Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912-1982

By MARIAN VAN COURT
Department of Psychology
The University of Texas at Austin

By FRANK D. BEAN
Department of Sociology and Population Research Center
The University of Texas at Austin

The following article first appeared in Intelligence 9 (1985), pp. 23-32.

Results are presented for the first analysis of the relationship between IQ and completed fertility using a large, representative sample of the U.S. population. Correlations are predominantly negative for cohorts born between 1894 and 1964 but are significantly more positive for cohorts whose fertility was concentrated in the "baby boom" years. Previous studies reporting slightly positive correlations appear to have been biased in their restriction of samples to atypical cohorts.

In the advanced industrialized nations, the rate of change in fertility and mortality - the two major forms of selection acting upon intelligence?began rapidly accelerating with the onset of the "demographic transition." In the United States, fertility began to decline in the late 1700s, moving from an average number of live births per woman of around 8.0 before the Revolutionary War to one Of less than 2.0 during the 1970s (Grabill, Kiser, & Whelpton, 1958; Rindfuss & Sweet, 1977). Although the evidence on mortality is more limited, it appears that steep declines in mortality also occurred during this period (Kitagawa & Hauser, 1973). Whereas most observers would agree that differential mortality operated prior to the demographic transition to increase intelligence, it is not certain whether differential fertility or differential mortality was the dominant selective agent in the latter stages of the transition. Nevertheless, the possibility of the former led many theorists at the beginning of this century to forecast a lowering of average levels of intelligence.

Studies conducted in the early 1900s seemed to bear out the more pessimistic prognostications. The relationship between family size and intelligence was measured by correlating the IQ scores of school children with their number of siblings. Negative correlations were consistently reported in a large number of studies conducted in the United States and England (Cattell, 1936; Lentz, 1927; Mailer, 1933; Roberts, 1939; Roberts, Norman, & Griffiths, 1937; Sutherland, 1929; Sutherland & Thomson, 1926). Naturally, these findings were met with considerable alarm. It was predicted that a loss of 1.0 to 1.5 mean IQ points would occur per decade (Cattell, 1937, 1936).

Large-scale investigations were launched in an attempt to measure predicted losses in population IQ over time. In the Scottish survey, the entire 1 l-year-old population was tested in 1932. Again in 1947, all 1 l-year-olds were given the same group verbal-intelligence test. Contrary to expectations, there was an average increase of 2.3 points (Maxwell, 1954). Cattell conducted an equally ambitious cross-decade study of 10-year-olds' performance on a nonverbal test in England, and found a 1.2-point increase in the mean IQ of children tested in 1950 over those tested in 1936 (Cattell, 1951). Intelligence test performance of US high school students showed small gains over a 20-year period (Finch, 1946), and American soldiers from World War II were reported to have significantly higher verbal-ability scores than their counterparts from World War I (Tuddenham, 1948).

Clearly, results of the family-size-IQ studies and cross-decade studies of populations yielded contradictory results. If people with lower IQ scores had larger families, why was there no discernible loss of IQ over time? Investigators adduced a variety of explanations attempting to resolve the paradox. Predicted losses might have been masked by rather substantial improvements in education, nutrition, and other facets of the environment. Tuddenham (1948) stressed the importance of better education and improved mass communication. Cattell (1951) discussed the possibility of increased test sophistication and noted that the relationship between intelligence and marriage rates had not been investigated. Reed (1965) suggested that such small gains as those reported in the cross-decade studies could easily have been caused by sampling error, testing errors, or some other unknown source of error. Osborn's (1940) "Eugenic Hypothesis", had predicted that a eugenic trend would naturally emerge in a modern democratic society, because parenthood would become wholly voluntary when there was free access to birth control (Osborn, 1940, pp. 193-198). At the opposite extreme, Cook (1951) adopted perhaps the bleakest outlook in the controversy when he characterized a decline in intelligence as "inevitable" and wrote that "(I)f this trend continues for less than a century, England and America will be well on the way to becoming nations of near half-wits" (p. 6). Still others expressed skepticism that real changes in either direction were taking place. Penrose (1950a, 1950b) believed a genetic equilibrium existed. Dobzhansky (1962, 316) concurred, suggesting a balanced polymorphism for intelligence in which both extremes failed to produce their quota of offspring.

In 1962, Higgins, Reed, and Reed provided what has come to be regarded as the definitive answer in their landmark article, "Intelligence and Family Size: A Paradox Resolved." They studied the completed fertility of a large Minnesota sample. Although they found the usual sizable negative correlation between IQ and number of siblings, they found a tiny positive correlation between IQ and completed fertility. The latter correlation was dependent upon the inclusion of individuals who had never married?apparently, their automatic exclusion in previous family-size-IQ studies using school children had biased earlier result because the unmarried were disproportionately found at the lowest IQ levels Higgins, Reed, and Reed reported that 30% of those with IQ's less than 70 were, unmarried, in contrast to 10% with IQ's between 100 and 110, and 3-4% with IQs over 110.

Several more studies of IQ and completed fertility reported similar result (Bajema, 1963, 1971; Olneck & Wolfe, 1980; Spuhler, 1962; Waller, 1970). In Bajema's Michigan sample, the higher rate of childlessness among those with very low IQs was due more to their childless marriages than to their lower marriage rates, but the net result was the same. With direct evidence such as this the dire predictions of the early 1900s were rejected as totally unfounded (Falek 1971; Osborn & Bajema, 1972). In a 1971 review article, Falek wrote

There is no evidence of a decrease in intelligence from generation to generation .... (B)ehavioral scientists concerned with the problem have resolved, in approximately a quarter of a century, all the contradictions which plagued the understanding of the direction of human intelligence. In doing so, most investigators have turned around 180 degrees, and are now confident that, with regard to intelligence, evolution is on a positive track. (p. 14)

Despite the wide acceptance these studies received, they contained two potentially serious sources of bias. First, the samples were not random, because they were composed principally of white, native-born Americans living in either the Great Lakes states or New England (Cattell, 1974; Jensen, 1969; Osborne, 1975; Weyl, 1973). Second, they were largely restricted to a narrow range of birth cohorts (Vining, 1982). In a pathbreaking recent analysis, Vining (1982) cast doubt on conclusions derived from previous fertilit
y-IQ studies, suggesting that the absence of a negative correlation may well have been peculiar to the cohorts studied. Previous samples were largely confined to cohorts which had their main reproductive years during the "baby boom," a period of rising fertility, unprecedented; since such records began to be kept. Vining hypothesized that during periods of rising fertility, there will be a zero or slightly positive relationship between fertility and intelligence, but during periods of falling fertility which characterize the entire modern era, with the one exception of the baby boom years of the late 1940s and the 1950s—there will be a negative relationship. He correlated intelligence test scores with number of children, using a large, national probability sample of men and women aged 25 to 34 as of the late 1970s. For each category of age, sex and race examined, correlations were negative, ranging from -.104 to -.221.

One acknowledged limitation of Vining's sample is that many of the respondents had not yet completed their fertility. In addition, the information it provides is confined to a restricted age cohort. The purpose of this paper is to report the results of research on the relationship between IQ and completed fertility (as well as partly completed fertility) which extends the range of cohorts to encompass those born between 1894 and 1964, whose major reproductive years span 1912 to 1982. In so doing, we may also be able to reconcile results of previous research on this issue and to discern whether a positive or negative relationship in fact emerges during periods of rising or declining fertility.

DATA SET: THE NORC GENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a nonprofit research organization affiliated with the University of Chicago, conducted the General Social Survey (GSS) in the United States each year from 1972 to 1982, except for 1979 (Davis, 1982). A combination of block quota and full probability sampling was employed. Hour-long interviews were completed with a total of 12,120 respondents, who were English-speaking, noninstitutionalized adults (18 years or older) living within the continental United States. Such questions as age, place of birth, income, and occupation were asked in each interview. Other questions about attitudes on various social, political, and moral issues were rotated in different years.

Variables of relevance to the present investigation include total number of liveborn children, number of siblings, and scores on a steeply graded, untimed vocabulary test given in 1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982 (total N = 6,021). The vocabulary test is made up of 10 questions selected from a test originally devised by Thorndike for use in large demographic surveys in which a full-scale IQ test would not be feasible (Thorndike, 1942; Thorndike & Gallup, 1944). The two forms of the original version were standardized against the Otis Test (Miner, 1957) and included 20 multiple-choice questions each (one item taken from every level of the I.E.R. Intelligence Scale CAVD).

Although no attempt has been made (to our knowledge) to standardize the GSS version against another test of mental ability, there is good evidence that brief vocabulary tests such as this perform quite well as measures of general intelligence. Miner (1957, pp. 28-29) found a median correlation of .83 between scores on several dozen similar short-vocabulary tests and scores on standard IQ tests. Vocabulary correlates more highly (r = .75) than any other subtest with total score on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) (Wechsler, 1958, p. 98). Furthermore, preliminary analyses of the GSS test showed internal characteristics and relationships with other variables which accord well with those reported for traditional, full-scale IQ tests. Scores are normally distributed with a Mof 6.0 and a SD of 2.2. The internal reliability (Cronbach's Alpha) is .79. Test scores correlate 0.5 with highest educational level obtained. As with other measures of crystallized intelligence, there is a very gradual improvement in performance until old age and then a gradual decline. Blacks average 0.70 SDs below the mean for whites, and there is a negligible sex difference (0.06 SDs) favoring women. A previous study found the GSS vocabulary test to be the most powerful predictor of adult white men's income (r = 0.29), better than both educational level and family background (Peterson & Karplus, 1981). Another study reported it to be strongly negatively correlated with "anomie" (r = .42) (Segilman, 1981).

The test was designed to provide only a rough grading of mental ability. In the "ideal world," the test might have been nonverbal and longer, though unreliability could only vitiate relationships between intelligence and other variables, and correlations to be presented could hardly result from random errors. The unique opportunity this data set affords is an overview of the relationship between intelligence and fertility for a nationally representative sample of Americans whose major reproductive years fell between 1912 and 1982.

COHORT ANALYSIS

Data were consolidated from the four surveys in which the vocabulary test was given (1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982). Respondents were divided into 15 birth cohorts of 5-year intervals ranging from before 1894 to 1964. Cohorts 1-9 can be considered to have completed their fertility (because the youngest would be 40 years old), whereas cohorts 10-15 would have completed their fertility to varying degrees. Correlations between vocabulary test scores and total number of children ever born for all 15 cohorts are presented in Table 1. Correlations

TABLE 1
Number of Offspring and Vocabulary Scores, Zero-Order Correlations by Cohort

					M (SD)
Cohort	Date of Birth	N	r	Corrected r	Score	Children
1	low-1894	102	-.05	(-.06)	5.2 (2.5)	2.3 (2.4)
2	1895-1899	127	-.21**	(-.24)	5.5 (2.4)	2.6 (2.3)
3	1900-1904	210	-.23***	(-.26)	5.7 (2.3)	2.5 (2.1)
4	1905-1909	302	-.17***	(-.19)	5.4 (2.5)div>	2.4 (2.0)
5	1910-1914	336	-.06	(-.07)	6.2 (2.2)	2.3 (2.0)
6	1915-1919	389	-.12**	(-.14)	6.2 (2.4)	2.6 (1.9)
7	1920-1924	463	-.11**	(-.13)	6.1(2.1)	2.8 (2.0)
8	1925-1929	402	-.10*	(-.11)	6.2 (2.1)	3.1 (2.0)
9	1930-1934	387	-.08	(-.09)	6.2 (2.2)	3.3 (2.0)
10	1935-1939	487	-.16***	(-.18)	6.2 (2.2)	2.8 (1.8)
11	1940-1944	566	-.14***	(-.16)	6.3 (2.1)	2.3 (1.6)
12	1945-1949	681	-.24***	(-.27)	6.3 (2.1)	1.5 (1.3)
13	1950-1954	734	-.22***	(-.24)	5.8 (2.1)	0.9 (1.1)
14	1955-1959	473	-.22***	(-.23)	5.4 (2.0)	0.5 (0.8)
15	1960-1964	118	-.20*	(-.23)	5.1 (1.8)	0.2 (0.4)
Note. Tests are one-tailed. *Significant at p < .05 **Significant at p < .01 ***Significant at p < .001.

corrected for attentuation (divided by the square root of 0.79, the coefficient of test reliability) are also presented in parentheses. It is clear that the relationship is predominantly negative, with 12 of 15 correlations statistically significant.
It is of particular interest to see whether the correlations of cohorts 8 and 9 are typical or atypical. Cohorts 8 and 9, whose fertility occurred squarely within the baby boom years, are the cohorts which largely comprised the samples of previous studies which reported small positive correlations. Although the correlations for both are negative, they are less negative than the other correlations. Vining's hypothesis of zero or slightly positive correlations during periods of rising fertility might thus be considered partly substantiated, and his hypothesis of a negative relationship during declines in fertility is more fully substantiated. But it appears that other factors, in addition to cohort effects, will be required to account fully for the differences between Vining's results and those of previous studies. To determine whether exclusion of nonwhites may have also constituted a source of bias in previous studies, a separate analysis of whites was performed for all 15 cohorts (see Table 2). Comparing the correlations in Tables I and 2, it can be seen that overall, the effect of exclusion of nonwhites is negligible.

TABLE 2
Number of Offspring and Vocabulary Scores for Whites, Zero-Order Correlations by Cohort

					M (SD)
Cohort	Date of Birth	N	r	Corrected r	Score	Children
1	low-1894	91	-.04	(-.04)	5.5 (2.5)	2.3 (2.3)
2	1895-1899	120	-.17*	(-.20)	5.6 (2.4)	2.6 (2.3)
3	1900-1904	195	-.23***	(-.26)	5.8 (2.3)	2.5 (2.0)v>
4	1905-1909	273	-.17**	(-.19)	5.6 (2.5)	2.4 (2.0)
5	1910-1914	307	-.08	(-.09)	6.3 (2.2)	2.3 (2.0)
6	1915-1919	363	-.13**	(-.14)	6.4 (2.3)	2.6 (1.9)
7	1920-1924	424	-.12**	(-.14)	6.4 (2.3)	2.3 (2.0)
8	1925-1929	364	.00	( .00)	6.4 (2.1)	2.9 (1.9)
9	1930-1934	358	-.03	(-.04)	6.4 (2.2)	3.2 (1.9)
10	1935-1939	429	-.16***	(-.18)	6.4 (2.2)	2.8 (1.7)
11	1940-1944	488	-.17***	(-.19)	6.5 (2.1)	2.3 (1.5)
12	1945-1949	604	-.24***	(-.27)	6.0 (2.0)	1.4 (1.3)
13	1950-1954	632	-.22***	(-.24)	6.0 (2.0)	0.8 (1.0)
14	1955-1959	408	-.21***	(-.23)	5.6 (2.0)	0.4 (0.8)
15	1960-1964	99	-.22**	(-.25)	6.3 (1.7)	0.2 (0.4)
Note. Tests are one-tailed. *Significant at p < .05 **Significant at p < .01 ***Significant at p < .001.

Although nonwhites average more children and lower test scores, they comprise only 11% of the sample. However, with nonwhites excluded, cohorts 8 and 9 exhibit a more positive relationship than the other cohorts (t = 2.04, p < 0.025, one-tailed test. It should be added that nonwhites were not over-sampled in the General Social Survey (as are blacks in some large surveys), so the total number of nonwhites (N = 622) does not permit separate analysis by cohort.

Correlations between vocabulary scores and number of siblings are presented in Table 3. They are markedly negative across all 15 cohorts, in agreement with the numerous family-size IQ studies of the early 1900s. Vocabulary-sibling correlations are more negative in every cohort than vocabulary-offspring correlations. If the childless had disproportionately low scores in this sample as in previous ones, this would weaken the negative relationship between vocabulary and offspring, but it would not affect the correlations between vocabulary and siblings, and thus it might reconcile the two sets of correlations. In actuality, the opposite turned out to be the case&#151;the childless were found to score higher than those with one or more children in nearly every cohort. It should be noted, with regard to the difference in magnitude between the two sets of correlations, that the variability is considerably greater for number of siblings (M = 4.3, SD = 3.3) than it is for number of offspring (M = 2.1, SD = 1.9).

