Hi All,
For my first official blog entry, I will be commenting on a recent class discussion I had in my Intelligence and Creativity course. We discussed race influences on IQ scoring, in the context of the Ferguson conflict. Questions I had entering this discussion were as follows: Is there morphological diversity among human brains, which correspond to different races? If so, could these differences reflect in different cognitive abilities? For instance, suppose different races had varied pre-frontal cortex size. Would this difference be significant enough to affect an individuals ability to critically think? Also, how about neuron density? How about oligodendrocytes and glial cells? How do the ratios of these cells affect cognitive capacity? And are these factors even affected by race? Or are racial differences only limited to superficial qualities like skin color?
Early 20th century results indicated that IQ differed significantly across race. However, factors like test bias, socio--economical situation, and language barriers prevented different races from preforming equally on the IQ test. Studies which standardized participants SES found no significant differences between African American and Caucasian IQ's. However, differences in the amount of words each parent said to their children varied per race, which could have influence on a child's intelligence. However, this is most likely a product of culture and language, rather than any biological mechanism.
As a class we came to the conclusion that race is not a significant factor that influences intelligence. However, things like SES, and culture (eg. environmental stimuli) do much more so! This makes evolutionary sense, since you would expect to survive human baseline intelligence wouldn't vary (need enough to communicate, work, and live in our dynamic society) ; however, it's ability to be molded by the environment would for the sake of the organisms survival (suppose you are in a society which favors tool building over abstract thought).
Until my next post,
Ryan
I like that you wernt afraid to suggest that people of different skin colors may actually have varrying biological differences. I think many people afraid to suggest that because if we were to find out that, say germans had smaller prefrintal cortexes, or that indians had consistantly fewer neurons, we would automatically think those people were not as smart, because science correlates big brains and lots of neurons with intelligence.
ReplyDeleteI like your evolutionary perspective towards why intelligence might be more or less uniform to begin with, but then change and fluctuate over generations with societal pressures. However, I wonder what you say to gross individual differences in intelligence. Control for race, gender, SES, culture, region, etc. and just look at differences in intelligence. Can these be explained from an evolutionary perspective? The story seems to get more complex when subgroups of the species have faced more or less the same societal and regional pressures, yet individual differences in intelligence remain.
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