premise fails too: Arab ideas themselves do not spring from objective observation, but from a relation of oppression because the Arabs, like the Europeans after them, were conducting a vigorous African slave trade. Therefore, in order to live with themselves, they needed to think of Africans as subhumans. Hence, Arab opinions of blacks are not in the least objective.

The argument is won, but it is worth plunging further back into history in order to show you that, in fact, the Arab (and later European) ideas used to justify slavery are identical to—and almost certainly derived from—the Greek, and these have absolutely nothing to do with blacks as such.

Similarities between European, Arab, and ancient Greek ideas should not be shocking. Consider what was being translated in Toledo:

“By the middle of the thirteenth century, scholars [at Toledo] …had translated the bulk of ancient science into Latin, including the writings of such greats as Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid and Hippocrates, which had been preserved in Arabic for hundreds of years.”[10]

These translations led to “a vogue for the philosophy of Aristotle” in Europe.[10a]

But if Greece is in Europe, why was Aristotle flowing back to Europe in Arabic? Because during Europe’s so-called ‘Dark Ages,’ when even the ruling classes in the northern Mediterranean were mostly illiterate, it was the Arabs who kept alive and studied the texts of the Greco-Roman civilizations which they had overrun. The Arabs first took over a large chunk of the Eastern Roman Empire, which was a Greek world (the language was Greek, and so was its ruling class), and then they conquered North Africa (and much else).[10b]

Now, the ruling classes of Greco-Roman societies—the ones who wrote the ‘classical’ texts—had been oppressive in the extreme, and had written down their well-developed ‘theories,’ which the Arabs then inherited. What theories were these? For example, as historian Benjamin Isaac explains in The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Aristotle, perhaps the most influential Greek thinker of all time, had a theory of the ‘natural slave.’

“In the Politics Aristotle does not identify a natural slave with animals, but the natural slave is subhuman and in some respects approaches animals, notably in their practical functions: ‘The ox serves instead of a servant for the poor’ (1252b, 12). ‘The use which is made of the slave diverges but little from the use made of tame animals; both he and they supply their owner with bodily help in meeting his daily requirements’ (124b, 25-29). ‘Tame animals have a better nature than wild, and it is better for all such animals that they should be ruled by man because they then get the benefit of preservation’ (1254b, 11-14)…”[11]

So Aristotle said that slaves were basically indistinguishable from domestic animals such as beasts of burden: the poor had the ox and the rich had slaves.

Aristotle was quite explicit that there was a natural and physical difference between a slave and a free man.

“…it is nature’s intention also to erect a physical difference between the body of the freeman and that of the slave, giving the latter strength for the menial duties of life, but making the former upright in carriage and (though useless for physical labor) useful for the various purposes of civic life”[12]

In addition, Aristotle was quite explicit that there was a natural and mental difference between a slave and a free man.

“A man is thus by nature a slave. . . if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself.”[13]

Naturally good for physical labor, and naturally bad at thinking (naturally). This is an old...old idea.

And yet in ancient Greece there was an awkward difficulty, which Aristotle recognized. Although he insisted that there was a physical difference between freeman and slave, “The relationship is less obvious than it should be, says Aristotle, because some slaves have bodies like freemen…”[19] Yes, because the victims of Aristotle’s theory were almost all white!

Indeed, Aristotle remarked that “some slaves have bodies like freemen” because so many of the slaves in ancient Greece were themselves ethnic Greeks, captured in the endless wars that the classical city-states tirelessly waged against each other (which insanity Aristotle defended as a good way to get slaves for himself and other aristocrats). The non-Greek slaves were also mostly white, as the preferred places for importation of slaves were Phrygia, Thrace, and Scythia, all of them European locations.[13a] In fact, Aristotle was applying his theory of natural slavery to most local whites—which sharpens the irony—because the majority, and sometimes the overwhelming majority, of people in the ancient Greek city-states were slaves. For example, in Sparta, which was the most extreme case, the slaves were called helots (all of them ethnic Greeks from Messenia), and “helots…outnumbered Spartans by seven to one.”[14] Though Sparta was the worst, everywhere in ancient Greece the slave-to-citizen ratio was high.

What does this show?

That ideas concerning the supposed natural mental inferiority and natural physical strength of slaves do not in the least require that the slaves look any different from the slave owners. On the contrary, the proper causal arrow goes the other way: given a slave-owning society, the ruling classes must invent an ideology that declares those who have been enslaved to naturally deserve it, regardless of what they look like. Why? Because unless people in the ruling classes are made to believe such prejudices, they will be crushed by guilt. Aristotle was writing for an audience of slave-owning Greek aristocrats who were learning, from the pen of the most prestigious thinker of his age, that they should feel no compassion for slaves because it was their nature to be slaves. Since they thought Aristotle was the smartest man alive, it was reassuring to these aristocrats that he had figured out how the savagery which they inflicted on their fellow humans was for the general good.