TABLE 3
Number of Siblings and Vocabulary Scores, Zero-Order Correlations by Cohort

					M (SD)
Cohort	Date of Birth	N	r	Corrected r	Score	Children
1	low-1894	101	-.11	(-.12)	5.2(2.5)	5.6(3.4)
2	1895-1899	127	-.33***	(-.37)

New evidence of dysgenic fertility for intelligence
in the United States By Richard Lynn
University of Ulster
Coleraine
County Londonderry
Northern Ireland

By Marian Van Court
Future Generations
Marlborough, MA 01752

The following article originally appeared in Intelligence 32 (2004), pp. 193-201.

Data from the General Social Survey (GSS) collected in the years 1990?1996 are examined for the relationship between fertility and intelligence as measured by vocabulary. The results show that the relation between fertility and intelligence has been consistently negative for successive birth cohorts from to 1900 to 1979, indicating the presence of dysgenic fertility for all of the 20th century studied thus far. The most recent cohort for which fertility can be regarded as complete is that born in the years 1940?1949. In this cohort, the decline of genotypic intelligence arising from the negative association between intelligence and fertility is estimated at .90 IQ points per generation. The decline of genotypic intelligence of Whites is estimated at 0.75 IQ points a generation.

1. Introduction For almost a century and a half there has been concern that there is a negative association between people's intelligence and their number of children. A negative association of this kind is known as dysgenic fertility. The reason it has aroused concern is that it would entail a decline in genotypic intelligence, i.e., the genetic quality of the population in respect of intelligence. In the 19th century this concern was voiced by Galton (1859) and in the earlier decades of the 20th century by Cattell (1937), Fisher (1929), and Muller (1963), among many others. Evidence for the presence of dysgenic fertility in the economically developed nations for the last 150 years or so and in most of the rest of the world during the 20th century has been reviewed in Lynn (1996). The general trend has been that fertility became strongly dysgenic in the closing decades of the 19th century, whereas in the early decades of the 20th century the dysgenic trend weakened but was still present. The leading theory to explain the onset of dysgenic fertility in the second half of the 19th century was differential use of contraception. A variety of methods of contraception including the sponge, spermicidal chemicals, pessaries, douches, the condom made from sheep gut, and withdrawal were described in a series of books including Richard Carlile's (1826) Every Woman's Book, Robert Owen's (1832) Moral Physiology and Charles Knowlton's (1832) The Fruits of Philosophy. It is assumed that these books were read and the methods of contraception were used initially and predominantly by those with higher intelligence levels, who used this knowledge to reduce their fertility in the second half of the 19th century. By the early decades of the 20th century, knowledge and use of contraception had become widespread. This brought about a decline in fertility throughout the whole population and reduced the dysgenic effect. In the middle decades of the 20th century, a number of those concerned with this issue believed that dysgenic fertility would be a temporary phenomenon and would disappear as contraception became used efficiently by the whole population. It was argued by Osborn (1940) that when this occurred, fertility would become eugenic because the more intelligent would tend to be higher earners, would be able to afford more children and would have more. Osborn called this the "eugenic hypothesis." Some studies carried out in the United States in the 1960s suggested that dysgenic fertility had already disappeared and therefore that the eugenic hypothesis was right (Bajema, 1993 and Higgins et al., 1992). However, several studies in the 1980s found that dysgenic fertility was still present (Retherford & Sewell, 1988; Van Court & Bean, 1985 and Vining, 1982). This paper presents new data on this issue for the United States collected during the years 1990?1996. 2. Method The data for this study are drawn from the General Social Survey (GSS) carried out by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) (Davis & Smith, 1996). These surveys are carried out annually on nationally representative samples of approximately 1500 individuals aged 18 and over drawn as national probability samples from the continental United States but excluding those who do not speak English and those in institutions. Full details of the sampling procedures are given by Davis and Smith (1996). The data from the surveys are available on disks from NORC and it is from these that the results presented in this paper have been derived. The GSS collects a vast amount of information. The variables with which we are concerned are the vocabulary score, the number of children and the race and sex of the respondents. The vocabulary score is taken as a measure of intelligence. The vocabulary score is derived from a multiple-choice test asking the meaning of 10 words and the score is the number of words defined correctly. Vocabulary scores are highly correlated with measures of general intelligence. For example, the vocabulary subtest correlates .75 with the full-scale IQ of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, more highly than any of the other subtests (Wechsler, 1958). The GSS data for the years 1974, 1976, 1978, and 1982 were analyzed for the relationship between vocabulary scores and fertility by Van Court and Bean (1985). The reason for using these years was that the vocabulary test is not given every year and these were the years in which it was given during the period 1974?1982. Van Court and Bean found negative correlations of around ?.15 between vocabulary and fertility. The present study is an examination of more recent GSS data to see whether the negative association between vocabulary and fertility has continued to be present. The present study examines the GSS data collected in the years 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1996. The data from these 5 years were combined to give a single sample of 6522 respondents. The vocabulary test was not given in the 1993 or 1995 surveys. 3. Results Because the present study is a follow-up of the investigation carried out by Van Court and Bean in the early 1980s, it is useful to start by considering the results of the two studies together so that they can be considered as a whole. This is done in Table 1, which divides the subjects into eight birth cohorts. The first two of these are 20-year birth cohorts consisting of those born between 1880?1899 and 1900?1919, followed by 10-year birth cohorts of those born 1920?1929, 1930?1939, etc. to 1970?1979 (the first two cohorts are 20-year cohorts because of small numbers). Table 1 shows the numbers in each birth cohort and the correlations between vocabulary and number of children as found by Van Court and Bean and as found in the present study. There are three interesting features in this table. First, all the correlations in both data sets are negative, indicating consistent and prolonged dysgenic fertility. Secondly, there is a close similarity between the correlat ions obtained by Van Court and Bean and those in the present data. Thirdly, there is no tendency for the magnitude of the negative correlations to decline in more recent birth cohorts. On the contrary, it increases. Table 1. Correlations between vocabulary scores and number of children In evaluating these negative correlations, it is important to consider whether the fertility of the cohorts is complete. The reason for this is that the more intelligent tend to have their children later (see, e.g., Vining, 1995), so young cohorts can show a negative association between intelligence and fertility, which may be reduced or disappear as the cohort grows older and the more intelligent start to have children. For practical purposes, fertility can be considered to be largely complete for those who have reached the age of 40. In the Van Court and Bean series, fertility is complete up to and including the 1920?1929 cohort and can be assumed to be more or less complete for the 1930?1939 cohort, which was aged 35 to 52 at the time the data were collected between 1974 and 1982. In the present series, the latest cohort that can be considered to have completed its fertility is that born between 1940 and 1949, which was aged 41 to 56 at the time the data were collected between 1990 and 1996. The next cohort born 1950?1959 was aged 31 to 46 at the time the data were collected between 1990 and 1996. Probably its fertility was largely but not entirely complete. We now analyze the 1990?1996 data in more detail by breaking down the association between vocabulary scores and fertility by sex and race. In regard to race, the GSS categorizes respondents as White, Black and other. The numbers in our sample are 5450 Whites, 806 Blacks and 286 other. The "other" category is considered to be too few for analysis, so the analysis is confined to Whites and Blacks. Table 2 shows the numbers and correlations for Whites and Blacks, broken down by males and females and by cohorts. The correlations vary somewhat, probably because of small numbers, particularly for the Blacks. To provide a clearer overall picture, the four first age cohorts, 1900?1919 through 1940?1949 of those whose fertility can be regarded as complete, have been aggregated and the results are shown in Table 3. There are two interesting features of the data. First, the negative correlations between vocabulary and fertility are present within the two racial groups and in males and females. Secondly, the negative correlation is approximately twice as great for Blacks as for Whites. Table 2. Correlations between vocabulary scores and number of children, broken down by race and sex Table 3. Correlations between vocabulary and number of children of those born 1900?1949 Because the 1940?1949 cohort is the most recent for which fertility can be regarded as complete, it provides the most recent data on which to examine the magnitude of the deterioration of genotypic intelligence per generation arising from the negative association between intelligence and fertility. The formula for calculating the change in a trait as a result of differential fertility (the response to selection) is given by Plomin, DeFries and McClearn. (1990, p. 281) as the product of the narrow heritability of the trait multiplied by the selection differential (narrow heritability is the additive heritability, i.e., the heritability attributable to the effect of additive genes, while total heritability includes the effects of dominant and recessive genes). The formula is derived from Fisher (1929) whose work on the problem is summarized by Plomin et al. (1990, pp. 284?285). These authors also provide an extensive discussion of selective breeding studies (Plomin et al., 1990, pp. 278295). For the present problem of calculating the magnitude of the deterioration of genotypic intelligence, the figure adopted for the narrow heritability of intelligence is .71 given by Jinks and Fulker (1970). The selection differential is the correlation between IQ and fertility and is ?.17. Thus, we obtain a decline in genotypic intelligence of .12. This is in the metric of vocabulary scores. To express this in conventional IQs, we need to express it in S.D. units. The S.D. is 2.08, so the decline is .06 S.D. units and this is the equivalent of .90 IQ points. For Whites, the correlation between IQ and fertility is lower than for the total sample at ?.15 as compared with ?.17. Hence, for Whites the decline of genotypic intelligence is also less and is ?.15 multiplied by .71=.11. The S.D. for whites is 2.02, so the decline is .05 S.D. units and is the equivalent of .75 IQ points. We turn now to the issue of the fertility of those with very low vocabulary scores. The interest of this question is that the method used early in the century to investigate the problem of whether fertility is dysgenic consisted of examining the correlation between intelligence and numbers of siblings. It was found that these correlations were invariably negative. It was inferred that there must be a negative correlation between the intelligence of parents and their number of children (see, e.g., Lentz, 1927, for the United States, and Cattell, 1937, for Britain). An objection made to this method was that it failed to sample those in the parental generation who were childless. If these had low IQs, their lack of children would counterbalance the dysgenic fertility inferred from the negative association between intelligence and numbers of siblings. Studies by Bajema (1993) and Higgins et al. (1992) reported that childlessness was most prevalent among those with very low IQs. These results have been widely considered to invalidate the methodology of inferring that fertility was dysgenic from the negative associations between intelligence and numbers of siblings (e.g., Ehrlman & Parsons, 1976). However, several subsequent studies reviewed in Lynn (1996) have found that those with low IQs do not have a high rate of childlessness. To throw further light on this problem we have analyzed vocabulary scores in relation to numbers of children. All those born up to 1949 have been analyzed, those born from 1950 onwards being excluded because they may not have completed their fertility. The results are shown for Blacks and Whites and for males and females in Table 4. The results do not confirm the theory that the childless tend to have low IQs. On the contrary, their vocabulary scores are higher than average. Table 4. Mean vocabulary scores in relation to number of children Stating the same claim slightly differently, it has been argued that those with very low IQs tend to have relatively few children (e.g., Erhman & Parsons, 1976). To examine this claim the mean numbers of children have been calculated for Black and White males and females, for those born 1900?1949. The results are shown in Table 5. They show no tendency for those with the lowest vocabulary scores to have small numbers of children. The mean vocabulary score of the entire sample is 6.1 and the standard deviation 2.1. Hence, those with vocabulary scores of 0?1 score 2 standard deviations below the mean, equivalent to conventional IQs in the range 55?70. Inspection of the data set out in Table 5 will show that if those in this range are aggregated they have about the same numbers of children as the total sample. Table 5. Mean number of children in relation to vocabulary scores 4. Discussion This study contains five principal points of interest. First, it goes some way towards resolving the problem of the differences between the Higgins et al. (1992) and the Bajema (1993) studies, showing a positive relationship between intelligence and fertility, and the Van Court and Bean (1985), Vining, 1982 and Vining, 1995, and the Retherford and Sewell (1988) studies, showing a negative relationship. The results of the present study confirm and extend the second set of studies in that they show that the association between intelligence and fertility has been consistently negative for all birth cohorts from 1900?1919 up to 1970?1979. This negative association holds for the American population as a whole and within White and Black and male and female subpopulations. When Vining (1982) found a negative association between intelligence and fertility he proposed that this could be reconciled with the positive association reported earlier by Higgins et al. (1992) and by Bajema (1993) if fertility had been dysgenic in the early decades of the century, subsequently turned eugenic (as found by Higgins et al. and by Bajema), and then had turned dysgenic again. This interpretation of the evidence is not supported by the present results showing that fertility has been consistently dysgenic from the 1880?1899 cohorts onwards. These results are consistent with the negative associations between educational level and fertility that were present in the cohort born in the last decade of the 19th century and has continued throughout the 20th century, as shown in Lynn (1996, p. 114). Because of the association between educational level and intelligence, it is improbable that educational level could be negatively associated with fertility, while in the same cohorts intelligence was positively associated with fertility. Since the negative associations between educational level and fertility are derived from census data they have to be regarded as stronger evidence than the positive associations between intelligence and fertility found by Higgins et al. and by Bajema in rather small samples whose representativeness is doubtful. In fact in the Higgins et al. study the initial sample showed a negative association between intelligence and fertility (r=?.08 for men and ?.11 for women). It was only when the sample was reconstructed by including the siblings of the sample that the association appears to have turned positive, although the correlations were not reported. As regards the Bajema result, it was obtained on an urban sample from a school in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The positive association between intelligence and fertility may have arisen because of the omission of rural subjects since rural populations typically have lower mean IQs and higher mean fertility, so their inclusion might have turned the association negative. Secondly, our results give no support to the eugenic hypothesis advanced by Osborn (1940) that dysgenic fertility would prove to be a temporary phenomenon of the demographic transition and would soon be replaced by eugenic fertility. On the contrary, the magnitude of the dysgenic fertility has increased from the cohorts of 1900?1919 to that of 1940?1949, whose fertility can be regarded as complete, and to that of 1950?1959, whose fertility can probably be regarded as approaching completion. These results are inconsistent with the secular trend of fertility in relation to educational levels, which show reduced dysgenic fertility in more recent cohorts (Lynn, 1996). The reason for this inconsistency is not clear. Third, our results show that dysgenic fertility among Blacks is about twice as great as among Whites. This confirms the results obtained by Vining, 1982 and Vining, 1995. It is also consistent with census data on the relationship between educational level and fertility, which shows a stronger negative relationship among Blacks than among Whites (Lynn, 1996). Fourth, our results show that there is no tendency for the childless to have low IQs or for those with low IQs to be childless. This suggests that the studies finding negative associations between intelligence and numbers of siblings were correctly interpreted as indicating the presence of dysgenic fertility, and makes these studies consistent with the results of the Retherford and Sewell (1988) and Vining, 1982 and Vining, 1995 studies and the present data. Fifth, it is useful to compare the present results with those obtained by Retherford and Sewell (1988). In the present data, the decline of genotypic intelligence for the 1940?1949 birth cohort is calculated at .9 IQ points per generation for the overall population, and .75 IQ points per generation for the White population. Retherford and Sewell calculated a genotypic decline of .81 IQ points from their data set consisting almost entirely of Whites and born around the same time. The present results are therefore very close to those obtained by Retherford and Sewell results in showing that fertility is slightly dysgenic. We now consider a limitation of the study that the sample excludes institutionalized individuals of whom the majority will have below average IQs. If these have fewer than average children, the effect of their exclusion from the sample would be to reduce the magnitude of the negative correlation between intelligence and numbers of children. Those in institutions and excluded from the sample are the severely mentally retarded, psychotics in psychiatric hospitals, and criminals in prisons. The severely mentally retarded in institutions most of whom have IQs below 50 have lower than average fertility, so their exclusion reduces the magnitude of dysgenic fertility, but these constitute only about 0.3% of the population and the effect of this will be negligible. Psychotics in institutions also have below average fertility but these are fewer than 1% of the population and the effect of their exclusion will also be negligible. We do not know of any data on the numbers of children of criminals in the United States, but in Britain criminals tend to have above average numbers of children (Lynn, 1995). If this is also true for the United States it would provide some counterbalance to the below average fertility of the mentally retarded and mentally ill. In any case the numbers excluded from the sample because they are in institutions are considered to b e too few to have any appreciable effect on the results. We consider finally the significance of the decline of genotypic intelligence. A decline of .9 IQ points of genotypic intelligence for one generation cannot be regarded as of great practical consequence. However, the consistently negative association between intelligence and fertility from the birth cohort of 1880?1899 onwards shows that dysgenic fertility has been present for three generations and, therefore, that over this period genotypic IQ has declined by approximately 2.7 IQ points. This is an appreciable decline but it has been counteracted by the much greater increase in phenotypic intelligence that has increased by approximately 3 IQ points per decade from the 1930s up to 1978 (Flynn, 1984). The fact that phenotypic intelligence has increased while genotypic intelligence has declined is not a problem. The increase of phenotypic intelligence is a result of improvements in the environment such as better nutrition and possibly other factors such as the greater availability of cognitively stimulating toys, computer games, television, and radio discussed by a number of contributors to Neisser's (1998) book. These have brought about an increase in phenotypic intelligence that has greatly outweighed the deterioration in genotypic intelligence arising from dysgenic fertility. It seems probable that the increase of phenotypic intelligence will not continue indefinitely but is likely to peter out with diminishing returns from environmental improvements. These is some evidence that this has already begun insofar as the mean IQ in the United States tested with Wechsler and Binet tests increased by approximately 3 IQ points per decade over the period 1932?1978 (Flynn, 1984), but increased by only 1.7 IQ points over the years 1978?1995 (Flynn, 1998). If this trend of declining secular gains is projected into the future, and if dysgenic fertility continues, the secular increase in phenotypic IQ would be expected to fall to zero and then be replaced by a decline. As first argued by Galton (1859) and later by Cattell (1937) and Fisher (1929), this would have an adverse impact on the nation's economic and military strength, its intellectual and cultural achievements and of the efficiency with which work is performed at all levels of society. References Bajema, C.J., 1993. Estimation of the direction and intensity of natural selection in relation to human intelligence by means of the intrinsic rate of natural increase. Eugenics Quarterly 10, pp. 175?187. Cattell, R.B., 1937. The fight for our national intelligence. , King, London. Davis, J.A. and Smith, T.W., 1996. General social survey. , Roper Public Opinion Research Center, Storrs, CT. Ehrlman, L. and Parsons, P.A., 1976. The genetics of behavior. , Sinauer, Sunderland, MA. Fisher, R.A., 1929. The genetical theory of natural selection. , Clarendon, Oxford. Flynn, J.R., 1984. The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. Psychological Bulletin 95, pp. 29?51. Flynn, J.R., 1998. WAIS-111 and WISC-111 IQ gains in the United States from 1972 to 1995: How to compensate for obsolete norms. Perceptual and Motor Skills 86, pp. 1231?1239. Abstract-PsycINFO Galton, F., 1859. Hereditary genius. , MacMillan, London. Higgins, J.V., Reed, E.W. and Reed, S.G., 1992. Intelligence and family size: A paradox resolved. Eugenics Quarterly 9, pp. 84?90. Jinks, J.L. and Fulker, D.W., 1970. Comparison of the biometrical, genetical, MAVA and classical approaches to the analysis of human behavior. Psychological Bulletin 73, pp. 311?349. Lentz, T.F., 1927. The relation of IQ to size of family. Journal of Educational Psychology 18, pp. 486?496. Lynn, R., 1995. Dysgenic fertility for criminal behaviour. Journal of Biosocial Science 27, pp. 405?408. Lynn, R., 1996. Dysgenics: Genetic deterioration in modern populations. , Praeger, Westport, CT. Muller, H.J., 1963. Genetic progress by voluntarily conducted germinal choice. In: Wolstenholme, G., Editor, , 1963. Man and his future, Churchill, London. Neisser, U., Editor, , 1998. The rising curve, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC. Osborn, F., 1940. Preface to eugenics. , Harper, New York. Plomin, R., DeFries, J.C. and McClearn, G.E., 1990. Behavioral genetics. , Freeman, New York. Retherford, R.D. and Sewell, W.H., 1988. Intelligence and family size reconsidered. Social Biology 35, pp. 1?40. Van Court, M. and Bean, F.D., 1985. Intelligence and fertility in the United States, 1912?1982. Intelligence 9, pp. 23?32. Vining, D.R., 1982. On the possibility of a re-emergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials. Intelligence 6, pp. 241?264. Vining, D.R., 1995. On the possibility of a re-emergence of a dysgenic trend: An update. Personality and Individual Differences 19, pp. 259?265. Wechsler, D., 1958. The measurement and appraisal of adult intelligence , Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, MD.

