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176   Race and Intelligence
      The Stanford Daily  October 21, 1969

     Professor Arthur R. Jensen, of the University of California,
Berkeley, has provoked wide controversy by his assertion that racial
differences in academic achievement are based on genetic differences
in intelligence.  This controversy has, in part, arisen from what I
believe to be a misinterpretation of Dr. Jensen's assertions, often
from a failure of popular commentators to heed the cautions that
Dr. Jensen himself has attached to some of his speculations.  In
particular, he has himself remarked that "High heritability by
itself does not necessarily imply that the characteristic is
immutable.  Under greatly changed environmental conditions, the
heritability may have some other value, or it may remain the same
while the mean of the population changes".

     This remark is however counterbalanced by the contradictory
stress that Jensen has placed on the futility of compensatory
education, and on the utility of the IQ as a measure of biological
competence.  This leaves some uncertainty about whether Dr. Jensen
subscribes to "Jensenism" a popular exposition of his writings, such
as appeared in an article by Lee Edson in the New York Times Magazine
for August 31, 1969.

     My criticisms, which follow, are directed to "Jensenism".
            Questions Raised

     Out of many complex and interwined questions raised by Jense-
nism, I extract two for separate discussion: 1) is the difference
in average "intelligence" scores between races mainly hereditary?
and 2) if so, what if any pragmatic meaning would this have?

     The arguments that Jensen has assembled for hereditary factors
in the variation of intelligence within populations of white English-
men and American have been discussed and accepted by geneticists for
at least 40 years.  The novelty of Jensen's discussion is mainly that
he is a psychologist, and most educators and psychologists have rejec-
ted  or been unaware of genetic research on human behavior.  In this
they were not altogether unwise, for our methods of genetic research
in this field are so feeble that it is misleading to report these
results under a photomicrograph of chromosomes.  This could only
have been intended to convey a flavor of experimental rigor which
human behavioral genetics is a long way from approaching. For pre-
cisely that reason I must commend that part of Jensen's exposition
that encourages further research, although I see much less hope for
useful answers from these statistical studies than is offered by
laboratory experiments on brain development and function.

     Jensen himself pointed out that conclusions about the heritabi-
lity of intelligence, from adoptions and separated twins within a
white culture, could not fairly be transferred to the variation
between races.  That racial groups might have hereditary differences
in intelligence is a perfectly plausible speculation.  But until the
manifest environmental factors are correctly controlled or assessed,
any assertion about whose genes score highest is pure prejudice.

     Dr. Jensen would not, I believe, disagree with these remarks;
but he then adds that he has found consistently poorer performance of
black compared to white groups whose "socio-economic conditions were
controlled" so as to assure comparable environments.  This control is
crucial to Jensen's approach to these studies.  In the end, however, 
it can only reflect a subjective judgment about which socio-economic
(not to mention cultural) factors are most important for intellectual
development.  Can anyone measure the total impact of being black in a
white-dominated world?  Can we say that environmental influences have
been controlled, in the face of the knowledge that the trends of
infant mortality and birthweight among blacks, although constantly
improving, lag so far behind whites?

              Effect on Education

     The second point is even more important, for Mr. Edson implies
that "no amount of compensatory education will improve  this ability
(to reason abstractly) since it is mainly inherited."  This fatalism
is a vicious  extrapolation of "jensenism"  whose thrust is contra-
dicted by every finding of modern biological research on how the ge-
nes influence development.  If hypothetical racial genes did impair
intelligence, they could operate like diabetes or hereditary goiter
which are remediable by diet and hormone treatment.

     I would agree that effective educational regimes are doomed to
fail if they deny the possibility of biological as well as cultural
differences among children.  I do not agree that we know much about
racial-genetic components of those differences.

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