Now consider: “Although slavery was a universal institution in the ancient world, only a handful of societies made slavery the dominant labor force. The first true slave society in history emerged in ancient Greece...”[14a] This means that the first society to require a rigid theory of the physical superiority and mental inferiority of the slave was ancient Greece. It is the easiest thing to argue that the Greeks applied this theory especially to whites, and not so much to blacks. I say this because black slaves, of which a certain number did exist in ancient Greece, were prized, probably because they appeared exotic: one scholar says that “The popularity of black slaves in fifth-century Athens may have something to do with their visible physical difference from the local population,” and another that “exotic slaves (black boys as servants at the symposium, sometimes even eunuchs) were used as a status symbol.”[14b] The most straightforward economic logic requires that this popularity of black slaves, and their function as a status symbol, would have raised their price, and the difficulty of acquiring them even more so. In other words, the Athenians would not have been sending their popular, rare, highly semiotic, and therefore expensive black slaves to work in the Laurion mines.

“Worse than torture and death was to find yourself a slave in the privately administered silver mines of Laurion southeast of Athens, source of much of Athens’ prosperity, where miners were routinely starved, savagely beaten, and, seldom seeing daylight, worked to death.”[14bb]

It was the superabundant white slaves who would have been doing the above. So it was to justify the violence against these slaves—white ones—that a theory of slave inferiority was most necessary in ancient Greece.

This makes it obvious that the prejudices Arabs and Europeans have expressed about African mental and physical capacities have nothing to do with the victims being African. These are not ideas about blacks; they are ideas about slaves. When blacks were enslaved by the Arabs such ideas were applied to blacks, but earlier the same ideas had been applied to whites when they were the most abused slaves. Given that the relation of oppression is what produces these ideas, it is irrational to submit that two different slave-owning societies, Arabs and Europeans, can be making objective observations about black people at the same time that they enslave them. But this is what J. Phillipe Rushton argues.

I point out that the Arabs traded in both black African and white European slaves: the white slaves were typically referred to by the Arabs as mamluk, whereas the African slaves were called 'abd. However, in the case of Arabs it was the black slaves whom they attacked with special ferocity for supposedly being mentally inferior, while they considered them good for physical labor. The reason for the flip is again a straightforwardly economic one: at this time, it was the white slaves who could be sold at a higher price. As historian James Sweet explains,

“The white mamluk commanded a higher price than the black 'abd because he could bring a substantial Christian ransom or be exchanged for a Muslim captive. The differing treatment of white and black slaves reflected their relative worth. The mamluk was viewed as an investment to protect, whereas the 'abd’s value was based on his labor as an expendable means of production. Where there was back-breaking work to be done in the Arab world, black slaves were made to do it. From ninth-century Iraqi land reclamation projects to fourteenth-century Saharan salt and copper mines, black Africans toiled under the worst conditions. White slaves were rarely assigned to such arduous tasks; they were usually household servants.”[14c]

Once again this shows that the ideologies of relative inferiority flow from the relation of oppression, and the economics of the slave trade. It is towards the most oppressed people that the ruling classes must be taught to feel the least compassion, and so it is the most oppressed people who end up being called ‘naturally inferior.’

Further insights on this question can be had by returning to Aristotle. It is worth considering how he resolved an interesting problem that he faced as a theorist of slavery: How to identify slaves and free persons given that often no convenient marker existed on the bodies of the supposedly natural slaves? Believe it or not, since the only thing that distinguished a freeman from a slave was the fact that the second had been made prisoner, Aristotle hung the whole idea of a natural difference between freeman and slave on this outcome. Wrote Aristotle: “A man is thus by nature a slave if he is capable of becoming (and this is the reason why he also actually becomes) the property of another…”[15] In other words, if I try to make you a slave, and I succeed, this is the demonstration that you are a slave by nature.

But the true scale of Aristotle’s madness cannot be grasped until two historical facts have been digested.

The first concerns the moment in Aristotle’s life when his theory of slavery was committed to writing. It is believed that Aristotle wrote this when he was at Assus, after leaving Athens, and before becoming Phillip of Macedon’s court philosopher.[15a]

The second fact concerns who was being enslaved at this time in Greece.

“A recent study has shown that before the reign of Phillip of Macedon, Greeks, including Athenians, were not reluctant to enslave Greek women and children taken in the towns they captured from each other, but until late in the period [of Phillip] the adult citizen males caught in these cities typically were killed, not enslaved.”[16]

Aristotle arrived at Phillip’s court at the age of 43, and Phillip still had six years to live. So “late in the period [of Phillip]” would appear to be the time after Aristotle left Assus. What Aristotle wrote in the Politics, then, interpreted in historical context, would appear to be that if a fully armed and ferocious Greek soldier succeeded in forcing a defenseless woman or child into slavery, this was the demonstration that the victims were slaves…by nature.

Aristotle was not an imbecile—far from it. And this simple fact produces for us yet another demonstration.

Like other Greek aristocrats of his time, Aristotle had an interest in making slavery appear natural and just, because the work of slaves gave Aristotle free time to debauch himself in various ways favored by the Greek ruling class, and also to ponder the riddles of the universe: in his view, a city should be organized so that aristocratic Greeks could live what he called “the philosophical life” while serfs and slaves worked for them (see fn. 15a); in order to get these slaves, Aristotle recommended war. By widespread agreement, Aristotle was the king of logic, and yet when it comes to defending why slavery is supposedly natural and just he sounds like a complete moron—pardon me, like our IQ-testing friends. What follows? That no logical argument will justify the claim that slavery is natural and just.