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Special Book Review by

J. Philippe Rushton,
Department of Psychology,
University of Western Ontario,
London, Ontario, N6A 5C2 Canada

In press, 22 October 2001, in Elsevier Science journal
Personality and Individual Differences

The Bigger Bell Curve: Intelligence, National Achievement, and The Global
Economy

IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, Westport,
CT: Praeger (2002), 256 pp., U.S. $64.95 (Hdbk.) ISBN 0-275-97510-X

This is a book that social scientists, policy experts, and global investment analysts cannot afford to ignore. It is one of the most brilliantly clarifying books this reviewer has ever read. IQ and the Wealth of Nations does for the study of human diversity and achievement among nations what The Bell Curve did for IQ and achievement in the USA. The central thesis is that the IQs of populations play a decisive role in the economic destinies of nations. With concise logic, Richard Lynn (professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland), and Tatu Vanhanen (professor emeritus of political science at the University of Tampere in Finland), systematically document their stunningly straightforward and yet greatly overlooked hypothesis.

IQ and the Wealth of Nations analyses the relation between national IQ scores and measures of economic performance. In one analysis of 81 countries for which direct evidence on national IQs is available, mean national IQ correlates 0.71 with per capita Gross National Product (GNP) for 1998, and 0.76 with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 1998. Other analyses consistently demonstrate national IQs predict both long term (1820-1922) and short term (1950-90; 1976-1998) economic growth rates measured variously by per capita GNP and GDP (mean rs ~ 0.60). Regression analyses of the 81 countries, and then of 185 countries, including 104 whose national IQs are estimated by averaging those from adjoining countries, shows the national differences in wealth are explained first, by the intelligence levels of the populations; second, by whether the countries have market or socialist economies; and finally, by unique circumstances such as, in the case of Qatar, by the possession of valuable natural resources like oil.

The book has a lucid, expository style. Chapter 1 reviews the various theories advanced over the last 250 years to explain why some countries are rich while others are poor. These include climate theories (temperate zones are said to be best), geographic theories (an East-West Axis is said to be best), modernization theories (urbanization and division of labor are said to be good), dependency theories (exploitation and peripheralization of poor nations are said to be bad), neoliberal theories (market economies are said to be good), and psychological theories (cultural values like thriftiness, the Protestant Ethic, and motivation for achievement are said to be good). While some of these theories almost certainly account for some of the disparities between countries, IQ scores turn out to be the single best predictor.

Chapters 2 to 4 discuss the nature of general intelligence, defined as a single unitary construct underlying performance on many specific cognitive tasks. A review of the literature shows that an individual's intelligence is an important determinant of his or her educational attainment, earnings, economic success, and other significant life outcomes. In the United States and Britain, the correlation between IQ and earnings is approximately 0.35, an association the authors argue is causal because: IQs predate earnings, are moderately heritable, are stable from 5 years of age onwards, and predict not only the earnings obtained in adulthood, but educational level and many other positive outcomes along the way. It makes sense that intelligence determines earnings because more intelligent people learn more quickly, solve problems more effectively, can be trained to acquire more complex skills, and work more productively and efficiently. Nations whose populations have high IQ levels also have high educational attainment and relatively large numbers of individuals who make significant contributions to national life, including the social infrastructure conducive to economic development. Conversely, nations with low levels of intelligence have low levels of educational attainment and relatively few individuals who make significant positive contributions to the social infrastructure. Low intelligence leads to a number of unfavorable social outcomes including crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, and single motherhood.

Chapter 5, the "Sociology of Intelligence," provides the first analyses of IQ at the group level, analyzing sub-divisions within nations such as those of cities, districts within cities, and regions. For example, studies carried out using the 310 administrative districts of New York City in the 1930s, found correlations of 0.40 to 0.70 between average IQ scores (gained from tests administered to children in schools) and measures of per capita income, educational attainment, welfare dependency, juvenile delinquency, mortality, and infant mortality. Similar studies carried out in regions of the British Isles, France, and Spain in the 1970s corroborate these relationships.

Chapters 6 to 8 (and their appendices) provide the critical core of the authors' analyses. These chapters describe in detail the variables and procedures by which the very testable hypotheses are tested and confirmed. The main IQ data are those published from 81 countries in the scientific literature over the previous 70 years. These are standardized to a British mean IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, along with adjustments made for the secular increases in IQ which average 2.5 points a decade since the 1930s. The IQ data turn out to be highly reliable and valid. For example, in 45 countries for which there are two or more IQ measures, the inter-correlation is 0.94; in 38 countries for which there are data from international studies of achievement in mathematics and science, the correlation with IQ scores is 0.87.

The widespread though rarely stated assumption of economists and political scientists that the peoples of all nations have the same average level of intelligence turns out to be seriously incorrect. To the contrary, the evidence clearly reveals that there are considerable national differences in average intelligence level. The highest average IQs are found among the Oriental nations of North East Asia (IQ = 104), followed in descending order by the European nations of Europe (IQ = 98), the nations of North America and Australasia (IQ = 98), the nations of South and Southwest Asia from the Middle East through Turkey to India and Malaysia (IQ = 87), the nations of South East Asia and the Pacific Islands (IQ = 86), the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean (IQ = 85), and finally by the nations of Africa (IQ = 70).

One of the most surprising aspects of these data is how few nations have IQs as high as the British average of 100 (only 15 out of the 81, or less than 20%) and how many nations have IQs of 90 or less (40 out of the 81, almost 50%). The mean IQ of the 81 nations based on averaging the 7 regional IQs listed above is 90, a serious problem if the book's conclusion is correct that IQ = 90 is the threshold for having a technological economy. However, even if all the IQs turn out to be underestimates, it is likely that the rank-order among the nations will remain highly simila
r.

The range of IQs can be considerable within a geographic or political boundary. For example, in Latin America and the Caribbean, IQs range from 72 in Jamaica to 96 in Argentina and Uruguay and appear to be determined by the racial and ethnic make-up of the populations. Some racially mixed countries were assigned IQs proportionate to the IQs known for the various groups that make up the country. Thus, the national IQ for South Africa is given as 72 based on the weighted average for Whites, Blacks, Coloreds, and Indians (e.g., Owen, 1992).

For some (not all) analyses, 104 of the countries had their IQs estimated by averaging those from the most appropriate neighboring countries. For example, Afghanistan's IQ was estimated by averaging those from neighboring India (IQ = 81) and Iran (IQ = 84) to give an IQ of 83. The tables provided in IQ and the Wealth of Nations will be invaluable for researchers wishing to analyze subsets of the data or to extend them with additional data. Of course, the authors are aware that their data on both national IQs and economic indicators are only estimates and will contain errors. Their stunning results, however, leave little doubt that the margins of error were small enough to make the exercise meaningful. Error variance is typically randomly distributed and so works to diminish the strength of the associations between variables.

Although the correlations between IQs and economic performance are high, some countries had higher or lower per capita incomes than expected from their national IQs. These results are also informative. An analysis of those countries that deviate most from a regression line shows that a major additional factor for economic success consists of whether countries have market or socialist economies. A third contribution to wealth is the unique circumstances a country finds itself in.

Some of the countries with a large positive residual, and therefore a higher per capita income than would be predicted from their IQs, are Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.S. With the exception of Qatar, South Africa, and Barbados all of these are technologically highly developed market economies and their higher than predicted incomes could be attributed principally to this form of economic organization. Qatar's exceptionally high per capita income is principally due to its revenue from oil exporting, which is actually managed and controlled by corporations and people from European and North American countries. South Africa's much higher than expected per capita income derives from the high performance of the industries established and managed by the country's European minority. Similarly, Barbados's high positive residual can be traced to its well-established tourist industry and financial services, which are owned, controlled and managed by American and European countries.

Some of the countries with a large negative residual are Bulgaria, China, Hungary, Iraq, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, and Uruguay. Some of these are present or former socialist countries. Iraq has suffered from losing the Gulf War and a decade of UN trade sanctions. The Philippines have had a large amount of ethnic conflict, which other studies show results in decreased growth (across countries, a 1 SD increase in ethnic conflict is associated with a 0.30 SD decrease in growth rate; Easterly & Levine, 1997).

Chapter 9 contrasts IQ theory with its competitors, explains anomalies, and provides historical accounts of particular nations and regions. For example, two significant exceptions to the view that a tropical climate is detrimental to wealth are Singapore and Hong Kong, which lie in the tropical zone but are among the richest countries in the world. Two exceptions to the view that a temperate climate is beneficial are Lesotho and Swaziland, which lie slightly south of the Tropic of Capricorn, but are among the poorest countries in the world. The explanation for these differences can be understood in terms of intelligence theory: the people of Singapore and Hong Kong belong to the ethnic group with the highest IQs, while the people of Lesotho and Swaziland belong to the ethnic group with the lowest IQs. Historical vignettes are presented to explain how geographical isolation in central Asia (e.g., Tajikistan) may hinder economic development, and how economic fluctuations in Britain, Germany, and India have coincided with their governments' commitments to a market economy.

Modernization theories, according to which all nations would evolve from subsistence agriculture through to various stages of urbanization and industrialization, have worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim but have failed for the four remaining groups of nations (South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa). IQ and the Wealth of Nations proposes that modernization theories worked for Western Europe and the Pacific Rim because these nations have appreciably the same or somewhat higher IQs than in the United States but they did not work for the other four groups of nations because these have lower IQs than those in the United States.

One of the most perplexing problems for the general theory is why the peoples of East Asia with their high IQs lagged behind the European peoples in economic growth and development until the second half of the 20th Century. China's science and technology were generally more advanced than Europe's for around two thousand years, from about 500 B.C. up to around 1500 A.D. In engineering, for example, China had canal systems, including canal locks, centuries ahead of Europe. In agricultural technology, the Chinese were the first to invent the collar and harness for horses (250 B.C.), and the chain pump for lifting water for irrigation (80 A.D.). They also invented the wheel barrow (240 B.C.), which did not appear in Europe until 1250 A.D. In printing and paper making, the Chinese invented making paper from bark (105 A.D.), printing from engraved wooden blocks (650 A.D.), printing with movable type (1040 A.D.), and color printing for paper money (1100 A.D.). In military technology, the Chinese invented the stirrup (475 A.D.) enabling soldiers on horseback to sit securely in the saddle and attack enemies with swords and lances, gunpowder (1044 A.D.), rockets (1200 A.D.), bombs producing shrapnel (1230 A.D.), small firearms shooting bullets from bamboo and metal tubes (1260 A.D.), and cannons (1280 A.D.). In Europe, gunpowder wasn't used until the 1300s. In marine technology, the Chinese built ships with rudders (2000 B.C.), and the magnetic compass for navigation at sea (1100 A.D.). Still other Chinese inventions included: cast iron (300 B.C.), iron chain supported suspension bridges (580 A.D.), spinning wheels (1035 A.D.), water powered mechanical clocks (1080 A.D.), and porcelain (840 A.D.). In mathematics, the Chinese invented the decimal point (1350 B.C.), and negative numbers (100 B.C.). In the 15th century Chinese inventiveness in science and technology came to an end and from that time on virtually all the important advances were made by Europeans, first in Europe and later in the U.S., perhaps because while Europeans developed the market economy, the Chinese stagnated through authoritarian bureaucracy and central planning.

