The Student Room Group

"Scientist" claiming that the average Australian aborigine is only capable of...

emptying bins?

Watch this short interview with geneticist Richard Lynn: [video="youtube;EsZ11VVdP_M"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZ11VVdP_M[/video]

He states that the Australian aborigines and sub-saharan bushmen have average IQs of 62 and 60 respectively (an IQ of <70 is usually defined as mentally handicapped), and then he's asked what kind of job a person with an IQ at this level would be capable of he responds with "emptying the rubbish". :eek:

Is this just politically charged racism or do his claims actually have some measure of validity?

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If your research contradicts everyday experience (clearly aborigine can do more than empty bins) you're completely wrong.
Reply 2
While the IQ gap is pretty much confirmed and public knowledge, the question remains whether it's grounded in social reasons (discrimination etc.) exclusively or a mixture of social and biological reasons. Lynn is a rather controversial figure in psychology.

Living in Australia, so far I have not yet seen an Aboriginal person, well ... doing what everyone else would do. Sit in a restaurant, walk into a bank, sit in a lecture (or hold one). Every single one I've seen so far was sitting in a park with booze or strolling on the pavement with some friends and ... booze.

That's not meant to be discriminatory, that's just what I've observed. This said, as always in IQ there is a wide distribution and you'll find enough Aboriginal people with IQs >100 who are working as lecturers, civil servants etc.
(edited 10 years ago)
Hmmmm - if he was racist surely he would have whites Britians/Europeans as the highest IQs not the chinese/japanese.

I can believe that this research did indeed find that in IQ tests aborigone tribesmen did come in quite low. But not necessarily because they lack intelligence. More to do with fact that they have no need of knowing about stuff in IQ tests, thier brains are not programmed to respond to maths and logic questions. They are wired to survival in a harsh enviroment.

Flip it round take your IQ test and make it about survival, where t find food, how to make fire, how not to freeze at night, how to hunt and forage and id bet that Europeans would be at the level of a cabbage wheras the Aborigines would come in very high scores
Reply 4
Original post by Are you Shaw?
If your research contradicts everyday experience (clearly aborigine can do more than empty bins) you're completely wrong.


Well he's talking about average IQ, so obviously there's going to be some Australian Aborigines that have an above average IQ, and therefore will be capable of more demanding roles.

To be fair there are a lot of issues currently ongoing in Australia with a huge percentage of Australian aborigines jobless, poor attainment in education and also major problems with solvent abuse and alcholism. These claims, if there's any truth in them, would go some way towards explaining the cause of these issues.
Reply 5
I would like to know how he got a large enough sample size of aborigines and sub saharn african do these IQ tests if an, as it would be difficult to do even in Europe. Therefore on this basis I say his results are inconclusive at best.
(edited 10 years ago)
Reply 6
He might be right.

But 'iQ' was a measure invented to quantify inherent ability.

Then people found that you can do better at iQ tests by preparing or practicing. This means that iQ tests do not measure inherent ability. And therefore - what do they measure?

It's pretty conceivable that tribal people do worse in these tests because people who receive a western education are far more used to doing tests and are trained to develop the skills used in an iq test. Shapes and patterns come up in early school life, for example.

I think a better study would be to see how people of aborigine ethnicity who have been adopted, raised and educated as a non-aborigine Australian compare. But obviously that pool of people is going to be too small.
Original post by paddyman4
He might be right.

But 'iQ' was a measure invented to quantify inherent ability.

Then people found that you can do better at iQ tests by preparing or practicing. This means that iQ tests do not measure inherent ability. And therefore - what do they measure?

It's pretty conceivable that tribal people do worse in these tests because people who receive a western education are far more used to doing tests and are trained to develop the skills used in an iq test. Shapes and patterns come up in early school life, for example.

I think a better study would be to see how people of aborigine ethnicity who have been adopted, raised and educated as a non-aborigine Australian compare. But obviously that pool of people is going to be too small.


+1 for someone challenging IQ tests rather than just accepting them at face value.
Reply 8
Original post by silverbolt


I can believe that this research did indeed find that in IQ tests aborigone tribesmen did come in quite low. But not necessarily because they lack intelligence. More to do with fact that they have no need of knowing about stuff in IQ tests


I thought the whole point of IQ tests was that they are culture free and not about "knowing stuff", but rather about natural problem solving ability, pattern recognition etc.
Reply 9
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html

Every year more and more evidence of something that has been suspected for quite a long time is emerging. While you may deny it now, soon there will be conclusive evidence. As mentioned in the article above,
"He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
"

Another interesting story:
http://rt.com/usa/florida-hispanics-education-blacks-582/
(edited 10 years ago)
chinese and north koreans have higher average iq's than whites on average. these are extremely poor areas, many times down to subsistence levels. yet they still score very high on tests that white men have created. if i ever have kids they will be mixed race (i am white, wife is black from US). that doesn't change anything, people are still individuals. just because a scientific fact is inconvenient by modern western world standards it doesn't mean it should automatically be binned. african american iq is around 85, but my wife is way above that. individuals are individuals
(edited 10 years ago)
I don't know much about this study, but I do know that IQs test for a very specific type of intelligence that is cohesive to the type of skills that were in demand for in the early 20th Century in the western world. Just because Aborigines don't have this specific type of intelligence doesn't make them mentally handicapped, it makes them different.
Original post by Chlorophile
I don't know much about this study, but I do know that IQs test for a very specific type of intelligence that is cohesive to the type of skills that were in demand for in the early 20th Century in the western world. Just because Aborigines don't have this specific type of intelligence doesn't make them mentally handicapped, it makes them different.