Finally, consider that Aristotle was Phillip of Macedon’s private philosopher, brought to his court so that he would tutor the son: Alexander. So the classical scholar who wrote the poison we just examined is also who shaped the mind of a restless youth who would go on to murder his own father and conquer, with unheard-of brutality, all of what the Greeks called ‘the inhabited world.’ As a result, Greek cities were eventually founded all over the Eastern Mediterranean, parts of North Africa, and parts of Asia. Alexander spread Aristotle’s ideas far and wide (the young conqueror reportedly slept with a copy of the Iliad annotated by his tutor).[17] The Romans, cultural descendants of the Greeks, then cemented this culture around the entire Mediterranean, including all of the southern rim, from the Middle East, to North Africa, to what is now Spain and Portugal (Iberia), and further up into Gaul and Britain. These were consequently very bad times for ordinary people in the Mediterranean.

It is because of the Greek and then Roman expansion that the ruling classes which the Arabs replaced in the Middle East and parts of North Africa were Greco-Roman. As I noted above, the Arabs were famously careful to keep and study the Greek and Roman texts. By far the most pondered thinker was…Aristotle. So it is not far-fetched to propose that the Arabs found the Greek theory to justify slavery convenient, and that later so did the Europeans, particularly given that the translations in Toledo led to “a vogue for the philosophy of Aristotle” in Europe, right as the Europeans were taking over the African slave trade from the Muslims.[10a] The Arabs certainly devoted themselves to war as sport and passion, just as the Greeks had before them, and they turned those captured in war into property in astonishing numbers, precisely as the Greeks (and the Romans) had also done. One ruling class replaced another.

This chain of transmission helps explain why it should be the case that,

“Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world’s major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome) and Islamic.”[17a]

So when Rushton tries to sell you on the notion that the Arabs and the modern Europeans have similar ideas about blacks because they have made independent and objective observations of the nature of black people, he is trying to pull off the most spectacular con. He is asking you to accept the ideas about blacks produced by the only two civilizations to have thoroughly institutionalized slavery, and which developed ideas about blacks in the process of enslaving them. Moreover, these are two civilizations that are characterized by unsparing admiration for Aristotle, whose theory of slavery contains the essential ingredients of anti-black prejudice found in both Arab and European thought: good for physical work, bad for thinking (rendered by Jon Entine as good for sports, and bad at IQ tests).

I emphasize, however, that in my view Aristotle was not exactly necessary. There is obviously circular causation between ideas and socioeconomic and political realities, but Aristotle was justifying an institution that predated him, so he demonstrates that a pre-existing relation of oppression will easily call forth its theoretical justification. If the Arabs had not found Aristotle, they could have produced him. And yet it is rather delicious that one can trace the idea that blacks are supposedly naturally stupid and naturally strong all the way back to Aristotle’s ideas about white slaves, because it means that no matter whether you prefer one or another extreme theory of historical processes (ideas producing economic and political realities, or economic and political realities producing ideas to justify them) Rushton stands refuted.

The ‘Oriental’ card
________________

But Phillipe Rushton is hardly lacking in creativity, and his strategy is to make a million different arguments, every one of them reaching the same conclusion. This appears designed to exhaust his adversaries and confuse the public. For example, he also says this:

“The whites who explored China were just as racist as those who explored Africa, but their descriptions were different from what they and the Arabs had written about Africans…”[20]

In other words, the Europeans were, by contrast to their evaluations of Africans, quite impressed with the Chinese, and you are supposed to find this an objective assessment of Chinese natural intelligence because Rushton, who is white, has also told you that ‘Orientals’ score a little higher than whites in IQ tests.

Very clever. But this, too, is a con.

Some obvious historical facts immediately come to mind that directly embarrass Rushton’s thesis. In order to accept his argument that civilizational complexity follows from innate intelligence, you have to believe that Northern Europeans (whom racists consider members of the supposedly superior ‘Nordic race’), and who now have the most technologically advanced civilizations, were very dumb several hundred years ago, when the southern Europeans and the dark-skinned North Africans considered them rude primitives. But they suddenly became smart, as if by lightning bolt, as they came out of the Middle Ages? Where did the smart genes come from so fast? And if smart genes can appear so quickly, in another two hundred years Nordics could easily be the relative imbeciles again, so Rushton, by the lights of his own theory, shouldn’t be so smug.

Also, consider that the aboriginal populations of Australia, when contacted by Europeans, had the most primitive technology of any place in the entire world. Especially the Tasmanians, who were cut off even from Australia, and whose technology was so primitive that older technologies archaeologically discovered in the same place turn out to be more advanced.

“When Europeans discovered Tasmania in the 17th century, it had technologically the simplest, most ‘primitive’ human society of any society in the modern world. Native Tasmanians could not light a fire from scratch, they did not have bone tools, they did not have multi-piece stone tools, they did not have axes with handles, they did not have spear-throwers, they did not have boomerangs, and they did not even know how to fish.”[20a]

In appearance, members of these populations look ‘black’ (you would not have been surprised to find them in Africa). So, by Rushton’s argument that the races are ‘black,’ ‘white,’ and ‘yellow,’ as ordinary Americans believe, and that we can supposedly identify them by appearance, as ordinary Americans also believe, we should consider Australians and Tasmanians black. However, these populations, as it turns out, are genetically closest to those in mainland Southeast Asia, who look nothing like them. So this refutes one half of Rushton’s argument, which relates to how one identifies his proposed subspecies (by their looks).