The failure of Japan to develop economically until the late 19th century is largely attributed to a regulated economy and isolation from the rest of the world. By 1867-68 a revolution occurred and the new rulers embarked on a program to modernize Japan by adopting Western education and technology, and by freeing up the economy by transforming state monopolies into private corporations. Much of the Japanese economic success in the 20th century was built by adopting inventions made in the West, improving them, and selling them more competitively in world markets. Japan thereby built up its motorcycle, automobile, shipbuilding, and electronics industries. Although it is so
metimes asserted that the Japanese have not made any significant scientific and technological innovations of their own, this underestimates their technological achievements. Philip's Science and Technology Encyclopedia (1998) lists a number of important discoveries and technological innovations made by the Japanese: the fiber-tipped pen (1960), "bullet" trains traveling at 210 km per hour, much faster than any Western trains (1964), laser radar (1966), quartz watches (1967), VHS video home systems (1976), flat screen televisions using liquid crystal display (1979), video discs (1980), CD-ROM (read only memory) disks (1985), digital audio tape (1987), and digital networks for sending signals along coaxial cables and optical fibers (1988).

African nations are at the other extreme to China and Japan in levels of national IQ and this may explain why they are such a major anomaly for modernization theory. The low rate of economic growth of African countries following their independence from colonial rule in the 1960s is one of the major problems in developmental economics. During the years 1976-98, the average rate of economic growth per capita GNP of the 41 nations of sub-Saharan Africa for which data are available is much lower than in the rest of the world. Many of the African countries even suffered negative per capita growth rate since 1960 (see also Easterly & Levine, 1997). Several economists have quantified all possible factors such as climate, ethnic diversity, geography, mismanagement, unemployment and the like and compared the situation to elsewhere in the world, especially Asia, and have concluded that these factors do not provide a complete explanation and that there is some "missing element." Some have identified the low level of "social capital," i.e., the widespread corruption and lack of trust in commercial relationships, poor roads and railways, unreliable telephones and electricity supplies, and the prevalence of tropical diseases such as malaria. IQ and the Wealth of Nations suggests that the missing link is IQ, and that some of the factors identified by economists as contributing to the low economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa are themselves attributable to a low level of intelligence in the populations. For example, the poor telephone services and electricity supplies, the low agricultural yields, and the poor advice given by government advisory boards are themselves due to the low average levels of IQ. With a cognitive capacity of IQ = 70, the populations of Africa cannot be expected to match the rates of economic growth achieved elsewhere in the world.

In chapter 10, the final chapter, various predictions are made. One clear prediction is that future growth is most likely in those countries with the largest negative residuals, that is, whose national IQ scores are high but whose present economic performance is weak. The countries of the former Communist Blocs -- such as Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania, and the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam -- are obvious possibilities. This chapter also lists some of the factors (both environmental and genetic) that might raise IQ scores, and so alleviate the problem. These include better nutrition, education, and health, and also ending the dysgenic fertility wherein the lowest IQ people produce the most children. For example, fertility figures from countries such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua show that among parents with secondary education in the late 1990s, the average number of children produced lies between 1.8 and 2.2, while among women with the least education, it lies between 5.0 and 6.1. Thus the least educated are having two to three times the number of children of the most educated. Since educational levels in these countries are to some degree correlated with intelligence, their demographic trend is strongly dysgenic.

The final conclusion of IQ and the Wealth of Nations is that national differences in IQ are here to stay, as is the gap between rich and poor nations. Hitherto, theories of economic development have been based on the presumption that the gaps between rich and poor countries are only temporary, and that they are due to various environmental conditions that could be changed by aid from rich countries to poor countries, and by poor countries adopting appropriate institutions and policies. It has been assumed that all human populations have equal mental abilities to adopt modern technologies and to achieve equal levels of economic development. The authors call for the recognition of the existence of the evolved diversity of human populations.

References

Easterly, W. & Levine, R. (1997). Africa's growth tragedy: policies and ethnic divisions. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, 1203-1250.

Owen, K. (1992). The suitability of Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices for various groups in South Africa. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 149-159.

Philip's Science and Technology Encyclopedia (1998). London: Philip.

Special Review

The Attack on The Bell Curve

By Richard Lynn

This paper originally appeared in Personality and Individual Differences 26,

(1999), pp. 761-765

B. DevUn, S.E. Fienberg, D.P. Resnick and K. Roeder (Eds). Intelligence, Genes and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve, Springer-Yerlag, New York (1997), ISBN 0-387-94986-0, 376 pp.

C.S. Fischer, M. Hoot, M.S. Jankowski, S.R. Locas, A. Swidler and K. Yoss (Eds), Inequality by Design: Cracking The Bell Curve Myth, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (1996). ISBN 0-691-02899-0, 318 pp.

It is doubtful whether any book in the entire history of psychology has been so extensively attacked as The Bell Curve
by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994). The book has been the subject of several hundred critical reviews, a number of which have been collected in edited volumes, some of whose very titles such as Measured Lies (Kincheloe, Steinberg and Gresson, 1996) betray the emotional strength of the hostility the book has evoked. However, many of the initial attacks on The Bell Curve fell wide of the mark. Now we have two more serious books, both of which examine the arguments of The Bell Curve and find then deficient. They contain contributions from geneticists, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians, and they attempt to refute all the essential arguments made in The Bell Curve.

Before considering how well they succeed, it will be useful to summarise H and M's major points. These are (1) the social structure of the United States is to some degree genetically stratified by intelligence and has at its apex a 'cognitive elite' of professionals and senior executives who are genetically superior to the rest of the population; this situation has come about relatively recently through social mobility, by which those with high IQs have risen in the social hierarchy and those with low IQs have fallen; (2) this social stratification by IQ has increased in recent decades as a result of greater equality of opportunity through which those with high IQs are increasingly securing entry to elite universities and occupations, where they are meeting and marrying people like themselves and having elite children; this has been producing a widening intelligence gap between the social classes and this is likely to continue, leading to a caste society with increasingly genetically differentiated social classes; (3) for this to be taking place, intelligence must have a reasonably high heritability, which H and M estimate as lying between 40-80 percent; (4) intelligence is socially important and is a significant determinant of educational attainment, social status and incomes; (5) low intelligence is a significant determinant of a variety of social pathologies including poor educational attainment, chronic unemployment, long term welfare dependency, crime, single motherhood and poverty; (6) these social evils would be reduced if the intelligence of the population could be increased and it would be desirable if this could be accomplished; (7) there is little chance of being able to do this because the things that have been tried as improving education and headstart programs have little or no impact on intelligence; (8) the situation is getting worse because the genetic component of intelligence is deteriorating through the process of dysgenesis or dysgenics resulting from the tendency of the intelligent to have fewer children than the unintelligent, for the generation length to be shorter for the less intelligent, and through the large scale immigration of those with low intelligence; (9) blacks have on average lower intelligence than whites and Asians and this contributes to the over-representation of blacks in respect of the social pathologies of poor educational attainment, single motherhood, crime, etc.; the low average IQ of blacks probably has some genetic basis; the social condition of blacks is likely to deteriorate in the future because dysgenics is greater among blacks than among whites and this will lead to a widening of the intelligence gap between blacks and whites; (10) nothing much can be done about any of this; the United States will become increasingly like South America, with high IQ whites and Asians living in fortified enclaves protected by high fences and armed guards from 'the menace of the slums below' (p. 518); (11) the future is consequently pretty bleak and the best that can be done is to try to return to a simpler small town America of yore in which the unintelligent could be usefully employed doing cognitively undemanding jobs and the local cognitive elite could exercise stronger social controls over those who step out of line by punishing them more swiftly and effectively than is done in the megalopises of the contemporary world..

Nearly all of these propositions are challenged in the two books under review. In the first of these, Daniels, Fienberg, Devlin and Rhoeder dispute the genetics of H and M. They argue that the heritability of IQ is much lower than that proposed by H and M, that dysgenesis/dysgenics is not taking place and that there is no persuasive evidence for a genetic component to the black-white IQ difference. On the heritability issue, they argue that H and M should have distinguished between narrow and broad heritability (the heritability due to additive genes only, and that due to additive genes plus dominants and recessives). They say that only additive genes are transmitted reliably from parents to children and could become stratified by social class, that hence only narrow heritability should be considered in the emergence of the genetic congitive elite thesis; that the narrow heritability of IQ is only 0.34; and that this is too low to produce agenetic cognitive elite.

There are several errors in this argument. First, contrary to the authors' statements, dominant and recessive genes are transmitted reliably from parents to children and are frequently disproportionately represented in certain populations. For instance, the dominant gene for myotonic dystrophy has an exceptionally high prevalence in the population of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, where it is more than 100 times more frequent than is typical for Caucasian populations (Veillette et al., 1992). Similarly, recessive genes for sickle cell anaemia are almost entirely confined to black populations and the recessives for Tay-Sacks disease are carried with much greater frequency among Ashkenazi Jews than among gentiles. There is no reason whatever why the dominant and recessive genes for high intelligence should not have become disproportionately represented among the cognitive elite and those for low intelligence disproportionately represented in the underclass and it is virtually certain that this has in fact occurred.

Second, in estimating the narrow heritability of intelligence at 0.34, Devlin et al. make the mistakes of (a) using the data for all age groups; it has become well known since Bouchard (1993) analysed the data that the heritability of intelligence is quite low among young children, becomes progressively greater among older children and reaches its peak among adults. Probably the explanation for this is that the environment provided by parents exerts effects on young children which wash out by the time they become adult, or that there are genes for intelligence which do not become active until adolescence. Whatever the explanation, the important figure for heritability is that derived from adults and this, according to recent estimates, is around 0.80 (Finkel et
al., 1995; Petrill et al., 1998); (b) a second error made by Devlin et al. is that they fail to correct the familial correlations for IQ for measurement error; this should have been done and the effect is to increase the heritability by around 12%. These two mistakes put the heritability estimates made by Devlin et al. way off target. If any criticism is to be made of H and M on their heritability estimate it is that they erred on the side of caution in placing it between 40-80%. The correct figure for adults is around 80%.

Devlin et al. also criticise H and M's conclusion that genetic deterioration for intelligence is taking place through the process of dysgenics. H and M demonstrated an inverse association between intelligence and numbers of children from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data, from which they inferred the presence of dysgenics. Devlin et al. object that the data are for 25-33 year olds who have not completed their fertility, that higher IQ women tend to have their children later, that only data for completed fertility can be used to establish the existence of dysgenics and that 'insofar as we are aware, there is nothing but anecdotal evidence for dysgenics' (p.61). The extent of their awareness of the evidence on this issue is seriously deficient. It is true that completed fertility needs to be assessed to establish the presence , of dysgenics but they fail to note that three studies carried out in the 1980's and 1990's fulfilled this condition on large representative samples of Americans and all three found completed fertility is dysgenic (Vining, 1995; Van Court and Bean, 1985; Retherford and Sewell, 1988). H and M summarise these three studies, but Devlin et. al. have failed to notice this. There is in addition a large amount of evidence from censuses and other surveys showing an inverse association between completed fertility and educational level (a proxy for intelligence), and between socio-economic status and intelligence (another proxy for intelligence), summarised in Lynn (1996). The evidence for dysgenic fertility is far from anecdotal. It is securely established. Furthermore, Devlin et al. do not address the dysgenic impact of shorter generation length among the less intelligent, nor that of immigration, for both of which H and M provide evidence.

Devlin et al. turn next to the possibility of a genetic component to the back-white difference in IQ. They reject this by citing three studies showing that the IQs of black-white hybrids are not related to their amount of Caucasian ancestry. They fail to cite the 18 studies of the relation of skin colour to IQ summarised by Shuey ( 1966), of which 16 found that light skin colour, a measure of the amount of Caucasian ancestry, is positively related to IQ. They assert that adoption studies show the malleability of IQ but fail to note that the leading study of this question by Waldman, Scarr and Weinberg (1992) showed that as young adults blacks adopted by white families showed no IQ gains (Lynn, 1994) and that the authors of this study have conceded that their evidence indicates a genetic component to the low black IQ (Waldman, Weinberg and Scarr, 1994). Finally, Devlin et al. write that 'it is not clear to us why IQ would be positively selected in Caucasians but not in Africans' (p.62). They are apparently unaware of the theory that Caucasians were subjected to the cognitively demanding selection pressures of survival in cold winter environments for around 100,000 years, to which Africans were not exposed, a theory which also explains the high IQs of East Asians, and which now commands wide assent as the evolutionary explanation for the genetically based high mean IQ of Caucasians and East Asians (Lynn, 1991; Miller, 1995; Rushton, 1995; Levin, 1997; Jensen, 1998).

Two later chapters discuss the nature of intelligence and the issue of whether H and M were justified in treating intelligence as a single entity called Spearman's g. Carroll is generally supportive of H and M and says that the scores on tests of various abilities (reasoning, verbal, spatial, etc.) can legitimately be summed to give a single measure which can be called general intelligence. Hunt opposes the concept of general intelligence and prefers the multiple intelligences model. However, he agrees that these are positively intercorrelated and can for practical purposes be summed to give a measure of general intelligence, and concludes that H and M's general intelligence is 'not exactly inaccurate but is simplified in an important way'. This conclusion is not seriously damaging to H and M's case. Everyone from Spearman onwards has accepted that g is a simplification and that there is more to intelligence than g. Simplification of the real world is precisely what science is about.

The book turns next to the importance of intelligence for earnings and other social phenomena. Cawley, Conneely, Heckman and Vytlacil examine the NLSY data for the relation between intelligence and earnings. They calculate that in different subsamples of males and females and of blacks, whites and Hispanics, IQ accounts, for between 0.12 and 0.17 of the variance in earnings, implying correlations of between 0.34 and 0.41. They conclude that H and M were wrong in their contention that IQ is an important determinant of earnings. There are two defects in their analysis. First, they omitted both the unemployed, who have low IQs and no earnings, and college students, who have high IQs and will in time have high earnings. These omissions reduce the correlations between IQs and earnings and adjustments should have been made for them. Second, corrections should have been made for the unreliability of the measures of both IQ and earnings. If these adjustments had been made they would have increased the contribution of IQ to earnings and the authors would have reached a different conclusion.

Cavallo, EI-Abbadi and Heeb consider sex and race differences in the contribution of IQ to earnings. They find that the black-white difference in earnings is largely due to IQ differences and that controlling for IQ, black males earn 96% of the earnings of whites, while black females earn 15% more than white females. They do not attempt to explain the reasons for these differences but fault H and M for not breaking down their analysis by sex. The sex difference they reveal is interesting, but it hardly dents H and M's case that the earnings of blacks and whites are pretty much the same once IQ is controlled. In fact, black females earn more than would be predicted from their IQs, possibly because they benefit more than black males from affirmative action.

Winship and Korenman discuss the effects of education on intelligence and argue that it is greater than H and M allow. They analyse the NLSY data and calculate that each year ofeducation increases the IQ by 2.5 IQ points. Wahlsten also argues that education raises IQ. They fault H and M for being too pessimistic about the scope for raising IQs by improving and increasing education. The weakness of this argument is that many intelligence tests consist of cognitive tasks taught in schools, such as arithmetic and language problems, and this is particularly true of the AFQT used in the NLSY. Scores on such tests do improve with education but this is not necessarily the same thing as increasing intelligence, which consists of many thousands of cognitive skills not taught in schools. The scope for raising intelligence by increasing education is much less securely established than these critics argue.

