Race and Intelligence: Separating Science From Myth

✍ Scribed by Jefferson M. Fish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 455
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In recent years, reported racial disparities in IQ scores have been the subject of raging debates in the behavioral and social sciences and education. What can be made of these test results in the context of current scientific knowledge about human evolution and cognition? Unfortunately, discussion of these issues has tended to generate more heat than light. Now, the distinguished authors of this book offer powerful new illumination. Representing a range of disciplines--psychology, anthropology, biology, economics, history, philosophy, sociology, and statistics--the authors review the concept of race and then the concept of intelligence. Presenting a wide range of findings, they put the experience of the United States--so frequently the only focus of attention--in global perspective. They also show that the human species has no "races" in the biological sense (though cultures have a variety of folk concepts of "race"), that there is no single form of intelligence, and that formal education helps individuals to develop a variety of cognitive abilities. Race and Intelligence offers the most comprehensive and definitive response thus far to claims of innate differences in intelligence among races.

✦ Table of Contents

Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 12
Contributors......Page 18
CHAPTER 1 A Scientific Approach to Understanding Race and Intelligence......Page 20
PART I......Page 48
CHAPTER 2 The Genetic and Evolutionary Significance or Human Races......Page 50
CHAPTER 3 The Misuse of Life History Theory: J.P.Rushton and the Pseudoscience of Racial Hierarchy......Page 76
CHAPTER 4 Folk Heredity......Page 114
CHAPTER 5 The Myth of Race......Page 132
PART II......Page 162
CHAPTER 6 Science and the Idea of Race: A Brief History......Page 164
CHAPTER 7 The Bell Curve and the Politics of Negrophobia......Page 196
PART III......Page 218
CHAPTER 8 An Anthropologist Looks at “Race” and IQ Testing......Page 220
CHAPTER 9 African Inputs to the IQ Controversy, or Why Two-Legged Animals Can’t Sit Gracefully......Page 244
CHAPTER 10 Cultural Amplifiers of Intelligence: IQ and Minority Status in Cross-Cultural Perspective......Page 260
PART IV......Page 298
CHAPTER 11 How Heritability Misleads About Race......Page 300
CHAPTER 12 Selections of Evidence, Misleading Assumptions, and Oversimplifications: The Political Message of The Bell Curve......Page 316
PART V......Page 346
CHAPTER 13 Test Scores, Education, and Poverty......Page 348
CHAPTER 14 Intelligence and Success: Is it All in the Genes?......Page 374
CHAPTER 15 Compensatory Preschool Education, Cognitive Development, and “Race”......Page 388
Author Index......Page 426
Subject Index......Page 440