But the remaining half of Rushton’s argument also fails.

Given the genetic proximity between Tasmanians and people in Southeast Asia, isn’t Rushton required—from the genetic if not visual point of view—to include Tasmanians in his ‘Oriental race’? But then the Tasmanians should be smarter than Africans, according to Ruston, and in consequence should have more complex technology. In fact, however, the traditional technology of any place in Africa is easily far superior to that found in Tasmania. There can thus be no better demonstration that ‘better genes producing better minds yielding more complex civilizations’ is the wrong theory to explain relative technological differences around the world.

What is the right theory? How can we explain the fact that some societies are more technologically complex than others, and some have a lot of stuff and others don’t?

I think that what makes humans so smart is not so much the raw power of the human brain (though of course it is impressive) but the ability to store, through culture, any innovations that are made in any one generation, refining them later. In this view, the technological advancement of any one population depends on:

1)  their ability to keep passing down certain traditions;

2)  their exposure to other populations from which they can learn innovations and/or must compete against; and

3)  the ability to produce surpluses, because only when food-producers can support those with other labor specializations can many cultural activities beyond subsistence be afforded.

All of this means that features of ecology and strategic position on continental masses will have a large impact on the technological advancement of any given population. Natural and historical catastrophes will also have sizeable impacts—after all, the brain is unlikely to be genetically modified in any interesting way in the space of only three or four generations, but a civilization can certainly rise or collapse in this space of time.[21]

Jared Diamond, in his masterpiece Guns, Germs, and Steel, has shown that the differences in technological and productive complexity between Eurasia and Africa follow directly from ecological and geographic differences.[22] Unlike Eurasia, Africa was not blessed with:

1) A favorable climate. This is of big help for the extraction of surpluses and for travel. But neither the African tropics, nor the deserts, nor the savannahs are very favorable compared to the environments in the temperate zones of Europe and Asia.

2) An East-West axis. An East-West axis means that a great deal of easy travel can happen within the same relatively invariant ecological zone (because ecology changes much more with latitude). Many innovations can thus spread by diffusion between societies arranged on an East-West axis. Africa has a North-South axis, which means that traveling long distances will often require mastering a number of different environments.

3) Plant and animal species that could be easily domesticated. Africa didn't have much in the way of native domesticable grains, and its soils are not very productive. In addition, for example, though you can domesticate a horse and ride it, you cannot do this with a zebra (people have tried it!). Gazelles and antelopes panic if you pen them, so they cannot be herded, and in any case herding economies (which do occur in Africa, do not lend themselves to much complexity). Etc.

This all made the production of surpluses, and the spread of innovations, difficult in Africa, which became an obstacle on the social complexity that could be achieved. So if African societies have been less technologically advanced, there is no reason to suppose that this is a consequence of differences in native mental ability.

Diamond’s account is not only supported by a crushing mountain of independently confirmed facts (laid out in an astonishing display of polymath erudition), but it also helps him solve some important historical puzzles. Why is it that the Australians and Tasmanians, when first contacted by Europeans, had the most primitive technology in the world? Well, it turns out that these Oceanic lands

1)  have no domesticable beasts of burden;

2)  they are mostly arid and not favorable to agriculture; and

3)  they are for most practical purposes completely cut off from the Eurasian continental land mass, preventing the arrival of innovations by diffusion.

The last point is quite significant. There has been considerable travel, migration, and trade across Eurasia for a very long time—even before the fabled and ancient Silk Road between Europe and East Asia. Thus, if an innovation appeared anywhere, sooner or later it was bound to get everywhere. For many purposes, being in Europe was not an obstacle to benefiting from a Chinese invention—that is, not forever—and vice versa. Each society on the Eurasian continent, across which travel was relatively easy, could potentially be seeded by the ideas of many millions of people. This naturally means that no society on the continent needed to be terribly creative in order to achieve spectacularly rapid civilizational growth (provided the ecology allowed it). What they needed was to recognize the good ideas when they arrived, as they were bound to, from all corners. And since many of these societies were in close competition for land, labor, and resources, there was a strong incentive to find and keep good ideas.

By contrast, no good continental ideas could come to the isolated Australians. Even worse, the societies within Australia were for the most part ecologically cut off from each other by vast deserts. Thus, each local society in this region of the world could rely only on the ideas its relatively few inhabitants produced. In addition, the arid environments of Australia, and its pre-modern species distribution, made it impossible to produce surpluses to support classes of people with free time to investigate the principles of the natural world. It is obvious, therefore, that the statistical likelihood of creative solutions at any given time for any given problem would therefore be much lower for an Australian than a Eurasian society, even under the assumption that Australians are actually smarter than other people. Once you see how obvious this is, you are wont to begin wondering why anybody would insist that the technologically and economically simpler societies found in Australia reflect the supposedly lower native intelligence of the region’s inhabitants.

