A common argument we read everytime, everywhere. All with the same common mistake. It consists in squaring the correlation. For example : “Your brain-IQ correlation is r=0.40, so if you square it, that only amounts to a tiny 16% (r²=0.40*0.40=0.16) of variance explained which is not impressive”. Or something in this vein. R² use and abuse caused enough damage. It is more than time to put an end to this utter fallacy.
Month: March 2014
One of the more famous studies on the heritability of IQ is Eric Turkheimer and colleagues’ 2003 paper called Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 700 times. Based on a sample of 7-year-old twins, the study found that in impoverished families the shared environment accounted for about 60 percent of IQ variance while heritability was close to zero. In contrast, heritability was high and the effect of the shared environment nugatory in affluent families.
The literature on the interaction between socioeconomic status and IQ heritability is very mixed. Several studies besides Turkheimer’s find such interaction (although in no other study is it as extreme as in Turkheimer et al. 2003), but others, including some with the very best study designs, find none. I am not going to try to adjudicate between these contradictory findings at this time. Rather, I will show some interesting, hitherto unpublished (well, careful readers of Boetel and Fuerst’s The Nature of Race have seen them already) results pertaining to Turkheimer’s study and the question of race differences. Continue reading
The strong heritability of IQ is well established for white populations in America, with dozens of studies confirming the basic findings. When it comes to heritability in non-whites, the handful of studies that exist (see Jensen 1998, p. 446ff.; Rowe et al. 1999; Guo & Stearns 2002; cf. John’s recent post) do not allow us to conclude that heritability is lower (or higher) in non-white Americans than it is among white Americans, but there is a sore need for more research.
To diminish this uncertainty, we compared the heritability of several different cognitive abilities in whites, blacks, and Hispanics in the CNLSY sample. The sample, which consists of the children of the mothers who are part of the NLSY79 study, includes the results of various ability tests administered between ages 3 and 13. Continue reading
The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States. Puerto Ricans are United States citizens—they can freely migrate between the island and the states, join the military, or even run for president. But they can’t vote for president, because the territory is not a U.S. state. In three referendums from 1967 to 1998, Puerto Rican voters rejected both political independence and U.S. statehood. However, in November 2012 a solid majority (61.3%) voted in favor of statehood. This kind of political nudging could quite possibly result in Puerto Rico becoming the 51st U.S. state … but only Congress and the president have authority over the matter, and analysts agree that approval is unlikely. This particular referendum also left off the option traditionally most favored by Puerto Ricans: continued commonwealth status. Many islanders appear to feel that statehood offers few additional benefits over citizenship; a majority of Puerto Ricans already live on the U.S. mainland (5 million vs. 3.7 million).
From the earliest days of intelligence testing, social scientists have taken a special interest in U.S. Hispanics. Proportionate to their numbers, it’s possible that more tests have been given to Hispanics than to blacks. But this special attention has also lacked focus. African-American test results have been subject to meticulous cataloging, synthesis and analysis (Shuey, 1966; Jensen, 1998; Jencks & Phillips, 1998) leading to somewhat of a consensus on the size and shape of the black-white cognitive performance gap. Yet there has not been a similar effort to process the disparate and voluminous literature on the abilities of U.S. Hispanics. Therefore there is less knowledge and consensus about the historical and contemporary test performance of Hispanic minorities.
Most of the U.S. Hispanic population is Mexican American (63%). Puerto Ricans are the second largest Hispanic minority (9.2% … or 15.3% including the Commonwealth). This post represents the first effort to comprehensively summarize the abilities of one of these two important American minority groups. Here I describe and analyze the results from over 70 studies that have measured the abilities of Puerto Ricans.
Much has been written about social class differences in the heritability of cognitive ability, little about racial and ethnic differences. I will leave a review of the issue, a discussion of our meta-analytic results, and a report of our technically complex CNLSY ACE x race/ethnicity analysis to my more loquacious (and apt) colleagues. Here I present results based on the (effectively) small NLSY79 kinship sample.
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In an attempt to equalize social opportunities, several large-scale studies have been launched. These studies were of special interest because they sampled a large portion of black people, since a study on white people can’t be generalized over other ethnic minorities. Among those projects, the Abecedarian (ABC) has the particularity to have generated conflicting interpretations. This needs to be discussed thoroughly.
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