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Summary: Hard truth.
Review: Required reading for educators, government, and corporate policy makers. Jensen has irrefutably established on a scientific basis that the Negroid Race by any measure is on the average 15 points lower in general intellectual ability than is the Caucasian Race. Jensen has reinforced and confirmed the conclusions arrived at by Herrnstein and Murray in their seminal work "The Bell Curve". Other salient conclusions that are made from the data include that Negroes are more likely than Caucasians to be at the average of the general intellectual ability within their respective population; based on g-loading of occupations and professions it is clear that the Negroid is over represented in all highly skilled occupations and professions; intelligence is largely inherited.Given that the difference in intellectual ability between the Races has been scientifically established, and given that people in highly skilled occupations and professions require a certain level of intellectual ability in order to function within that occupation or profession then it follows that the simplistic use of population ratios to ascertain the state of racial relations is counterproductive, ultimately destructive of those relations, and illegal. It is clear that affirmative action and the use of hiring and promotion goals has resulted in the over representation of the Negroid in all occupations and professions. Among the many practical consequences of "The G Factor" is that legal claims of discrimination in hiring, and promotion based on population ratios must be weighted by the general intellectual ability ratio of the same population in order to ascertain discrimination. For example, if the percentage of Negroid in a given area is 12%, but the number of Negroid who have an IQ of 100 is 4% then the discrimination ratio should be 4% for occupations in which the average IQ of the population within the occupation is 100. From the legal perspective the significance of this book is its potential use as an authoritative defense to plaintive claims of discrimination. For educators the significance of the book is that any effort to improve the scholastic achievement of the Negroid Race is bound to fail. Despite over 30 years of experimentation in education directed toward the Negroid he continues to perform below the Caucasian in highly g-loaded tests. Besides not improving Negroid performance this experimentation has done harm to those who respond to rote learning who are the majority of children. Further it is clear that schools and teachers are not to blame for the failure to educate those that cannot be educated. Resources should be directed to train the Negroid to fill those occupations for which he is intellectually suited and not to attempt to improve his academic standing.
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Summary: Arthur Jensen has the final word on intelligence and race
Review: The Gauntlet is Down: Jensen Takes the IQ Debate to a New Level! ARTHUR R. JENSEN is Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. During the 40 years of his tenure at Berkeley, he has been a prolific researcher in the psychology of human learning, individual differences in cognitive abilities, psychometrics, behavioral differences in cognitive abilities, behavioral genetics, and mental chronometry. His work, published in six earlier books and some 400 articles in scientific and professional journals, has placed him among the most frequently cited figures in contemporary psychology. In a brilliant 40-year career that has earned him a place among the most frequently cited figures in contemporary psychology, Arthur Jensen has systematically developed a seminal concept first discovered by Charles Spearman in the 1920s: individual and group differences in mental ability exist, and these differences can be measured by a single, general factor, g. On its surface, this concept seems innocuous. However, Jensen does not draw back from its most controversial conclusions: that the average differences in IQ and other abilities found between sexes and racial groups have a substantial hereditary component, and that these differences have important societal cosequences. The culmination of his career is the most comprehensive treatment of g ever written, The g Factor. In it, Dr. Jensen not only clearly explains the psychometric, statistical, genetic, and physiological basis of g, in the process he also refutes all major challenges that have been brought against the concept of general mental ability. It is a title destined to be a classic in psychology for years to come that boldly addresses some of the most important questions in an increasingly complex and technological world. [Publisher's Introduction] Arthur Jensen's new book The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability finally puts an end to The Bell Curve debate started in 1994 by Herrnstein and Murray. That block buster stood the race debate on its head and brought out the forces to do battle over the causes of human nature, specifically the 100 years of testing that consistently showed that blacks scored poorly on IQ tests, on an average of 85 in the United States. But Herrnstein and Murray's book was not subject to rigorous academic review and was criticized for putting forth public policy as well as analyzing the causes of black pathologies. In order to set the world straight, and bring some order to the chaos, the American Psychological Association (APA) put together a team of experts in 1995 to again look at psychometrics and concluded in their report APA Task Force Examines the Knowns and Unknowns of Intelligence that there indeed was a huge gap between whites and blacks in measured IQ, that the tests were not in any way biased, but the cause was still unknown. The subterfuge and deception continued, as this was just too political a subject to be absolutely honest and candid about. But it was a good start. Now only the cause was in dispute, not the actual disparity that has been so well documented. Now, the most renowned and most frequently cited expert in the field, Arthur R. Jensen, has taken another step in bringing order to a subject as divisive and vitriolic as evolution was over 100 years ago. In fact, in Sulloway's new book, Born to Rebel, he shows how the forces of reactionaries and radicals, many from the same families, will battle these highly charged views that infringe on the political turf of religionists, politicians, and social do-gooders. The principals of scientific debate take a back seat to agendas. But having experienced this anathema to pure science for the last 40 years himself, Arthur Jensen has produced the most thorough compilation of the science of psychometrics and differential psychology yet published. Finally, until an equally qualified academic can summon forth evidence to the contrary, the record will show that general intelligence as defined shows a wide disparity between individuals and different ethnic and racial population groups, and this disparity is primarily genetic. The g Factor is so complete in its coverage, so mathematically thorough in its treatment of establishing general intelligence as the engine that all other brain modules use in solving life's problems, that it is hard to sum up in a few pages what the message is. It is really the culmination of over a hundred years of research into what it is we mean by intelligence. Why is it so important? Because it is the foundation which the socialist/communitarian/egalitarian left must destroy to be able to move forward in trying to remake humans in their own image. To do this, the genetic genie must be stuffed back into its bottle at any cost. If the subject was love, or morality, or fairness and these subjects were attacked with the same vigor that intelligence has undergone, the media, government, and public debate would come to a halt. All we would have to say is, "but no one knows what morality is, everyone has a different definition of it, so it must not exist." Likewise for love, beauty, athleticism, virtue, etc. None of these can be clearly defined, but we can learn much about each by understanding our past, how we evolved, and how and what these terms mean in relation to reproduction, survival, and life's meaning as we pass through this world. (In fact, anyone would have an even harder time defining a mutually acceptable and scientifically sound meaning of life . Does that mean that life is perhaps meaningless?)
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Summary: Interesting subject
Review: This is a great book. I have a BS in Psychology, so I did have some background on the subject before I jumped in, but anyone that's curious about the subject of human intelligence will find much of interest here. The only part of the book that I didn't "get" was the statistics (having only taken a couple of very basic stats courses in college). Overall, highly recommended!
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