And Diamond’s theory can also explain another puzzle: Why is it that archaeologically discovered past technologies in Tasmania are superior to those which the Tasmanians had when first contacted by Europeans? This is because the Tasmanian population was not only cut off from Australia, which was already cut off from Eurasia—it was also very small. Small populations are very vulnerable to random fluctuations. As is well known from the historical record, societies always go through fads, and anti-technology fads are common. Not far from where I live, in Pennsylvania, a famous modern anti-technology movement, the Amish, has made its home. The Amish can adopt modern technologies whenever they wish, because the people who surround them use them. But if that were not the case, the Amish would have to invent them. Because they are a small population, the probability that they will be able to invent everything modern people use is zero. The Tasmanians were also a small population, and therefore they were unlikely by themselves to produce much technological innovation. Unlike the Amish, however, they were also completely isolated from other societies so, once lost, a technological idea had a high probability of having been lost for good. With one loss after another, for 10,000 years, the Tasmanians eventually ended up with a quite primitive technology.

Jared Diamond writes:

“...for the last 10,000 years the Tasmanians represented a study of isolation unprecedented in human history except in science fiction novels. Here were 4,000 Aboriginal Australians cut off on an island, and they remained totally cut off from any other people in the world until the year 1642, when Europeans 'discovered' Tasmania. What happened during those 10,000 years to that isolated 4,000-person society?

...Incredibly....archeological investigations have shown...[that] during those 10,000 years of isolation, the Tasmanians actually lost some technologies that they had carried from the Australian mainland to Tasmania. Notably, the Tasmanians arrived in Tasmania with bone tools, and bone tools disappear from the archeological record about 3,000 years ago.

...[There are] two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either adopt practices that are not profitable or for whatever reasons abandon practices that are profitable. But usually those fads are reversed, as a result of the societies next door without the fads out-competing the society with the fad, or else as a result of the society with the fad, like those European princes who gave up the guns, realizing they're making a big mistake and reacquiring the fad. In short, competition between human societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only in an isolated society, where there's no competition and no source of reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of a valuable technology. So that's one of the two sets of lessons that I want to draw from history, about what happens in a really isolated society and group.”[22a]

In any case, the point is this: the various legs of Diamond’s argument are massively confirmed, and in addition this argument easily accounts for why the Australians were technologically primitive and the Chinese advanced. For Rushton’s theory, by contrast, this state of affairs is a great embarrassment. Australians and Tasmanians—whose technology advanced the least—are genetically most closely related to those humans whose intellect, according to Rushton, biologically improved the most: Southeast Asians. It’s quite a contradiction. Without an overwhelming prejudice, no theory defying the facts this blatantly would be entertained for very long.

This is all without mentioning the fact that if you actually test Rushton’s predictions they don’t work out at all.

Rushton’s predictions all fail
_________________________

Rushton’s ‘theory’ begins with a well known observation from evolutionary ecology, dating to a classic work by McArthur & Wilson: some species are K-selected, meaning that environmental pressures favor producing few offspring and investing more in them, whereas other species are r-selected, meaning that different environmental pressures favor producing lots of offspring with less investment.[23] Depending on where a species is on the r/K continuum, lots of things can be predicted about their behavior. Rushton makes the argument not for species, but for different geographic populations of humans, which he claims are at different places on the r/K continuum.

“According to Rushton, three distinct populations of humans evolved. Africans retained a more r-selected strategy, humans who moved into the ‘colder’ conditions of East Asia evolved a more K-selected strategy, while humans in between (i.e., in Europe) evolved a strategy between the African and East Asian ones. Rushton (1995, pp.259-262)[24] argues that these strategies are genetic in their basis and that they affect a wide range of human behavior, including social organization, family structure, sexuality, and even technological sophistication.”[25]

Quite apart from Rushton’s views on human genetic variation and how to parse it, which, being incorrect, guarantee that the argument built on them is wrong, one may wonder whether at least the world looks the way Rushton thinks. In other words, we may ask whether the systematic differences in behavior that Rushton claims he sees between the people he designates as ‘white,’ ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ really exist. If they do, then, although Rushton’s biological illiteracy has led him to the wrong explanation, at least we can say that the correlations he talks about are really there and cry out for some explanation, if not his.

So do these correlations exist? Is there something to explain?

The quotation above is from an article that endeavored to test this question precisely, published in Evolution and Human Behavior—the flagship journal for what used to be called ‘human sociobiology.’ Using “previously coded data on the 186-society Standard Cross-Cultural Sample,” the authors found “no statistical support for [Rushton’s] predicted associations between ‘race’ and behavior” (p.357).

Notice first that these authors put the word ‘race’ in quotes, which reflects that scientists literate in human population biology, as those published in a prestigious and peer-reviewed journal such as Evolution and Human Behavior usually will be (full disclosure—I have been published there[26]), do not agree with Rushton that human races exist. The authors of this study are quite explicit about it: “we do not support Rushton’s division of the world’s human populations into three ‘races,’ or indeed into any racial classification” (p.359).