The relation between intelligence, crime and race is considered by Manolakes. She accepts H and M's contention that among whites IQ is negatively associated with crime. H and M did not consider this relationship among blacks. Manolakes faults them for this and finds that among blacks in the NLSY sample IQ is positively associated with crime. She criticises Hand M for not discovering this themselves, failing to note that Hand M were not primarily concerned with race differences. She has certainly made a remarkable discovery considering
the large research literature showing that crime is predominantly committed by the less intelligent. Before taking this result too seriously it should be noted that the data consist of self-reported crime and people do not invariably report their crimes truthfully. Nevertheless her apparent discovery that IQ is positively related to crime among blacks certainly deserves further research.

The remainder of the book consists of chapters by Glymour, a philosopher who asserts that The Bell Curve is pseudoscience; Zigler and Styfco, who agree that head start programs do not raise IQs but believe they may have other useful effects; and Lemann, a journalist who doubts whether there is a cognitive elite in America except in the professions of law, medicine and business consultancy. The book ends with a summary by Resnick and Fienberg, respectively a historian and statistician, who endorse the generally tendentious and frequently erroneous arguments of the contributors. The academic disciplines of these authors belie the book's subtitle Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve. Of the twenty five writers in this book, there is scarcely one who could properly be called a scientist.

Poor as Intelligence, Genes and Success is, it is no-where near so bad as Inequality by Design. This is a joint effort produced by six members of the sociology department at Berkeley. Their basic argument is that intelligence, earnings and socio-economic status are wholly environmentally determined. Their model (p.74) is that the family and neighborhood environment determine schooling and the cognitive skills of intelligence and educational attainment, that these determine inequality of earnings, which in turn determine the social problems of chronic unemployment, welfare dependency, single motherhood, crime, etc. Since intelligence is determined by the environment and by schooling, it could be increased by providing better environments and better schooling and this would reduce poverty and its associated ills. This should be done by raising the taxation of those with high and middle incomes and distributing the proceeds to the poor.

In order to establish their case that IQ is solely determined environmentally, the authors would have to show that all the twin and adoption studies indicating that intelligence has a moderate" to high heritability are flawed, but they make no attempt to do this. They should have considered Taubman's (1976) work on the similarity of the incomes of twins showing that income has a heritability of around 50%. They should also have considered the evidence that intelligence measured in young children remains fairly stable over subsequent years and predicts later educational attainment. For instance, it has been shown that the IQ of 5 year olds predicts their performance in an examination in mathematics taken at the age of 16 at a correlation of.72 (Yule, Gold and Busch, 1982). All this evidence is ignored. The authors of this deplorable book stand squarely in the tradition of sociological ostriches who have for so long averted their eyes from evidence they prefer not to see.

In the early and middle decades of the century sociologists largely ignored the role of genetics and intelligence as determinants of earnings, socioeconomic status, poverty and other social conditions. In the early 1970's a valiant attempt was made by the sociologist Christopher Jencks (1972) to remedy this blindness of sociological analysis. Jencks presented a path model linking genes to intelligence to social outcomes which was a forerunner of the analysis presented in The Bell Curve. Jencks seriously underestimated the strength of these causal links because he understated the heritability of intelligence and failed to correct for measurement unreliability but he made a major contribution by formulating the right model. It appears that, so far as the faculty of the sociology department at Berkeley is concerned, he wasted his time.

There is nothing in either of these two books that makes any serious case against the conclusions of The Bell Curve. With the exceptions of the chapters by Carroll and Hunt in the first book, the authors systematically distort the data and ignore the relevant evidence. Just what mix of ideology and sheer ignorance is responsible for the positions the authors of these two books adopt is difficult to assess. Whatever the explanation, these two books represent the benighted environmentalist timewarp in which much of contemporary social science is still enmeshed.

Richard Lynn
University of Ulster
Department of Psychology
Coleraine
Co Londonderry, N Ireland BT52 1 SA
UK

References

Bouchard, T. J. (1993), The genetic architecture of intelligence. In P.A. Vernon (Ed) Biological Approaches to the Study
of Human Intelligence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Finkel, D., Pedersen, N. L., McGue, M. and McClearn, G. E. (1995). Heritability of cognitive abilities in adult twins:
Comparison of the Minnesota and Swedish data. Behavior Genetics, 25, 421-431

Herrnstein, R. J and Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve. New York; Free Press.

Jencks, C. (1972). Inequality. New York: Basic Books.

Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g Factor. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Kincheloe, J, Steinberg, S. and Gresson, A. (1996). Measured Lies. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Levin, M. (1997). Race Matters. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Lynn, R. (1991). The evolution of race differences in intelligence. Mankind Quarterly, 31, 255-296.
Lynn, R. (1994). Some reinterpretations of the Minnesota transracial adoption study. Intelligence, 19,21-28.
Lynn, R. (1996). Dysgenics. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Miller, E. M. (1995). Environmental variability selects for large families only in special circumstances: another objection
to differential K theory. Personality and Individual Differences, 19,903-918.

Petrill, S. A., Plomin, R., Berg, S., Johansson, B., Pedersen, N. L., Ahern, F. and McClearn, G. E. (1998). The genetic
and environmental relationship between general and specific cognitive abilities in twins age 80 and over. Psycholgical
Science, 9, 183-189.

Retherford, R. D. and Sewell, W. H. (1988). Intelligence and family size reconsidered. Social Biology, 35, 1-40

Rushton, J. P. (1995). Race, Evolution and Behavior. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Shuey,A. (1966). The Testing of Negro Intelligence. New York: Social Science Press.

Taubman, P. (1976). The determinants of earnings: genetics, family and other environments; a study of male twins.
American Economic Review, 66, 858-870.

Veillette, S., Perron, M., Mathieu, J., Prevost, C. and Hebert, G. (1992). Sociocultural factors influencing the spread of
myotonic dystrophy in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of the province of Quebec. In A.H. Bit ties and D.F.
Roberts (Eds) Minority Populations; Genetics, Demography and Health. London: Macmillan.

Vining, D. R. (1995). on the possibility of the re-emergence of a dysgenic trend: an update. Personality and Individual
Differences, 19, 259-265.

Waldman, I. D., Scarr, S., and Weinberg, R. A. (1992). The Minnesota transracial adoption study: a follow-up of IQ
test performance at adolescence. Intelligence, 16, 117-135.

Waldman, I. D., Weinberg, R. A. and Scarr, S. (1994). Racial-group differences in IQ in the Minnesota transracial
adoption study: a reply to Levin and Lynn. Intelligence, 19,29--44.

Yule, W., Gold, R. D. and Busch, C. (1982). Long term predictive validity of the WPPSI: an 11 year follow-up study.
Personality and Individual Differences, 3,65-71.

Van Court, M. and Bean, F. D. (1985). Intelligence and fertility in the United States 1912-1982. Intelligence, 9,23-32.

 

 

The New Enemies
of Evolutionary Science By J. Philippe Rushton

(Note: The following report by J. Philippe Rushton was originally published
in Liberty, March, 1998, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 31-35)

The decencies and pieties of the age are at war with the pursuit of truth.

On January 19, 1989, in the Sausalito Room of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel, my life changed forever. I stood before a lectern speaking to a symposium of scientists belonging to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The title of the brief paper I proceeded to present to the meeting was "Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)."

I reviewed the international literature recently published in academic peer-reviewed journals. I summarized data about traits like brain size, temperament, speed of maturation, family structure, and reproductive variables. I tentatively concluded, roughly speaking, that East Asians, on average, were slower to mature, less fertile, less sexually active, with larger brains and higher IQ scores than Africans, who tended to the opposite in each of these areas. Whites, I found, fell between the other two groups.

I further contended that this orderly tri-level hierarchy of races in average tendency had its roots not only in economic, cultural, familial, and other environmental forces but also, to a far greater extent than mainstream social science would suggest, in ancient, gene-mediated evolutionary ones. Heredity, or nature - to use the term popularized by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's younger cousin - was every bit as important as environment or nurture, often more so.

To account for the racial pattern in brain size and the other "life-history variables," I proposed a gene-based life-history theory familiar to evolutionary biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategy. At one end of this scale are r strategies, which emphasize high reproductive rates, and, at the other K-strategies, which emphasize high levels of parental investment. This scale is generally used to compare the life histories of widely disparate species but I used it to describe the immensely smaller variations within the human species. I hypothesized that Mongoloid people are, on average, more K-selected than Caucasoids, who in turn are more K-selected than Negroids.

I also mapped this theory onto human evolution. Molecular genetic evidence shows that modern humans evolved in Africa sometime after 200,000 years ago, with an African/non-African split occurring about 110,000 years ago, and a Mongoloid/Caucasoid split about 41,000 years ago. The farther north the populations migrated, "out of Africa," the more they encountered the cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters. As these populations evolved into present-day Europeans and East Asians, they did so by shifting toward larger brains, slower rates of maturation, and lower levels of sex hormone with concomitant reductions in sexual potency and aggression and increases in family stability and longevity.

I did not claim to have established the truth of these hypotheses. They may never by established in their entirety. But if they, or any part of them, or even any parallel hypotheses were eventually confirmed, we would have an explanation of why the measured traits are statistically distributed among racial groups in the distinct patterns evident in the data I had examined. The theories provided testable hypotheses and consequently complied with two fundamental goals of any science: the search to provide causal explanations of phenomena, and the search to unify separate fields of thought. These powerful incentives pulled me forward.

I emphasized two caveats in my presentation before the AAAS. First, because there is enormous variability within each population and because the population distributions overlap, it is always problematic to generalize from a group average to any particular individual. Secondly, because genetic efforts are necessarily mediated by neurohormonal and psychosocial mechanisms, many opportunities exist for intervention and the alleviation of suffering.

My hypothesis so stunned AAAS organizers that they quickly called a press conference to publicly dissociate themselves from my remarks. At the press conference, the president of the AAAS, Dr. Walter Massey, vice-president for research at the University of Chicago, told reporters that my credentials as a psychologist were good and that scholars participating in the conference were free to draw any conclusions they choose. Massey affirmed that the AAAS would never consider muzzling any scholar because the free expression of views was the essence of academic discussion. He went on to say that I had made "quite a leap of faith from the data to the conclusions" and that he found the paper "personally disturbing" and its conclusions "highly suspect." The scene was eerily reminiscent of the closing sequence of the film Rosemary's Baby with the media setting up to take pictures of the newborn devil, cloven hoofs and slit eyes, ready to raise hell on earth. I was about to become an academic pariah.

By the time I returned from the conference to my home in London, Ontario, and my job as professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, the uproar was in full swing. "Canadian Professor Provokes Uproar With Racial Theories," proclaimed Canada's national newspaper, the venerable Globe and Mail. "Theory Racist: Prof Has Scholars Boiling," declared the influential Toronto Star. "UWO Professor Denies Study Was Racist," trumpeted the local London Free Press.

Newspapers took my views to hostile social activist groups and got their predictably hostile opinion. They said I should be fired for promoting hatred. The press then took this idea to the president of the university who upheld the principle of academic freedom. The ongoing conflict was serialized for weeks. Student activist groups soon entered the fray, demanding that I meet with them in a public forum.

TV coverage of my theories juxtaposed photos of me with footage of Nazi storm troops. Editing and voiceovers removed any mention of my qualification that the race differences I had identified were often quite small and could not be generalized to individuals and didn't mention that like any decent human being I abhor Nazi racial policies. Newspapers caricatured me as wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood or talking on the telephone to a delighted Adolf Hitler. The Toronto Star began a campaign to get me fired from my position, chastising my university and stating "This protection of a charlatan on grounds of academic freedom is preposterous." Later, the same paper linked me to the Holocaust saying, "[Thus] there emerged the perverted 'master race' psychology of the 20th century, and the horror of the Holocaust. Oddly, the discredited theories of eugenic racism still are heard, most recently from an academic at an Ontario university." I had no choice but to hire a prestigious law firm and issue notices under the Libel and Slander Act against the newspaper. This brought the media campaign against me to a halt.

Hate Crime Laws

In the U.S. there is a First Amendment to protect the right of every citizen to free speech and there is not much the government can do to silence unpopular ideas. In Canada and many Western European countries, however, there are laws against free speech, ostensibly enac
ted to inhibit "hate" and the spreading of "false news."

Two weeks after my AAAS presentation, the premier of Ontario denounced my theories. My work was "highly questionable and destructive" and "morally offensive to the way Ontario thinks," he said. It "destroys the kind of work we are trying to do, to bring together a society based on equality of opportunity." The premier told reporters he had telephoned the university president and found him in a dilemma about how to handle the case. The premier said that he understood and supported the concept of academic freedom, but in this particular case dismissal should occur "to send a signal" to society that such views are "highly offensive."

When the university failed to fire me, the premier asked the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate whether I had violated the federal Criminal Code of Canada, Chapter 46, Section 319, Paragraph 2, which specifies: "Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than private conversation, willfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of an indictable offense and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years."

The police questioned my colleagues and members of the administration and professors at other universities, demanded tapes of media interviews, and sent a questionnaire to my attorney to which I was obliged to reply in detail. (There's no Fifth Amendment in Canada either). After harassing me and dragging my name through the dirt for six months, the Attorney General of Ontario declined to prosectue me and dismissed my research as "loony, but not criminal."

This did not halt the legal action. Eighteen students, including seven Black students, lodged a formal complaint against me to the Ontario Human Rights Commission claiming that I had violated Sections, 1, 8, and 10 of the 1981 Ontario Human Rights Code guaranteeing equality of treatment to all citizens of the province. In particular, I was charged with "infecting the learning environment with academic racism." As remedy, the complainants requested that my employment at the university be terminated and that an order be made requiring the university to "examine its curriculum so as to eliminate academic racism."

I was outraged. A more flagrant attack on the right to freedom of expression was difficult to imagine in a supposedly free country. "Human rights" tribunals were becoming a menace - a direct threat to the very human rights and fundamental freedoms they were supposed to protect. The Ontario Human Rights Commission could no more change the truth about human races than could the Christian Inquistion about the solar system or the KGB about the genetics of wheat. I found it difficult to accept the increasingly obvious fact that in the post-Soviet world, an academic was freer to say what he believed about some things in Russia, than in Canada.

Four long years after the complaint was lodged, the Ontario Human Rights Commission abandoned its case against me claiming it could no longer find the complainants to testify.

Events at the University

In its relations with the outside world the university administration stood firmly for academic freedom. The president gave a press conference to state categorically that there would be no investigation of me, that I would not be suspended, and that I was free to pursue any line of research I chose.

Behind the scenes, however, I became the target of a witch hunt by some of the administrators. Dismayingly, my dean, a physical anthropologist, publicly declared that I had lost my scientific credibility and spearheaded an attack on me in the newspapers. She issued a series of preemptive statements making plain her negative opinion of me and my work. "What evidence is there for this ranked ordering of the evolution of the human races?" she wrote. "None." Claiming that her views represented only her academic opinion she emphasized that she was not speaking in any administrative capacity. Her letter was nonetheless widely interpreted in the media as a refutation by my "boss." Henceforth, in order to support me, a person would now have to go up against the dean in addition to prevailing opinion. Next, the chair of my department gave me an annual performance rating of "unsatisfactory" citing my "insensitivity." This was a remarkable turnaround because it occurred for the same year in which I had been made a Fellow of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. My previous twelve years of annual ratings had been "good" or "excellent." Indeed, my earlier non-controversial work had made me on of the most cited scholars in my university.

Because unsatisfactory ratings can lead to dismissal, even for a tenured professor like me, I contested the rating through various levels of grievance, wasting an enormous amount of time and emotional energy. The proceedings that followed were Kafkaesque, terrifying when they weren't simply funny. For example, the grievance procedures required that I first appeal the Chairman's negative assessment to the Dean. The Dean had already spoken out against me, so I asked the Dean to recuse herself from hearing the case. She refused. So I had to appear before her.

At my hearing, the Dean's folded arms and glowers of fury made her decision obvious, and six weeks later, she upheld the Department Chair's decision. In a seven-page letter justifying her decision, she cast aspersions at my "sensitivity," and my sense of "responsibility," and questioned whether ther were, in fact, "any" papers that had ever been published that had supported my perspective other than those I had written myself.

