race and intelligence

Race and IntelligenceAuthor(s): John MacNamaraSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 3 (1988), pp. 55-60Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735312 .

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Race and

Intelligence

JOHN MACNAMARA

What do you say to a people that has been raped from their native land, treated

for generations as subhuman, and at length grudgingly allowed a place in the

sun, when they are struggling for a sense of their human worth and dignity?

Frankly I do not know. But I know one thing you should not say to them. You

should not say that the reason for their historical disaster and for their continuing

misery is that they are by nature intellectually inferior to their rapists; that they would never have landed in this condition or remained in it, if their ancestors

had been smart enough to avoid being raped in the first instance.

The people I am thinking of mainly are the North American blacks. The evidence offered for the claim that they are inferior to whites is that they obtain a

lower average IQ and this is taken, in conjunction with some slippery

arguments, as demonstrating that blacks have in general inherited a meaner in?

telligence than whites; that is, that the difference is in substantial part built into

nature. Hard knocks have been dealt to blacks by whites but this particular blow

had to await the arrival of psychology. Of course some of the psychologists who

drew this conclusion declared that they were only drawing it for the blacks' own

good. They merely wanted to discover the blacks' relative strengths and

weaknesses. It turned out that the blacks were supposed to be good at rote

memorizing and poor at understanding. This at a time when, with the disap?

pearance of the folk story teller, rote memory is so little admired.

I once became unwillingly involved in an oblique way in this rather shabby af?

fair. My purpose in going over this event is to reflect on the cult of numbers to

which we are a prey. But first, the story of what happened. Years ago I studied the impact on children's school progress of Ireland's

national policy to revive Irish. My research strategy was to compare groups of

fifth class primary-school children who had been taught most school subjects

through the medium of Irish with similar children who had been taught mainly through the medium of English. I also had a group of children who were native

speakers of Irish. The strategy called for an IQ test to be used in smoothing out

differences in academic ability between the groups of children. To ensure that

the IQ test would be as fair as possible I chose a nonverbal test, one in which the

problems were not expressed in words but in visual patterns. Of course there

were verbal instructions saying what you had to do to solve the problems in a

55



56 Macnamara

particular group; five verbal instructions for five groups of problems. I took a lot of care in selecting the children and ended up with 1083 boys and

girls in 120 primary schools. The important finding was that children taught in

Irish, when that was not their native language, obtained lower marks in some

subjects than similar children taught in English. It also transpired that the

English speakers on the whole were poor readers of English. A surprising, but

from my point of view marginal, finding was that on average the entire sample of

Irish children came a cropper on the IQ test. Comparable children in England, where the test had been standardised, would be expected to answer 48 of the

questions correctly on average. On average the Irish children answered only 17

correctly. This is how I became involved in the IQ controversy. At the time when my report (Macnamara, 1966, Bilingualism and primary

education, Edinburgh University Press) was published there was little interest in the issue of race and IQ. The 'IQ controversy' began with the appearance of a

long article by Arthur Jensen in the Harvard Educational Beview (1969) called 'How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?' Nevertheless, six or

seven years before the IQ controversy broke, my thesis supervisor, Tom Ren

shaw ? for this was my thesis work ? queried whether the extraordinary IQ

results might not be due to selective emigration from Ireland. The idea was that

the smart and vigprous elements among the Irish might have emigrated to

England and America, leaving behind a genetically impoverished race. I must confess I was taken aback and wrote the following paragraph in my report.

It has been suggested that selective emigration from Ireland might have im?

poverished the native stock. This assumes that through the years those who

emigrated were on average superior in IQ to those who remained. Unfor?

tunately, evidence from Ireland on this most important point is lacking. But

if emigration from Ireland followed even roughly the same pattern as that

which migration from rural to urban areas over the past 150 years followed in

Great Britain (in Ireland emigration was mostly from rural areas), then

emigration can be called upon to account for only a small fraction of the very

large difference between Irish and British children in mean IQ. For migration in Britain, if it is the cause, has produced only a very small difference between

urban and rural areas in mean IQ. (Macnamara (1966, p. 128.)

Subsequently, I was grateful to my supervisor for having placed me on my guard

against an interpretation that would never have occurred to me on my own.