It actually correlates very well to the intelligence required to be successful in developed society today. It is the best single variable predictor of educational and occupational outcomes that exists.

Given that the definition of mentally handicapped, clinically, is scoring low on IQ tests (and a few other criteria), they are by that metric handicapped. However, I take these studies with a pinch of salt. While there may exist a difference in IQ between them and East Asians, say, an average IQ of 60 seems very unlikely.
Original post by joseon
I thought the whole point of IQ tests was that they are culture free and not about "knowing stuff", but rather about natural problem solving ability, pattern recognition etc.


Ideally yes. In practice white Europeans and east Asians are used to testing in general and IQ tests specifically. People from backgrounds either without a structured education system or among populations that poorly integrate with available education due to various societal issues are much less likely to be prepared. IQ has been shown to correlate with levels of educational attainment in both observational studies (eg. college graduates vs high school graduates in the US) and interventional studies (eg. between groups of children, one of which is given extra help in pre-school). I'll admit that both of those examples are taken from a quick google that didn't give references but I doubt they'd lie. More convincingly shown in this study. If groups are coming from different educational and social backgrounds then IQ might be useful for some studies, but not to consign a race to an epsilon semi-moron role in life.
Reply 14
Original post by Rob da Mop
Ideally yes. In practice white Europeans and east Asians are used to testing in general and IQ tests specifically.


That very much depends. German schools do not use any kind of standardised testing such as IQ and throughout my 13 years of school I've never had any multiple choice exams or tests (except for PISA). So I wasn't used to IQ tests either when I took one.

Big question is, what would happen if you only took indigenous Australians who grew up in a supportive environment and went to normal Australian schools, so basically enjoyed the same education white Australians enjoy, and made them take an IQ test?
(edited 10 years ago)
Just beacuse he's a scientist doesn't make him immune to being an idiot.
I don't know much about Australian Aborigines specifically, but measured racial differences in IQ and strong predictive capacity of IQ for job performance are scientific orthodoxy. For instance see the statement of the American Psychological Association or this letter to the Wall Street Journal signed by many leading scientists in the field.

I infer that the people calling him a fool or a pseudoscientist didn't actually investigate the strength of his claim before deciding that he was wrong.
Original post by Sir Fox
That very much depends. German schools do not use any kind of standardised testing such as IQ and throughout my 13 years of school I've never had any multiple choice exams or tests (except for PISA). So I wasn't used to IQ tests either when I took one.

Big question is, what would happen if you only took indigenous Australians who grew up in a supportive environment and went to normal Australian schools, so basically enjoyed the same education white Australians enjoy, and made them take an IQ test?

This can surely be measured: look at the outcomes of the Aborigine children who were kidnapped by whites and raised in state orphanages and by white families during the "Stolen Generations". While this policy is regarded as monstrous today, it was adopted for just the humanitarian reasons you propose. The fact it's now regarded as monstrous suggests that the Aborigine children didn't do much better than those not raised in normal Australian environments (though perhaps not worse either).

More broadly, adopted twin studies suggest that socioeconomic background fades out almost entirely by adulthood, with almost all differences in IQ predicted by the IQ of the biological parent, and random variation.
(edited 10 years ago)
IQ is a general measure of a certain set of abilities and correlates in some way with intelligence, but it is not a measure of innate genetic or racial intelligence.

This is a decent review: https://www.apahelpcenter.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf

The average IQs of countries can change dramatically across generations and we see this with rising average IQs across the developing world. We know that socioeconomic background has a massive impact on IQ; if you look at children from poor parents adopted by rich parents the IQ of the children conforms to the average for wealthy children (and the best evidence we have shows these effects persist to adulthood - there is good data for effects into the late 20s but the quality of data for adults is quite poor). Research has also shown this to be the case with race, studies in America have looked at black children adopted by white parents and shown that they perform just as well as white children from similar families. There's also the issue of stereotype threat where you just have to remind someone of the stereotypes associated with their race or gender and they under-perform - asking someone to write their ethnicity on a test is enough make black students perform worse. The converse of this is if you prime someone with something positive, say make them write they are a student from a top university, their performance improves.

IQ certainly measures something related to intelligence, but it is a measure of an outcome of educational and other social systems, not an inherent racial truth.

In general, when someone starts talking about racial differences in IQ as if it is carved in stone:
iq.jpg
(replace details of oppression and discrimination as appropriate)
(edited 10 years ago)
Original post by Observatory
This can surely be measured: look at the outcomes of the Aborigine children who were kidnapped by whites and raised in state orphanages and by white families during the "Stolen Generations". While this policy is regarded as monstrous today, it was adopted for just the humanitarian reasons you propose. The fact it's now regarded as monstrous suggests that the Aborigine children didn't do much better than those not raised in normal Australian environments (though perhaps not worse either).

More broadly, adopted twin studies suggest that socioeconomic background fades out almost entirely by adulthood, with almost all differences in IQ predicted by the IQ of the biological parent, and random variation.


Or perhaps the fact that it's viewed as monstrous means that those children were raised in a "supportive environment" and now engage well enough with society to put their point across that kidnapping is always awful?


Edit: I feel I should add, this post is mostly sarcastic, I just wanted to join you in the make-a-vague-speculation-that-backs-up-my-point game.
(edited 10 years ago)

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