The second point is that Rushton’s predictions failed even though the study’s authors cut him as much slack as possible. They point out that, even if they disagree with Rushton’s ‘racial’ classification, their tests have to follow it as closely as possible, or they will not be testing his predictions. However, they complain that “this is difficult [i.e. establishing just what Rushton’s classification is] because his procedures are so inconsistent” (p.359). To compensate for this, they “developed three versions of the ‘race’ variable, each representing one of the apparent definitions that Rushton used” to separate humans into ‘black,’ ‘white,’ and ‘yellow’ (p.359). They conclude that “Rushton’s predictions do not find much support, regardless of how ‘race’ is operationalized.” In fact, of the 78 correlations tested, only 2 were even statistically significant. As if this were not embarrassment enough, “More of the correlations are in the opposite direction (45 of 78) than in the predicted direction” (p.362).

The authors are not doing justice to their own findings. It is not true that “Rushton’s predictions do not find much support”; what is true is that Ruston’s predictions are completely contradicted.

But of course Rushton will ignore all of the above and remind everybody of IQ differences because that is all he is really interested in, and because that is all people hear anyway. Everything else, really, is just muffled background noise. In a review of Jared Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel, Rushton complains as follows about Diamond’s ecological/geographic argument to explain the differences in technological complexity between societies:

“Racial differences in brain size and IQ map very closely to the same cultural histories Diamond explains. Although Diamond dismisses such research as ‘loathsome,’ he fails to tell his readers what, if anything, might be scientifically wrong with any of it.”[27]

Well, perhaps Diamond left that alone because—despite being an awesome polymath—he is not a psychologist. Or perhaps he didn’t talk about it because his book was about broad historical patterns, not the history of intelligence testing. Whatever the reason, I have already filled here the gap that Rushton complains Diamond neglected: I have demonstrated that quite a lot is “scientifically wrong” with IQ research. Namely, everything.

So what is Entine doing?
______________________

As we have seen, Entine goes out of his way to apologize for Phillipe Rushton. If you think Rushton is a racist, then Entine is a propagandist for racism.

If you still have doubts, however, these may be dispelled by numerous other comments that Entine makes. Just to give one glaring example, he tells us that,

“Florida State University professor of psychology and neuroscience Glayde Whitney. . .wrote a glowing foreword to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s 1998 autobiography, My Awakening…calling it an ‘academically excellent’ work that could ‘change the very course of history.’”[28]

Entine’s reaction to this is that Whitney exercised “questionable judgment.”

Now, the Ku Klux Klan, for those not familiar with it, is a racist organization devoted to attacking minorities, and especially Americans of African descent. Over the years it has claimed responsibility for the deaths of many black people—lynchings. To get a sense for what lynchings were like, consider the case of Sam Hose, a farm laborer who was killed in 1899:

“Local and regional newspapers took over the publicity, promotion, and sale of the event with the kind of sensationalized narrative pattern that would come to dominate the reporting of spectacle lynchings up until the 1940s. ‘Determined Mob After Hose, He Will Be Lynched If Caught,’ began the story in the Atlanta Constitution on April 14, 1899...

[A]fter the lynching had taken place, another local newspaper printed the details: ‘In the presence of nearly 2000 people, who sent aloft yells of defiance and shouts of joy, Sam Hose was burned at the stake in a public road. Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers, and other portions of his body with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as souvenirs. The Negro’s heart was cut into small pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain the ghastly relics directly, paid more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents and a bit of liver, crisply cooked, for 10 cents.’”[29]

With that for context, is it a proper reaction for Entine to say that Whitney exercised “questionable judgment” when she praised a leader of the Ku Klux Klan?

Consider a couple of parallels. If somebody yells ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, when there is no fire, do we say that they ‘misspoke’? If a man rapes a woman do we call it ‘sexual harassment’? The proper (and obvious) reaction to what Whitney has done is to call a spade a spade, and to condemn her as a racist, because she is praising a book by a leader of a white supremacist organization that has victimized blacks with extreme violence. Entine’s ‘criticism’ of Whitney must therefore be that she is not a clever racist like himself, because she says things bluntly, as opposed to Entine’s more sophisticated approach. Her “judgment,” Entine clucks disapprovingly, is “questionable”: she might get caught.

Well, but so might Entine, and now we’ve caught him.

»» Continue to Chapter 11:
http://www.hirhome.com/rr/rrchap11.htm
________________________________________________________

Footnotes
________________________________________________________

[1a] U.S. News & World Report, Nov 18, 1963, pp 92-93.

[2] The first quotation appears in: Sternberg, Robert J. 1998. “Intelligence as a Unifying Theme for Teaching Cognitive Psychology.” Teaching of Psychology. Volume: 25. Issue: 4. Page Number: 293.

[2a] Quoted in ATHERTON J S (2003) Learning and Teaching: Intelligence [On-line] UK: Available: http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~jamesa/learning/intellig.htm
Accessed: 4 February 2005

The paper Atherton quotes is: Sternberg, R. J. 1987. "Intelligence," in The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Edited by R. L. Gregory, pp. 376. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

[3] Quoted in Shonemann, P. H. 2005. "Psychometrics of intelligence," in Encyclopedia of social measurement, vol. 3, pp. 193-201: Elsevier. (p.200).