Two years after Jensen's paper appeared, the English psychologist Hans

Eysenck (1971) brought out a book called Bace, intelligence and education, (Lon? don: Temple Smith) aimed at a

large audience. The line he took was that there

was no evidence that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. He maintained

that the evidence showed only that certain subgroups of blacks are genetically



Race and Intelligence 57

inferior in intellectual powers to certain subgroups of whites; more precisely that North American blacks, not all blacks, are inferior to North American

whites. How could this be? Eysenck's answer was that if the slaves taken from

Africa were genetically inferior in intelligence to the bulk of Africans, the in?

feriority would have been transmitted from generation to generation, since

North American blacks were largely isolated from the parent African populaiton

all those years and also, in the business of begetting children, from the white

population of North America. Is there any evidence that this is true of North

American blacks? Well none directly, since slave drivers did not trouble to make

comparisons in intellectual capacities between slaves and the populations from

which they were captured. But Eysenck was not without indirect argument and

this is where the Irish study came in. Intelligence test scores in Ireland, he

thought, made it abundantly clear that selective population movements and

subsequent genetic isolation could produce substantial genetic differences in in?

telligence, of the sort observed between North American blacks and North

American whites.

As an example, take the Irish ? a well defined interbreeding population, isolated on an island, and thus removed from most sources of out breeding, and certainly subject to historical processes which might be expected to have

drawn away, over many centuries, the most able and adventurous of citizens

to foreign countries. Under these circumstances ... we might expect a

distinctly lower IQ level among the remaining Irish than would be found in other countries not subject to this particular selection process. Facts seem to

confirm these hypotheses; Macnamara found the Irish to have IQs which

were not very different from those observed in American negroes, and far

below comparable English samples. (Eysenck, 1971, p. 127)

In the popular press this issued in such headlines as: 'British Smarter than Irish

says Prof. I wrote a letter in protest to that dignified but obscure organ, The

Bulletin of the British Psychological Society. A dignified but quite ineffectual

response! Subsequently, Richard Lynn made marginal use of my data to make a

point similar to Eysenck's in a paper called 'The social ecology of intelligence in

the British Isles (British Journalof ^Socialand ClinicalPsychology, 1979, Vol. 18, pp. 1-12). What are we to make of all this? We should note in passing that various English

rulers have disturbed the genetic isolation of the Irish by planting hordes of British settlers all over the country

? but let that pass. For the rest, the observed

IQ differences between Irish and English children can hardly be taken very seriously. For one thing, this intelligence test was the first printed test these 1083

children had ever seen and moreover the test contained a variety of visual puzzle that few had ever seen before. I suspect the test scared a number of them witless.



58 Macnamara

Besides, in attempting to translate the instructions of the test to Irish for the

native speakers of Irish I found that slight changes in wording produced large changes in the scores obtained on the set of accompanying items. It seems that

difficulty in following the written instructions could have a marked effect on

children's level of success. The whole study showed that the Irish children were

poor readers of English. Little wonder when English reading was neglected for

Irish reading in the primary-school curriculum of the period. That this is the

right way to look at things is borne out by subsequent events. In the late 1960s

the primary school curriculum was changed and much more stress was placed on

English reading. One result is that Irish children are now gaining marks on

English reading tests that are almost on a par with those obtained by English

children, which suggests that there was not much difference in intellectual abil?

ity between the two to begin with. (See Noel Ward, Irish Journal of Education, 1982, Vol. 16, pp 56-61.) It must be noted, too, that in the meantime Irish

children have become fer more accustomed to standardized tests.

* * *

But this is tangential to my purpose, which is to reflect on the usefulness of a

single figure as an index to a

person's intellectual capabilities. That is what

modern society has agreed to do, albeit somewhat squeamishly. The veneration

of IQs is one of the great vulgarities of our age. Just imagine what it would be

like if doctors were required to place a

single number on a person's body as an in?

dex of his health. For blood alone doctors employ a

bewildering assortment of

numbers. Nevertheless, one can imagine circumstances, such as war time, in

which doctors place a

single overall number on an individual, a health quotient so to speak. It is difficult to imagine its being taken as

anything but a gross indica?

tion of fitness for some physical task by either the medical profession or the

public; and if it were it would be something of a travesty.

Why should a single index to a person's intellectual capacity be taken more

seriously? After all, IQ is not like atomic weight, which in chemistry proved the

key to the periodic table. IQ has proved the key to nothing very much. Nor did

the inventor of the intelligence test, Alfred Binet, imagine that it was. His was a

practical problem, to devise a test that would single out those French primary school children who were so educationally backward as to require special help

with their schooling. It is precisely in the area of primary schooling that intelligence tests have been

most useful. They are moderately accurate in forecasting how well a child will

fere in elementary reading, writing and arithmetic, because that was what they were

originally devised for. As children grow older and their studies become

more specialized general intelligence scores are less effective at discriminating

among them; though such scores retain some small degree of predictive validity



Race and Intelligence 59

at higher levels of education. So, in a way, reverence for IQ hides a supposition

that one can usefully measure a person's mind by his aptitude for the three Rs in

primary school. While the three Rs are not without their worth in the mental life

of an individual, there is more to the mind, even if it is the mind of a child, than

that.