I decided on a more drastic defense. I wrote to colleagues around the world and received over 50 strong letters of support, many endorsing the evidence I had presented. When the Dean found out about this she went absolutely ballistic, on one occasion screaming and spitting at me in fury.

I eventually won my appeal against the Dean and the Chair and two separate grievance committeess chastised them for their actions against me. My annual performance ratings are back to receiving grades of "good" and "excellent."

Some radical and Black students mobilized and held rallies, even bringing in a member of the African National Congress to denounce me. In one demonstration, a mob of 40 people stormed through the psychology department, banging on walls and doors, bellowing slogans through bull horns, drawing swastikas on the walls, and writing on my door "Racist Pig Live Here."

The administration responded by barring me from the classroom and ordering me to lecture by videotape on the pretext that they could not protect me from the lawlessness of students. Again I launched formal grievances. After a term of enforced teaching by videotape, I won the right to resume teaching in person, though then I was required to run a gauntlet of demonstrators shouting protests and threats. Only after several forced cancellations of my classes did the administration warn the demonstrators that further action would lead to suspension and legal action. That brought the protests to a halt.

De Facto Censorship and the Corruption of Scholarship

As a graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1973, I witnessed a physical assault on Hans Eysenck, who was studying the biological basis of intelligence and had recently published his book Race, Intelligence, and Education (1971). The slogan of that day was "Fascists Have No Right To Speak," and Eysenck became a target for attack. No legal charges were brought for the widely witnesses assault because another popular slogan of the 1960's , for those who approved the message but disapproved the tactic, was "There are no Enemies on the Left." Stories of harassment and intimidation could be told by many others who have had the temerity to research topics that touch on the genetic or distributional basis of race differences.

Today, many campus radicals from the 1960's are the tenured radicals of the 1990's. Th
ey have become the chairs of departments, the deans, and the chancellors of the universities: senior political administrators in Congress and Houses of Parliament, and even the presidents and prime mimisters of countries. The 1960's mentality of peace, love, and above all, equality, now constitutes the intellectual dogma of the Western academic world. There are laws to prohibit platforms for those denounced as "fascists" and others deemed to be not politically correct.

In his book, Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch showed that even in the U.S. with the First Amendment in place, many colleges and universities have set up "anti-harassment" rules prohibiting - and establishing punishments for - "speech or other expression" that is intended to "insult or stigmatize an individual or a small number of individuals in the basis of their sex, race, color, hankicap, religion, sexual orientation or national and ethnic origin." (This is quoted from Stanford's policy, and is more or less typical.) One case at the University of Michigan became well known because it led a federal court to strike down the rule in question. A student claimed, in a classroom discussion, that he thought homosexuality was a disease treatable with therapy. He was formally disciplined by the university for violating the school's policy and victimizing people on the basis of sexual orientation.

In Canada and Western Europe, governments can and do prohibit speech on topics they consider obnoxious. In Denmark, a woman wrote a letter to a newspaper calling national domestic partner laws "ungodly" and homosexuality "the ugliest kind of adultery." She and the editor who published her letter were targeted for prosectution. In Great Britain, the Race Relations Act forbids speech that expresses racial hatred, "not only when it is likely to lead to violence, but generally, on the grounds that members of the minority races should be protected from racial insults." In some parts of the world you can be jailed, exiled, or even executed for expressing forbidden opinions.

Irrespective of religious background, or political affiliation, virtually all American intellectuals adhere to what has been called 'one-party science.' For example, only politically correct hypotheses centering on cultural disadvantage are postulated to explain the differential representation of minorities in science. Analyses of aptitude test scores and behavioral genetics are taboo. Cheap moralizing is so fierce that most people respect the taboo. This intellectual cowardice only encourages viscious attacks by activist groups on those who are engaged in legitimate scientific research showing that there is a genetic basis underlying individual and group differences.

The high-placed pervasiveness of the egalitarian orthodoxy is scary. Even more frightening than what happened to me is the experience of Christopher Brand, professor of psychology at Edinburgh University. On February 29, 1996, Brand's book on intelligence, The g Factor, was published in the United Kingdom by the British subsidiary of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. On April 14, newspaper reports of interviews with him began to appear saying that he thought black people had a lower IQ than did whites and that these were probably partly genetic. On April 17, Wiley's company in New York denounced Brand's views as "repellent" and withdrew the book from bookstores. A blizzard of "refutations" of Brand appeared in the U.K. media under outraged headlines. Protests from members of Parliament, student boycotts of his lectures, and calls for his resignation by faculty at the University of Edinburgh all predictably ensued. Brand's refusal to be silenced and his defense of free speech led him to be fired (on August 8, 1997) for bringing his university into disrepute. There but for the grace God, go I.

In 1995, my monograph Race, Evolution, and Behavior was published by Transaction Publishers. Subsequently, the book was translated into Japanese (1996) and released as a softcover edition (1997) with an Afterword updating the science since the hardback went to press.

The book garnered a lead review in the New York Times Book Review (October 16, 1994) where Malcolm Browne, the Times science writer, discussed it along with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve and Seymour Itzkoff's The Decline of Intelligence in America. Browne concluded his analysis with the statement that "the government or society that persists in sweeping this topic under the rug will do so at its peril." Dozens of other journals, including the National Review, Nature,andThe Nation, also reviewed it.

Its publication by an important academic press touched off a new round of hysteria. A lurid article screaming "Professors of HATE" (in five-inch letters!) appeared in Rolling Stone magazine (October 20, 1994). Taking up the entire next page was a photograph of my face, hideously darkened, twisted into a ghoulish image, and superimposed on a Gothic university tower. In another long propaganda piece entitled "The Mentality Bunker" which appeared in Gentleman's Quarterly (November 1994), I was misrepresented as an outmoded eugenicist and pseudoscientific racist. A photograph of me was published in brown tint reminiscent of vintage photos from the Hitler era.

Incredibly, Canada Customs seized and witheld copies of one shipment of the book for nine months while they tried to decide whether to condemn the book as "hate literature" and ban it from entering Canada. The fact that an academic book was even the subject of an investigation stunned my publisher: "I've never heard of such a thing," said Mary Curtis, Chairman of the Board of Transaction. "This is not supposed to happen in Canada. The last time the company had trouble shipping scholarly works was in the mid-1980's, when some books shipped to the Moscow Fair didn't make it."

Michel Cléroux, a spokesman for Canada Customs, said Customs were just following orders by investigating possible hate propaganda. A departmental policy prohibiting hate propaganda includes this definition: "Goods alleging that an identifiable group is racially inferior and/or weakens other segments of society to the detriment of society as a whole." After an "investigation" lasting nine months, Canada Customs relented.

Harassment continued at another meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS routinely allows the militantly disruptive International Committee Against Racism (INCAR) and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to have official "Exhibitor" status, along with a booth, at its annual meeting. At the February 1996 meeting in Baltimore, INCAR and PLP festooned their booth with posters of Karl Marx and signs taking credit for interfering with the University of Maryland conference on "Genes and Crime" in September 1995.

At the AAAS meeting, INCAR targeted my poster presenting a review of the literature on brain size and cognitive ability. When INCAR encountered me the day before the poster presentation, they yelled so many death threats that the AAAS called the Baltimore police, who dispatched an armed officer to stand by the presentation. Despite the guard, INCAR continued to utter threats. One demonstrator took photographs of me saying they were for a "Wanted: Dead or Alive" poster. "You won't be living much longer," he said. Incredibly, instead of cancelling the Exhibitor Status of organizations that threaten violencee, the program director of the AAAS's annual meeting said, in an interview published in The Scientist (March 4, 1996), that AAAS would tighten up the screening process to make it more difficult for presentations like mine to get on the program!

As Charles Murray has observed in the aftermath to The Bell Curve, social science is corrupt on the topic of race. Yet, the genetic hypothesis for the pervasiveness of the three-way racial pattern across so many traits, and which calls into question simple explanations based only on social factors like discrimination and poverty, needs to be discussed.

In his commencement address to the graduatin
g class of 1997 at the University of California (San Diego), U.S. President Bill Clinton called for a new dialogue on race and for "deepening our understanding of human nature and human differences." But apparently there are some aspects of human nature and human differences he'd rather leave unexplored.

I've learned a great deal since that day in 1989 when I stood before that meeting of scientists and presented a summary of my research, thereby making myself the target of harassment by the politically correct and the object of intimidation by the government of Canada. Despite the viscious campaign against investigation of the possible genetic basis of group differences, my interest never wavered. Work on other topics seemed shallow by comparison. Spurred by attacks and aided by colleagues, I have sought out more definitive tests of the genetic hypothesis and continue to publish my research.

I've also learned how important freedom of inquiry is to science, which must always remain to pursue truth without regard for where that pursuit leads. I've learned to treasure such remnants of freedom of speech as I enjoy as a citizen of Canada, and remain more committed than ever to the search for truth. As Benjamin Franklin observed more than two centuries ago, "Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech."

J. Philippe Rushton
Department of Psychology
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario N6A 5C2

Buy this book today!

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Evolution, Eugenics, and God's Will by Marian Van Court

This famous scene from the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel has recently been interpreted in a startling new way. After it was cleaned and restored, the original details were revealed. The vehicle in which God is traveling, along with God himself, all the angels, the sashes, etc, conform remarkably well to the structures of a human brain (turned sideways, facing Adam). It's long been known that Michelangelo performed dissections so that he could fully understand the human body. Instead of the old interpretation of God giving life to Adam, it seems clear that Michelangelo's intention was to portray God giving the highest form of intellect to Adam, a uniquely human gift which is the product of the human brain (Meshberger, 1990).

This painting provides a wonderful artistic illustration for the subject of this paper. If one understands the large genetic component to our very souls -- not only our intelligence, but our honesty, our kindness, our courage, our creativity, and our unique personalities -- then one can immediately grasp the potential of eugenics for evolving ourselves into better people, more fully in the image of God. Francis Galton envisioned eugenics as a large-scale humanitarian endeavor, firmly grounded in science, which also contained the seed of a new religion:

The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavor to further evolution, especially that of the human race.

Those who enjoy a sense of communion with God can dwell on the undoubted fact that there exists a solidarity between themselves and what surrounds them, through the endless reaction of physical laws among which the hereditary influences are to be included. They know that they are descended from an endless past, that they have a brotherhood with all that is, and have each his own share of responsibility in parentage of an endless future ( Blacker, 1952).

Evolution is the Crown Jewel of Creation

Evolution by natural selection fashioned creatures with conscious awareness from one-celled animals over vast expanses of time. The consciousness of human beings has evolved to such a degree that we are able to love one another, to experience joy at the beauty of nature, to create, to explore, to struggle to comprehend the nature of God, and even to manifest glimmerings of divinity ourselves. If Creation can be said to have anything resembling a purpose or destiny in a spiritual sense, the evolution of conscious beings has got to be at the very heart of it. For this reason, evolution by natural selection can legitimately be regarded as the "crown jewel" of Creation.

And isn't "the crown jewel of Creation" a far cry from how Darwin's theory was first greeted by the public in the late 1800s?! Christianity's vehement rejection of the theory of evolution was understandable since it contradicted a literal interpretation of the Bible. Although it was a painful process, fraught with bitterness, in the long run this conflict was healthy. Now we think of the story of Adam and Eve as an allegory, and a lovely one at that. We have sufficient understanding to welcome Darwin's message because we recognize evolution as a vitally important key to life, to our consciousness, and ultimately to God.

All major religions say, in one way or another, that we are created in God's image. In Genesis it is written, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." An Indian proverb (East Indian) elegantly expresses a similar notion:

Divinity sleeps in stones,
breathes in plants,
dreams in animals,
and awakens in human beings.

Consider the fact that we were created in God's image through the process of evolution--this can hardly be an insignificant fact. The creation story in the Bible may be lovely, but isn't the way we actually evolved into ourselves more awesome and more overwhelmingly beautiful than God merely dictating by fiat the existence of the first man and woman? Science has established conclusively that evolution is true, and this is not in doubt. But perhaps evolution could also be said to surpass the story of the Garden of Eden as being more probably true purely on aesthetic grounds (just as in physics sometimes the more beautiful of two theories is given more credence).

Dysgenics: A Cosmic Sacrilege?

The process of evolution quite naturally evokes our deepest fascination and respect, but it is the product of evolution, our consciousness itself, which is precious -- one might even say "divine." Yet the shocking fact is that today, our evolution has shifted into reverse, and our precious consciousness -- acquired at such an enormous cost in suffering and death, over so many millennia -- is now deteriorating. Scientific studies have shown that we, as a species, are currently evolving to become less intelligent, more violent, less healthy, and more mentally disturbed (Van Court and Bean, 1985, Lynn and Van Court, 1996; Lynn 1995; Lynn, 1996; Comings, 1996). The word for this is "dysgenics," which is the opposite of "eugenics." Dysgenics means human genetic deterioration. It's difficult to imagine worse news. If evolution by natural selection is the crown jewel of Creation--having produced human beings in the image of God--then dysgenics must constitute one cosmic sacrilege.

Un-natural Selection

How did dysgenics come about? Simple. By a process that might well be called "un-natural selection," because it is a reversal of natural selection resulting from society's corrupting influence. In a nutshell:

(1) Modern societies quite understandably take care of sickly people who previously would have died, but then these people go on to have children with a high incidence of the same illnesses, and

(2) although contraception is available to everyone, it's more consistently and effectively used by all of the "best" and the most admirable people, i.e., the smartest, most responsible, hard-working people who make a positive contribution to the larger society.

A high percentage of the "worst" and least-admirable people either don't know, or don't care, that unprotected sex brings babies into the world, so they have sex with little or no thought of contraception. They include: psychopaths; sociopaths; criminals; psychologically disturbed people of all varieties; alcoholics; drug addicts; irresponsible, short-sighted, and selfish people; the mentally retarded; just-plain-dumb people; and people who are too lazy to take a trip to the corner drugstore. Because of their negligence, they contribute a disproportionate share of their least- admirable genes to future generations.

Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster conducted a study in which he found that despite lengthy sojourns in prison, London criminals still managed to produce more children on average than ordinary, law-abiding citizens (Lynn, 1995). Lynn calculated the increase in crime that would be expected
, given the degree to which criminal behavior is a function of heredity, and estimated the increase in crime which should result (other factors being equal) by the excess fertility of criminals. His excellent book, Dysgenics (see review on this website) is the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the issue of eugenics and dysgenics to date.

Instead of implementing a eugenics program of incentives and disincentives in order to rectify the problem of dysgenics, most governments are making it worse by subsidizing the reproduction of the least-productive segment of society, and taxing heavily the most productive segment.

Farmers and breeders have utilized the principle of "select the best" for their crops, livestock, and pets, and this has given us bountiful crops of every variety, high-yield milk cows, fast, beautiful, and gentle horses. Yet we take far less care when it comes to human beings, and in effect, we "select the worst." It would be unconscionable to breed stupid, sickly, and vicious dogs -- surely it's at least as cruel to do this to human beings.

Eugenics

It's not necessary, nor even possible, to do away with contraception entirely because the technologies and information for preventing conception are "out," and only a severely repressive government could keep them from the people, and then only partially. However, we can reverse dysgenics and continue the process of improving the human species by implementing a eugenics program. We can once again evolve in a positive direction with self-directed evolution. From a spiritual point of view, when we take on the mantle of eugenics, we insure that our evolution will be guided more directly by God, who lives and breathes within us.

The word "eugenics" conjures up draconian images of Nazis and death camps, but even a cursory examination of the issues shows that this association is unwarranted. Eugenics has been practiced since ancient times, and in the 20th century Sweden had a eugenics program that lasted for 40 years (Broberg and Roll- Hansen, 1996). In fact, a total of 28 countries practiced eugenics in the 20th century, and one country, Germany, committed genocide, so despite Marxist propaganda to the contrary, it's apparent that no causal association can be drawn between eugenics and mass murder. (For a more detailed discussion of these important issues, see the review of Dysgenics on this website.)