[3a] The New York Times, April 3, 2001 Tuesday, Late Edition - Final , Section F; Column 1; Science Desk; Pg. 1, 1850 words, SCIENTIST AT WORK: ROBERT STERNBERG; His Goal: Making Intelligence Tests Smarter, By ERICA GOODE

[4] Taboo (pp.239-240)

[4a] "Of the 246,100 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses in 2001, 139,700 (56.7%) were black, 47,000 (19%) were Hispanic, and 57,300 (23.2%) were white."

Source: Harrison, Paige M. & Allen J. Beck, PhD, US Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2002 (Washington, DC: US Dept. of Justice, July 2003), Table 15, p. 10. [Posted at Drug War Facts:
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/racepris.htm ]

An article in the Harvard Political Review puts the above numbers in perspective: "Though only 13 percent of the population are African-American, they make up roughly half of all prison inmates, and are nearly eight times more likely to be jailed than whites."

Source: "Addicted to Prison: The war on drugs is largely responsible for racial disparities in incarceration rates"; Harvard Political Review; Tuesday, May 4, 2004; by Jared Fleisher.
http://www.hpronline.org/news/2004/05/04/
Cover/Addicted.To.Prison-672867.shtml

Think about it: blacks are eight times more likely to be jailed than whites.

[Quote from HPR starts here]

"More than any other factor, this increasing disparity is the result of changes in the treatment of drug offenders, specifically low-level, non-violent drug dealers. The Reagan administration initiated these shifts when it launched the so-called 'war on drugs' in the early 1980s... A central feature of this new war was the strengthening of criminal penalties against drug offenders and the adoption of "mandatory minimum" sentences for the possession of certain threshold quantities.

...since 1980...while arrests have increased only three-fold, incarceration has grown almost twelve-fold. Justice Department statistics attribute at least 65 percent of all growth in federal prisons over this time to the influx of drug offenders; the figure is more elusive at the state level, though it is likely around 50 percent. A 2002 study by the Sentencing Project found that 58 percent of these incarcerees represent individuals with no history of violence or high-level drug activity.

[Quote from HPR ends here]

In other words, over half of all the people netted by the 'war on drugs' are recreational and relatively casual drug users. How many relatively casual drug users who are white are going to prison? Not many, we learn:

[Quote from HPR starts here]

Even more striking, however, is the racial disparity among these drug offenders... The racial disparity is almost twice as pronounced for drug offenses than for any other category. Per-capita incarceration for drug offenses has consistently been 12 to 14 times higher for blacks than for whites; such offenses, moreover, account for nearly 38 percent of all African-Americans admitted to prison, by far the largest category of admission. According to calculations by Pamela Oliver of the University of Wisconsin, in a given year drug offenses alone account for 40 percent of the disparity in prison admissions between blacks and whites."

[Quote from HPR ends here]

The same article points out that,

"...even though urban poverty communities do witness more low-level drug crimes and have therefore borne the brunt of an increasing emphasis on incarceration, it does not follow that pursuing such a policy has helped or alleviated the drug problem. There is instead little evidence that this approach has reduced drug consumption or drug-related crime. ...Even Barry McCaffrey, the former Clinton Adminstration 'drug czar,' argued in a 1999 speech that 'It is clear that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of chronic drug abuse and drug-driven crime.'"

But if the 'war on drugs' has not reduced drug consumption and drug-related crime, what has it done? Answer: increase violent crime, because black and Hispanic non-violent offenders are sent to prison in large numbers, where they are often turned into serious criminals. This has been obvious for many years, and so it follows that the purpose of the 'war on drugs' cannot be crime reduction. If a policy is continued year after year, yielding always the same results, then the most probable purpose of that policy must be to produce the results which it in fact produces - otherwise, why is it so eagerly continued? And so it follows that the 'war on drugs' is a eugenic policy, whose purpose is to decimate the African American population, and others, among the poor (something that, in fact, should be obvious).

The timing of the launching of the 'war on drugs' - the early 80s - is consistent with the hypothesis of this being a deliberately eugenic policy. For this is shortly after the gains of the civil rights movement of the 60s, which also made some progress in the 70s. The 'war on drugs' does indeed give the appearance of being a strategy to roll these gains back by other means.

[5] Rushton, J. Philippe. 2000. Race, Evolution, and Behavior. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute. (p.14)

[6] Race, Evolution, and Behavior (pp.15-16)

[6a] Consider this wonderful quote by Andrew Dickson White, writing at the end of the nineteenth century:

"Accounts of the filthiness of Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within this century, seem monstrous. All that in these days is swept into the sewers was in those allowed to remain around the houses or thrown into the streets. The old theological theory, that "vain is the help of man," checked scientific thought and paralyzed sanitary endeavour. The result was natural: between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty notable epidemics swept the country, and some of them carried off multitudes; but as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement; they were called "visitations," attributed to Divine wrath against human sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the particular sin concerned and to declaim against it."