How then is one to measure the mind? I am sure I do not know, but I will say that a serious measure would be a complex affair. One would want to reflect the

depth of a person's response to beauty, goodness and truth and one would want

to do it in a whole range of areas: literature, mathematics, science, social set?

tings, management, business, salesmanship etc.

One other point is relevant to our evaluation of what Eysenck was

doing. There is no such thing as intelligence that is not intelligence in a domain to

which the mind has applied itself. To put it an other way, to assess the power of

an individual mind we must take account of degree of familiarity with a par? ticular domain as well as the work it can perform in that domain. Minds do not

come, so to speak, with the manufacturer's measure of horse power. Twenty or

thirty years ago there was a good deal of talk of a dimension of general in?

telligence, usually called g, which was thought of as manifesting itself in a

number of domains. But even then, some common level of familiarity with the

domain was presupposed. To take a dramatic example, it might make some

rough sense to test whether Margaret Thatcher was intelligent by seeing what

sense she could make of a passage of English prose; it would make no sense at all

to apply such a test to an Albanian. On the other hand, you could flatten me out

completely with the most elementary test of chemistry because, alas, I have

never at all studied that great subject. Yet among those who apply themselves to

chemistry, some reveal a remarkable intelligence which they could, no doubt, have applied with great effect in psychology.

Hans Eysenck did not take into account that the 1083 Irish children had never

before encountered a printed test, let alone an intelligence test; that they were

far less sophisticated than their English counterparts in the ways of modern

mental testing. He foiled to advert to the main finding of the survey, that the

children were poor at English reading and to the relevance ofthat fact to their IQ results. What is more, he took the performance of these fifth-standard children

on this nonverbal intelligence test as an index to the whole population's

'problem solving ability' ? his description of what intelligence is and what in?

telligence tests seek to measure (Eysenck, 1971, p. 54). The survey cast no light at

all on how those children might be expected to progress through secondary school, through college (for those who went to college), through their various

vocations in life as fathers or mothers, as doctors, teachers, businessmen, farmers or whatever life held in store for them.

Eysenck took a single very wobbly figure for a fifth-standard child, averaged



60 Macnamara

such figures for a sample of fifth-standard children and took the mean thus ob?

tained as an index to a whole population's (including adults) intellectual parts. What is more he concluded that the difference in mean IQ between Irish and

English children was due in large part to genetic factors. That is, he took the

observed differences to be due to an impoverishment of the Irish population through genetic bleeding

? the good genes have ebbed away from the old coun?

try leaving little but the dregs behind. It is hard to imagine that this could be offered as a serious scientific conclusion,

even at a time when we were all, myself included, more spellbound by IQs than

we are today. Yet Eysenck so offered it, and in a book that ends with an epilogue on 'The social responsibility of science'. He does say that 'Macnamara suggests some plausible reasons why the observed figures need scaling up, but even when

reasonable adjustments are made the differences between Irish and English results remain very large.' (Eysenck 1971, p. 127). Eysenck did not offer any details about the adjustments that might be reasonable. He was right not to, because no one so far as I know, has the slightest idea as to what would be

reasonable. * * *

But, you may wonder, are the Irish and American blacks genetically inferior in

intellect to their white neighbours? Why, you may want to ask, have I not said

that the claim that they are is plain false? One reason is that it is even more im?

possible to prove the claim false than to prove it true. Short of proving blacks

and Irish intellectually superior, the only strategy known to logic that can prove the claim false is to show that the grounds offered in its support are insufficient. I

have dwelt on just one piece of evidence that was offered, because I happen to

know a good deal about it and because it is an object lesson in how facts can

mislead. It is fair to say that that piece of evidence fells somewhat short in the

matter of sufficiency. There is also the matter of timing. Jensen's paper appeared at a time of great

racial tension and violence in the United States. Eysenck's book appeared when

racial tensions in Britain were mounting and when civil unrest in the North of

Ireland was at its peak. This made his book particularly untimely. Though I doubt that any time is the right time for a book at once so flimsy and so offensive.



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