Critics of eugenics often argue that we will never agree upon which traits we want, so therefore, the entire enterprise is hopeless. But this argument is utterly without merit. It's perfectly predictable that we will choose health, beauty, intelligence, talent, courage, kindness, and honesty for our children because these are universally valued traits. All over the world parents value them today, just as parents valued them a hundred years ago, and a thousand years ago.

Is Dysgenics God's Will? Three Fundamental Truths

Scientists entering the realm of theology for the first time suddenly find themselves on very shaky ground, indeed. How does one know this or that is true? Where's the evidence? In this paper, I have assumed only that many readers believe in God. Now, given this assumption, at least it becomes possible to say, "If one accepts this statement about God, then such-and-such logically follows."

Is the current genetic deterioration of the human species "God's will?" I hope to address this question in a such a way that it will be applicable to Christians and devotees of other religions, as well as to most people who believe in God but don't adhere to any particular religious creed. First I'll state three fundamental truths about the nature of God upon which all major religions agree. Then I'll attempt to draw inferences from them about dysgenics.

(1) God loves us. All major religions hold that this is so.

(2) God wants us to be kind to one another. Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself." The current Dalai Lama (spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists) says, "Be kind to one another." Kindness to others is one of the most important -- if not the most important -- teaching of all religions.

(3) God has accorded human beings a special place in the animal kingdom, with a distinct destiny. All major religions believe that human beings are the pinnacle of God's creation. In Genesis, God said, "[L]et [man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepith upon the earth." In Hindu writings about reincarnation, people are considered the highest and most spiritually advanced creatures. No major religion teaches that we are indistinguishable from lower animals.

Now we get to the heart of the matter--namely, what inferences can we draw from these three fundamental truths? Is dysgenics God's will? Is dysgenics contrary to God's will? Or, is dysgenics simply irrelevant to God?

Let's take the first statement, that God loves us. If God loves us, then he doesn't want us to suffer unnecessarily. That certainly follows, doesn't it? Dysgenics means that our children's generation will be less well-endowed genetically than our generation is, and it's inescapable that they will suffer as a result. To be sickly, to be retarded, to suffer psychiatric illness -- these are all things we definitely do NOT want for our children, nor for anyone else we love. It hardly requires a giant leap of faith to conclude that if God loves us, he doesn't want us to suffer needlessly.

With regard to the second point, that God wants us to be kind to one another -- is it kind for us to leave the next generation genetically stupider, more sickly mentally and physically, and worse people morally? Inflicting pain and suffering on enormous numbers of innocent beings is hardly the definition of kindness. I challenge the reader: can you think of anything that is more cruel, on such a vast scale? Communism certainly comes to mind as a possible contender, but I would argue it ranks second to dysgenics. At any rate, we know what our health means to us--it means everything. And we know how much our intelligence means. Imagine what life would be like if you had been born mentally retarded -- you wouldn't even be you! These traits are profoundly important to everyone, past, present and future.

In addition to leaving our children's generation a poorer genetic legacy, if we do nothing about dysgenics, we will also bequeath to them the same cultural taboo against eugenics which we have inherited -- the taboo which has paralyzed the Western world for the past 50 years on the vitally important issue of our own biological evolution. Until dysgenics is reversed, each generation will become successively less and less capable of solving the problem of dysgenics -- or any problem, for that matter.

Third, God has accorded human beings a special place in the animal kingdom, with a distinct destiny. Could our "distinct destiny" possibly be to evolve closer and closer in the image of God for hundreds of thousands of years -- more intelligent, more loving and kind, healthier and more civilized -- and then suddenly to reverse direction, to squander all the hard-won gains, and evolve backwards, less in the image of God, more like lower animals? How could this be God's will? It's inconceivable.

By examining three fundamental truths upon which all major religions agree, a very short and sure step of reasoning leads us, in each case, to the conclusion that dysgenics must be against God's will.

Conclusion

Our biology and our spirituality are inextricably linked, and they evolve (or de-volve) hand in hand. From the standpoint of Christianity, it's fascinating to realize that as we de-volve to become more criminal, more stupid, and more primitive, there will inevitably be (1)
a large increase in the total amount of sin, and therefore (2) a higher percentage of people condemned to Hell!! Amazing though it may seem, science has proven that Good and Evil have roots in biology, and we ignore this fact at our peril.

In conclusion, the most capable of our small, ape-like ancestors survived and reproduced in greater numbers so that our species gradually evolved larger brains, higher intelligence, and greater human-ness, and the result of this extraordinary Creation is us. However, "we" aren't the end of the story!! "Creation" is still in motion, and now we are participants in it, whether for good or for ill. We can, and we must, reverse the current process of dysgenics if we are to carry out God's will, and if we feel any love or compassion for all those who come after us.

REFERENCES

Blacker, C. P., 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After, Gerald Duckworth & Co, London

Broberg, Gunnar, & Nills Roll-Hansen, 1996, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, Michigan University Press, East Lansing

Comings, David, 1996, The Gene Bomb, Hope Press, Duarte, CA

Meshberger, Frank L., 1990, "An Interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy," JAMA, Oct. 10, 1990, vol. 264, No. 14

Lynn, Richard, 1996, Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut

Lynn, Richard, 1995, "Dysgenic fertility for crime," Journal of Biosocial Science, 27, p. 405-408

Van Court, Marian, and Frank Bean, 1985, "Intelligence and Fertility in the United States: 1912-1982," Intelligence, vol. 8, p. 23-32

 

Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations

by Richard Lynn (Praeger, 1996)

reviewed by Marian Van Court

[This review first appeared in the Journal of Social, Political,
and Economic Studies, Volume 23, Number 2, Summer 1998.]

Countless volumes have been written about the past evolution of the human species, yet hardly any attention has been paid to the crucial question, "Where are we evolving now?" Richard Lynn, of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, courageously addresses this question in his controversial book Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations. Professor Lynn presents compelling evidence that much of the world is deteriorating in its genetic potential for intelligence, health, and conscientiousness (or good character). The word for this is "dysgenics," the opposite of "eugenics." The Bell Curve devoted one chapter to the question of where we are evolving with regard to IQ (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994). Dysgenics picks up where The Bell Curve left off. Professor Lynn surveys studies from all over the world, and everywhere finds the least intelligent people having the most children. The only exception is sub-Saharan Africa where contraception is rarely used. Our genetic potential for intelligence has been declining in Europe and North America since the mid- 1800s, with a total loss of about 5-8 IQ points. Currently, we are losing almost one IQ point each generation. The decline in genotypic intelligence coincided with the dissemination of information about contraception. For several centuries prior to 1800, married couples had natural fertility, essentially uninfluenced by efforts to limit it. During this period, there was a strong taboo against sex outside of marriage, and many people never had children because they were too poor to marry. Illegitimacy was rare. Infant mortality was high, especially among the lower classes. Harsh though it may have been, natural selection operated to maintain a healthy population, and to keep intelligence gradually increasing. Then in the early 1800s, several books on contraception were published. These ideas naturally affected the reading classes disproportionately. Goodyear perfected the vulcanization of rubber, making it an ideal material for the mass production of condoms and diaphragms. By the middle of the century, it was becoming apparent that educated people were having fewer children than the uneducated. Charles Darwin worried about the fact that "the scum" of society were so prolific, and expressed deep concern about the future of civilization because natural selection had ceased to operate. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term "eugenics," and was its main proponent: The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty . . . is an endeavour to further evolution, especially that of the human race. Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of eugenics. (Blacker, 1952). In the early decades of the 1900s, eugenics societies were being formed in Great Britain and the United States, and eugenics was advocated by leading thinkers along all points of the political spectrum. H.G. Wells summed up its common-sense appeal: "It seemed to me that to discourage the multiplication of people below a certain standard, and to encourage the multiplication of exceptionally superior people, was the only real and permanent way of mending the ills of the world. I think that still." Julian Huxley described eugenics as "of all outlets for altruism, that which is most comprehensive, and of longest range" (Van Court, 1982). Eugenics made sense because few doubted that heredity was important. Life was more closely tied to the land, and farmers knew from experience that plants and animals vary widely depending on their inborn qualities. Common sense dictated that human beings, like all the rest of nature, are strongly influenced by heredity. In addition, most people had larger families back then. If a couple had many children, all of whom turned out good except one, it was perfectly reasonable to think that what accounted for the difference was inborn, especially if there were signs from early childhood. Since all the children grew up in the same house, with the same parents, eating the same food, it was just a matter of common sense. Common Sense Confirmed by Science Professor Lynn's major thesis in Dysgenics is that scientific evidence has proven the eugenicists were absolutely right in their concerns about genetic deterioration, and that we, as a society, have made a serious mistake by discounting them. Twin studies and adoption studies have established beyond any doubt the important role of heredity in determining IQ. Identical twins separated at birth have quite similar IQ's. When adopted children grow up, they resemble their biological parents more closely than their adoptive parents in IQ. Just as the eugenicists assumed, social mobility over centuries has produced a social class gradient for intelligence, and social class is determined partly by innate intelligence. One U.S. study found that in families with 2 or more brothers, the boys with higher IQ's tended to move up the SES ladder when they grew up, whereas those with lower IQ's tended to move down. Finally, the evidence shows we are deteriorating genetically because the most intelligent people are having the fewest children. A number of recent studies point to contraceptive practices as the key to understanding dysgenics today. People with low IQ's, whether married or unmarried, are less likely to use any form of birth control. Among women using the same birth control methods, those with low IQ's have much higher failure rates. After an unwanted pregnancy has occurred, low IQ couples are less likely to obtain abortions. Thus each factor selects against intelligence. One minor contribution to dysgenics is the fact that high IQ women often end up not having as many children as they would have liked to have had. By the time a baby is "convenient," it may be too late. However, the major reason for the decline in our genetic potential for intelligence is greater birth control failure on the part of low IQ women. In the United States, women of all IQ levels report that they would like, on average, about 2.3 children. But low IQ women frequently have more children, often far more children, than they would ideally like to have. If all women had exactly the number of children they desired, there would be no dysgenics, and we would at least break even in our genetic potential for intelligence (Van Court, 1983). The loss of a 5-8 IQ points may not be a tragedy for an individual, but when applied to a population, it has profound consequences. As readers of The Bell Curve may remember, small shifts in the average of a bell-shaped distribution produce large effects on the tails--in this case, the retarded and the gifted. For example, a decrease in the average IQ of just under 5 points doubles the number of retardates (IQ less than 70), and cuts in half the number of gifted (IQ over 130). Furthermore, Herrnstein and Murray found that when they moved the average IQ down statistically by just 3 points, from 100 to 97, all social problems were exacerbated: the nu mber of women chronically dependent on welfare increased by 7%; illegitimacy increased by 8%; men interviewed in jail increased by 12%; and the number of permanent high school dropouts increased by nearly 15%. One anomalous finding known as 'the Flynn effect' adds an element of mystery to this picture. James Flynn, political scientist from New Zealand, has reported "massive gains" in IQ in the U.S. and elsewhere. When IQ tests are standardized, people consistently find earlier versions of the tests easier, and score higher, than did the original test-takers. There's no consensus on whether this is due to actual increases in intelligence, or some sort of artifact. Certainly, enormous gains are difficult to reconcile with casual observation and declining SAT scores. Many people dismiss 'the Flynn effect' on the grounds that if the population had actually gained 3 points per decade since 1932 as claimed, "Our ancestors would have been morons." Flynn himself is not unsympathetic to this view. Christopher Brand makes a convincing case that people have merely become more savvy test-takers over the years (Brand, 1996). Professor Lynn believes the gains are real, and probably due to better nutrition, which is thought to be the cause of comparable increases in stature. He likens the situation to poorer quality seeds given ever greater quantities of fertilizer. But even if his optimistic view proves to be correct, there should soon be a limit to how much more benefit can be derived from nutrition, if the limit hasn't been reached already. Decline in Health and Conscientiousness Throughout our evolution, the weak and diseased died young and didn't pass on their genes. Now, because of modern medicine, people with numerous genetic diseases live long enough to reproduce and transmit defective genes to their children. (Examples: cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, diabetes, pyloric stenosis, various heart defects, thalassemia, phenylketonuria, and sickle cell anemia.) The incidence of many of these disorders is doubling or tripling each generation. No one would deny sufferers treatment, but it's important to realize that, as a result of it, our genetic potential for robust good health is declining. Life-long care will require ever-increasing expenditures. Furthermore, while sufferers are grateful for medical advances, most would nevertheless be quick to point out that the quality of their lives would be far better if they'd never inherited a disease in the first place. Conscientiousness, traditionally known as "good character," consists of honesty, a strong work ethic, and concern for others. Since IQ is positively correlated to a number of desirable traits (such as altruism, anti-authoritarian attitudes, and middle-class values of hard work, thrift, and sacrifice), when IQ declines, so do these traits. People with low IQ's are far more likely to become criminals, so the fact that our genetic potential for intelligence is declining means our genetic potential for crime is increasing. Moreover, some evidence suggests that despite lengthy sojourns in jail, criminals still manage to procreate at a faster rate than the rest of us. Professor Lynn's research on London criminals found they had nearly twice as many offspring as non-criminals, and those figures are almost certainly underestimates. In demographic studies of fertility, the entire category of underclass males is frequently omitted because reliable data on their offspring simply can't be obtained – their sexual behavior is often promiscuous, and their relationships transient. Since twin studies and adoption studies have established that there is a substantial genetic component to criminality, the higher fertility of criminals significantly increases the genetic potential for criminality in the population. What to do? The solution to genetic deterioration in intelligence, health, and conscientiousness is not a matter of know-how or resources. Rather, it's a matter of overcoming the pernicious association of eugenics with Nazi genocide. This association has made eugenics a taboo subject, and prevented most rational discussion of it for at least the past few decades. Previously I have addressed this issue: An almost primitive fatalism and superstition underlie the assumption that as a society, we are utterly powerless to alter our course, however disastrous a legacy we may be leaving to future generations through our negligence, and the irrational fear that if we dare attempt to guide [our evolution] . . . . we run a grave risk of being suddenly forced against our wills through some mysterious, outrageously implausible yet inexorable sequence of events culminating in genocide and World War III (Van Court, 1983). The public has witnessed numerous grim and frightening stories about the Holocaust, along with Nazi propaganda on the creation of "a master race," so quite understandably, it has come to associate eugenics with Nazis and genocide. Who could ever forget the sight of bulldozers shoving mountains of emaciated bodies into mass graves? It's not surprising that the Nazi's strong and vocal support for eugenics has utterly destroyed it as a social movement, because nothing, no matter how inherently benevolent, could survive an association with such nightmarish images. But Germany is just one example of a country with a eugenics program – one very, very conspicuous example. In the first half of the 20th century, a total of 29 countries passed eugenics laws, including Germany, The United States, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela, Estonia, Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Italy, Greece, and Spain. History tells us that in one country, Germany, there was genocide; in the other 28, there was not (Saetz, 1985). Furthermore, numerous cases of genocide have been committed without so much as a mention of eugenics. Communism – far and away history's biggest mass murderer – never advocated eugenics, and, in fact, held the opposite beliefs from the Nazis, that the environment causes everything, and heredity counts for nothing. So how can there possibly be a causal connection between eugenics and genocide? In order to prove causation, it's necessary minimally to show a true association. Put simply, one case out of 29 does not an association make. Consider the following analogy: Imagine that the most salient historical event of all times was the Crusades, instead of the Holocaust, and that for the past 50 years, the Crusades had been the subject of highly sensational movies, documentaries, commemorative ceremonies, newspaper and magazine articles, books, lectures, museum exhibits, and so on. If we didn't know much about Christianity, it would be easy to conclude that it was a war-like religion, and quite reasonably, we'd be concerned that if we should ever convert to Christianity, we might wind up fighting and dying in some Crusade. The emotionally-charged association between "Christianity" and "war" would become indelibly imprinted in our consciousness after being paired thousands of times. It wouldn't be a true association, with predictive value – whenever there's Christianity, there's likely to be war (and vice versa), as would be the case if Christians had actually engaged in a disproportionate share of the wars throughout history – but in fact, it would be a false association, because it's based on just one single event which is replayed again and again and again. Ghost of Adolf Hitler To say, "The Nazis believed in eugenics, and they did terrible things" just isn't good enough as a reason to reject eugenics forevermore. Before rejecting the only solution to dysgenics – a serious problem which isn't 'could be' or 'might be' but rather is – it must be firmly established that a eugenics program would actually cause more harm than genetic deterioration of the population. In order to do that, it would have to be shown that genocide (or some other clearly-specified catastr ophe) is, in fact, a very real danger of a eugenics program, and not merely hysteria and irrational anxiety resulting from a false association with Nazi's. The idea that there's an actual risk of genocide as a result of implementing a eugenics program is preposterous, and it has never been established flimsily, let alone firmly! Draconian practices would be wholly unacceptable and unnecessary in a modern-day eugenics program. Professor Lynn offers no recommendations in Dysgenics, leaving that for his promised sequel, to be entitled Eugenics. But in light of the problems touched upon in this review, several possible eugenic measures come to mind. Since low-IQ women are much more likely to have unwanted children due to birth control failure, a reasonable first step might be to offer them free long-term and permanent contraception. (Prevention of unwanted births would be a worth-while humanitarian goal in itself, aside from eugenic benefits, because unwanted children are far more likely to be neglected and abused.) A second step might be to provide incentives to criminals (such as reduced sentences) to have vasectomies or tubal ligations. A third step might be to implement various measures to ease the burden of parenthood for college students. Such a program could go a long way toward halting dysgenics, or possibly even reversing it. Professor Lynn concludes Dysgenics with a word to his critics: [W]e have considered the criticisms of the view that the genetic quality of modern populations is deteriorating. These are that there is no genetic determination of intelligence, conscientiousness, crime, educational attainment or socioeconomic status; that there can be an inverse association between intelligence and fertility without genetic deterioration occurring; that there are no genetic differences between the social classes; that there are no such things as bad genes; that the genes for genetic diseases should be preserved, especially in other people, because they make a positive contribution to creative achievement; and that all human types, including the mentally retarded, criminals and psychopaths, are equally valuable. All these arguments have been examined and found wanting. Only one verdict is possible concerning the critics of eugenics who have advanced these arguments, and that is that they have not taken the trouble to examine the research evidence. The eugenicists believed that modern populations were deteriorating genetically. The evidence set out in this book shows they were correct. Perhaps Professor Lynn is being charitable to his critics by suggesting that they are merely ignorant. A decidedly less charitable view would be that – at least with regard to the high percentage of Marxists and nihilists among them – his critics have read the research, and know perfectly well that it's true, but publicly they insist it's utterly false (in a tone of moral indignation, no less) because it threatens their thinly-veiled political agenda. Like all important works on genetics and IQ of the past few decades, Dysgenics is bound to send Marxists/ nihilists into apoplexies of agitation and rage. They respond to scientific facts which don't fit their egalitarian ideology by attempting to suppress them, branding scientists who report them "Nazis" and "racists," and publishing devoid-of-substance, pseudo-scientific "rebuttals," which – unlike the scholarly, substantive, straightforward works they line up en masse to rebut – are welcomed with open arms by the politically-correct media. They can do all of these things, and they can pitch a fit 'till they rupture an artery in their collective brain. But they cannot make these facts go away. We are deteriorating genetically, and the only alternative to leaving future generations an increasingly chaotic, violent, degraded society is called "eugenics." What a dilemma! Have we no other choice than to bequeath to our children a poorer genetic legacy than the one we ourselves inherited? And what if they too live in terror of the ghost of Adolph Hitler? Where will it end? From every imaginable perspective – the economy, education, literacy, crime, welfare, government, the "misery quotient," advancing civilization, and science, to name just a few – human genetic deterioration in intelligence, conscientiousness, and health is a disaster. For the believers among us, add to these the religious implications of dysgenics: How could it be God's will for us to behave irresponsibly and cruelly to people who come after us? Would it not be a sacrilege to thoughtlessly squander God's most precious gifts--in fact, the very ones used to create us in His image? In retrospect, it seems inevitable that at some point, the widespread knowledge and use of contraception would bring about dysgenics. Many people feel it's wrong for society to attempt to influence reproduction in any way. But it should be borne in mind that dysgenics came about as a result of society's “meddling” with the natural order of things by introducing contraception, and it's clear some sort of “compensatory meddling” will be required if we are ever going to set our evolution back on a healthy course. REFERENCES Blacker, C.P., (1952) Eugenics Galton and After, London: Duckworth Brand, Christopher (1996) The 'g' Factor, New York: Wiley & Sons Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray (1994) The Bell Curve, New York: Free Press Saetz, Stephen B. (1985) "Eugenics and the Third Reich," The Eugenics Bulletin, reprinted on Future Generations website at http://www.ziplink.net/~bright/ Van Court, Marian (1982) "Eugenics Revisited," Mensa Bulletin, #254 Van Court, Marian (1983), "Unwanted births and dysgenic fertility in the United States," The Eugenics Bulletin, reprinted on Future Generations website at http://www.ziplink.net/~bright/ Van Court, Marian, and Frank Bean (1985) "Intelligence and fertility in the United States: 1912-1982," Intelligence 9, 23-32