Source: White, A. D. 1955 [1896]. A history of the warfare of science with theology in Christendom. London: Arco. (Chapter XIV).
http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/relg/historygeography
/HistoryoftheWarfareofScienceWithTheologyinChristendom/chap15.html

[7] “The African Diaspora: The beginnings of the European slave trade”; by Richard Hooker; World Civilizations: Anthology of readings; Washington State University.
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/DIASPORA/SLAVE.HTM

Main page for World Civilizations:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/

[8] Sweet, James H. “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought.” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Ser., Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997): 143-166. (p.145)

[9] The History of Translation.
http://www.completetranslation.com/history.htm

[10] The History of Translation.
http://www.completetranslation.com/history.htm

[10a] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_ages

[10b] The following map shows the much-reduced Roman Empire after the invasion of the Lombards, in the year 568.
http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/568ad.html

The map below shows the expansion of the Arab conquests, which began shortly thereafter. The second phase of the expansion, as you can see, covered precisely the southern possessions of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire that can be seen in the map above.
http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/academics/syllabi/mehlerbarry/maps/mideast2.htm

[11] Isaac, B. 2004. The invention of racism in classical antiquity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. (pp.211-212)

[12] Quoted in The invention of racism… (p.176).

[13] Quoted in The invention of racism… (pp.211-212).

[13a] Cartledge, P. 2001. "Rebels and Sambos in Classical Greece," in Spartan reflections, pp. 127-152. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (p.143)

[14] "ancient Greek civilization" Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8461/eb/article?eu=109183
[Accessed August 16, 2004].

[14a] Source: Digital History.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/black_voices/voices_display.cfm?id=4

[14b] The first quotation is from historian Benjamin Isaac, in The invention of racism… (p.212).

The second quotation is from:

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.1.04; [Margaret C. Miller, Athens and Persians in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 331, 150 illus., 2 maps. $100.00. ISBN 0-521-49598-9.]; Reviewed by Balbina Baebler, University of Bern, Switzerland.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1998/98.1.04.html

[14bb] Cahill, T. 2003. Sailing the wine-dark sea: Why the Greeks matter. New York: Random House. (p.115)

[14c] Sweet, James H. “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought.” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Ser., Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997): 143-166. (p.145)

[15] Quoted in The invention of racism… (pp.211-212).

[15a] "At Assus, Hermeias of Atarneus, a Greek soldier of fortune, had first acquired fiscal and then political control of northwestern Asia Minor, as a vassal of Persian overlords. After a visit to the Athenian Academy he invited two of Plato's graduates to set up a small branch to help spread Greek rule as well as Greek philosophy to Asian soil. Aristotle came to this new intellectual centre. To this period may belong the first 12 chapters of Book 7 of Aristotle's Politics. There he sketches the connection between philosophy and politics, namely, that the highest purpose of a city-state (polis) is to secure the conditions in which those who are capable of it can live the philosophical life. Such a life, however, lies only within the capacity of the Greeks, whose superiority qualifies them to employ the non-Greek tribal peoples as serfs or slaves for the performance of all menial labour. Thus, citizenship and service in the armed forces are considered to be the exclusive rights and duties of the Greeks."

Source: "Aristotle." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8300/eb/article?tocId=33162
[Accessed February 7, 2005].

[16] The invention of racism… (p.180). The study in question is: Vincent J. Rosivach (1999) "Enslaving Barbaroi and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery," Historia 48:129-57

[17] Cartledge, P. 2004. Alexander the Great: The hunt for a new past. Woodstock & New York: Overlook Press, Peter Mayer. (pp.53-54, 112, 227).

[17a] "slavery." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8300/eb/article?tocId=9109538
[Accessed February 7, 2005].

[18] The invention of racism… (see the figures that appear after page 251).

[19] The invention of racism… (p.176, fn.23)

[20] Race, Evolution, and Behavior (p.16)

[20a] The excerpt is from a talk given by biologist and historian Jared Diamond who wrote an entire book on the subject of technological and economic differences between societies (see footnote 22). The excerpt quoted in my text is found here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p4.html

To read the talk from the beginning, visit:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p1.html

[21] If you doubt the impact of natural catastrophes on social organization, I recommend Jared Diamond’s article on the southern highland Maya collapse: “The Last Americans,” by Jared Diamond; Harper's Magazine, Jun 2003, Vol. 306, Issue 1837.
http://www.tjm.org/articles/msg00119.html

[22] Diamond, J. M. 1997. Guns, germs, and steel : the fates of human societies. New York: W.W. Norton.

[22a] The excerpt is from a talk given by biologist and historian Jared Diamond who wrote an entire book on the subject of technological and economic differences between societies (see footnote 22). The excerpt quoted in my text is found here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond_rich/rich_p4.html

Some of it is found on the next page.

To read the talk from the beginning, visit:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/diamond/diamond_p1.html

[23] MacArthur, R. H., and E. O. Wilson. 1967. Theory of island biogeography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[24] Rushton, J. P. 1995. Race, evolution, and behavior. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

[25] Peregrine, P. N., C. R. Ember, and M. Ember. 2003. Cross-cultural evaluation of predicted associations between race and behavior. Evolution and human behavior 24:357-364

[26] Henrich, J., and F. J. Gil-White. 2001. The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred status as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and human behavior 22:165-196.

[27] Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 480pp.; European Sociobiological Society Newsletter; Reviewed by J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2;
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/jpr_ggs.html

[28] Taboo (p.242)

[29] http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-old.html
 

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