 

Adam, Eve, and Evolution

by Marian Van Court

The traditional interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve is that they disobeyed God by eating the forbidden apple, which is the origin of Original Sin. I shall present a new interpretation (based largely on the principles of evolutionary psychology) that the story symbolizes the major step in our evolution from animal to human, a transition which spanned millions of years.

Occasionally people refer to Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. They leave off the "of good and evil" part, which is crucial. The Biblical passage clearly states that they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If it were merely the tree of knowledge, the passage would make no sense whatsoever. God said:

Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Later, the Serpent assured Eve that what God had told her was untrue, and that her fears were unfounded:

Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods . . . .

Adam and Eve ate the apple, and when God realized this, He said:

Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.

Thus, God confirmed that what the Serpent had said when he tempted Eve was, in fact, true. Now they have souls, and their consciousness lives forever, even after their bodies are gone. They have become as one of us.

In the traditional interpretation, the Serpent is considered wicked. Its plain from the text that the Serpent was perfectly truthful in everything he said to Adam and Eve, and the fact that he was telling the truth is somehow overlooked, as is the fact that God deceived them, at least until the point at which they ate the apple. This is an inescapable conclusion, and God admits as much later on. The fact that God lied to them is also ignored or glossed over by the traditional interpretation.

God told Adam and Eve if they ate from that one tree, they would die. But clearly, they ate from the tree, and they didn't die!! It could be argued that, in the very broadest sense of the word, that they did die, the change in them being so great, their former selves and their former lives being lost forever. However, a stronger case could be made that God simply deceived them. Maybe it was for their own good, but He deceived them, nevertheless. God goes on to confirm everything the Serpent predicted, and Adam and Eve became as gods. How did the Serpent know all these things?

Perhaps it makes sense to view God and the Serpent as two aspects of the same entity. God loved Adam and Eve, and didn't want to see them suffer, but, having planted the tree in the Garden, God knew it was inevitable that at some point they would eat from it. In this story, God and the Serpent may represent the two opposite poles of a conflict similar to the one parents feel as their children grow up, need them less, and venture out into the cold, cruel world. Parents want their children to become independent, but they also want to keep them at home, forever safe.

What exactly is meant by knowledge of good and evil? It means morality, a distinctly human trait. It means the entire array of emotions, beliefs, and behaviors that goes along with it, such as the assumption of free-will, desire for approval and respect, fear of rejection, guilt, pride, envy, admiration, desire for revenge, ambition, anxiety, shame, remorse, love-- in short, all the emotions that make up the glue holding human social groups together, motivating members to suppress hostile impulses, forgo selfish interests, and work for the common good. Eventually, this leads to the development of civilization, along with its numerous ramifications.

Acquiring the knowledge of good and evil means evolving from animals to human beings. Becoming human was both a blessing and a curse. There was much to be gained from it--as the Serpent said, "your eyes shall be opened". But it entailed a steep price. God said to Eve, "I will increase your labor and in labor you shall bear children." Why specifically that? Because becoming human meant becoming more intelligent, and in order to do that, their brains had to grow larger, resulting in extremely painful births which lower primates, with smaller head-to-body ratios, do not experience. This evolution of larger brains, along with an un- avoidable increase in pain during childbirth, is at the very heart of the process of becoming human.

Before, they were naked, but unashamed, their sexuality uninhibited, like animals. Afterwards, they suddenly realized they were naked, and they stitched loincloths from fig leaves. Strong social restrictions on sexual behavior characterize any civilized people, and make up an integral part of the whole cluster of moral beliefs and behaviors that distinguish us from lower animals.

When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden, they began the long, Faustian journey to human-hood, striving for understanding and mastery. God said to Adam, "You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground." No longer could he pluck fruit from a tree when he got hungry the way a monkey does. He cultivated the land, tended his flock, and put away food for hard times. He had the intelligence to envision the horror of famine, and he knew if he didn't work hard and plan wisely, he and his family would starve.

Back in the security and isolation of The Garden, good and evil were hardly salient concepts. But suddenly they become very real, and very potent forces, in human social groups where survival itself is uncertain. Good is whatever helps the group as a whole to survive and prosper--courage, honesty, unselfishness, intelligence, hard work. Evil is whatever harms the group--cowardice, dishonesty, selfishness, stupidity, and laziness.

The concepts of good and evil were integrated into the culture. Parents taught children to share, to be honest, and to consider the feelings of others. The concepts became internalized, along with all the whole vast array of emotions, both powerful and subtle, that go with them. For example, a man feels instinctive rage when he discovers his wife with another man. People feel spontaneous resentment upon witnessing the selfish or deceitful behavior of others. They experience fear and anxiety when they imagine themselves ostracized by the group for engaging in forbidden acts. And they feel pride after being praised for making a major contribution to the group. All of these pleasant and unpleasant emotions form a system of positive and negative reinforcement that molds the behavior of individuals and keeps the group working successfully as a unit.

The importance of the group is paramount, for we know that human beings must band together in order to survive. Groups with a highly developed morality survived in greater numbers than those without it, thus the genetic predisposition increased in the population. The most successful hunters and warriors received the admiration and gratitude of all, as did the most ingenious inventors--in short, those who contribute to the group. Thieves and murderers were executed or banished. Adolescent boys dreams of glory constituted specially potent fuel for the creative process that constructed technology and civilization. This entire dynamic, the network of prescriptions and proscriptions, facilitated group co-operat
ion, cohesion, morale, progress, and ultimately, survival.

How does the story of Adam and Eve end? They (or shall I say "we") are still evolving. Will we become more and more human--smarter, more compassionate, more creative--until eventually we become one with God? Maybe in some symbolic sense we will come full circle back to the Garden. The story of Adam and Eve is a beautiful and powerful allegory. I hope what I have suggested fits the original text from Genesis reasonably well, and that it at least provides an interesting alternative interpretation to the traditional one.

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Your Soul Mate with the Utmost Efficiency by Marian Van Court
This article appeared in Counter-Currents Publishing
One useful thing to come out of social psychology is the discovery that spouses who are very similar get along much better, and are far less likely to divorce, and it’s fairly easy to measure these traits (like introversion-extroversion) and make predictions. When I first learned about this research around 1970, I envisioned starting something remarkably similar to eHarmony. But I was still an undergraduate, and computers were just being invented, so it was a bit premature. It seemed to me that it would be much better for the whole world if couples were happy and didn’t get divorced, and it was exciting to think that science could really make this happen.
Today, more than half the marriages in America end in divorce, and of those who remain married, about half are unhappy. So that gives us over 75% bad outcomes. Neil Clark Warren founded and now runs eHarmony, and he is both a theologian and a clinical psychologist. He’s the kindly, white-haired man in the TV commercials. Dr. Warren has determined that most marriages that fail are actually doomed from the outset because the couple is incompatible. n his book, Falling in Love for All the Right Reasons, Warren tells the story of eHarmony, and the 29 dimensions of compatibility. He counseled couples for several decades, and performed “autopsies” on marriages that failed, and that’s how he became involved in this endeavor. As far as chemistry goes, he believes it’s either there, or it isn’t, and he has no idea why, but that it’s necessary in a marriage. He says it’s fashionable nowadays to emphasize “friendship first,” and that’s good, but he believes if a man and a woman are good friends and are very compatible, and they have a strong physical attraction, that’s great, but if there’s no attraction, they should stay friends and absolutely not get married. It was interesting to learn that if couples are strongly attracted to one another but are not fundamentally compatible, very often they will ignore red flags and rationalize their partner’s bad behavior because a great sex life clouds their judgment. Warren also seems to think a good deal of who we are is genetic, especially IQ, and that ideally, partners shouldn’t be more than 10 points apart. Now they’ve started making homosexual matches, too, with the same purpose of finding enduring love. Most people sign up for 6 months or 1 year. It begins with a long list of questions which takes over an hour to complete, and this is no doubt off-putting to many people, but remember that prospective mates will answer those questions, too, and the answers are what determines compatibility, so this is important. Each person is actively involved in the process from beginning to end. It’s a good idea to be as flexible as possible about things that don’t matter – for example, where the person lives – because anybody can take a flight to anywhere, and most long distance phone calls are free, as is Skype. I’ve never actually done eHarmony myself. (I’m very old and not personally interested in finding a mate.) But hypothetically, as a woman, I would include the entire English-speaking world if possible, and I would definitely not rule out bald guys, short guys, or even “below average in looks” guys, because intelligence and character are crucial, and they are in short supply, as well as warmth and kindness, and sensible political beliefs. To belabor the point, if you are flexible about all the things that don’t matter, you create a larger pool of potential mates, so this increases your chances of finding someone with the qualities that do matter. There’s no guarantee with eHarmony, but it’s definitely worth a try for at least 6 months, especially in light of the alternatives. The “old fashioned” method is only somewhat better than a crap shoot. Say you meet someone attractive who has similar interests, you fall in love, get married, have 3 kids, and then finally one day, after years of turmoil and conflict, you finally reach the conclusion that it’s just hopeless. Kind of a kick in the stomach. If you’re in it for the long haul, it might be wise to step back and look at your situation objectively, in a state of total calmness. Sometimes when people are trying to solve a problem, especially one that’s sensitive, personal or embarrassing, they think that somehow this particular problem is “different.” A sense of fatalism sets in, they feel stuck, unable to take any action at all. But that’s wrong! Applying creative intelligence, imagination, hard work, trial-and-error, patience, persistence, soliciting expert advice, taking reasonable risks – all these apply to finding a mate, just like they do to any other problem. Granted that it seems strange to employ science for this purpose – and it is strange! But so what? What matters is results. According to eHarmony’s website, altogether they’ve had 600,000 marriages, with an average of 542 new marriages each day. Almost 5% of all new marriages in America today are the result of eHarmony. People may object, “But what about chemistry?” eHarmony doesn’t attempt to figure out who is physically attracted to whom. That part’s up to the individual. When you find potential mates (who are similar to you and meet your preferences), most likely at least one of them will attract you, and be attracted to you, but if not, the situation requires a bit of patience. After all,10,000 new people sign up each day. There’s always been a severe woman-shortage for men who hold radical conservative beliefs, because women on average, tend to be more liberal. But this could be a way to find a wife who is at least in the same ballpark politically. People looking for a mate today are lucky that eHarmony exists. It’s not magic, it’s just a tool – a very useful tool – that substantially increases the probability of success. And if you succeed, the lifetime pay-off is huge. I believe that Warren and eHarmony have made a unique and valuable contribution by applying science to match-making.