Ron Unz : Does Race Exist? Do Hills Exist?

http://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/

Does Race Exist? Do Hills Exist?

Ron Unz • May 22, 2014

Credit: Wikimedia

Although my own academic background is in theoretical physics, I’m the first to admit that field seems in the doldrums these days compared with human evolutionary biology.

The greatest physics discoveries of the last couple of years—the Higgs Boson and strong evidence for Cosmological Inflation—merely confirm the well-established beliefs that physicists have had since before I entered grad school. It’s nice that such experimental evidence means that individuals such as Peter Higgs, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde, whose names have been prominent in the standard textbooks for decades, have received or will surely soon receive their long-deserved Nobel Prizes, but little new has been learned. Or so is the impression of a lapsed theoretician who left that field over twenty-five years ago and who mostly follows it through the pages of the major newspapers.

Meanwhile, human evolutionary biology has been on a tear, partly due to the full deciphering of the human genome over the last couple of decades and our increasing technical ability to effectively read archaic DNA from thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the past. In recent years we have seen shocking discoveries that most humans possess small but probably significant Neanderthal ancestry and that important genetic changes have regularly swept through our genome. On the theoretical side, it was long assumed that human genes had changed little since Cave Man days, but we now understand that in some respects human evolution may have actually accelerated during the last ten thousand years as our rapidly growing population provided a much larger source of potentially favorable mutations, while agriculture and civilization were simultaneously applying strong selective pressures.

Although my other projects have prevented me from following these developments except through newspapers, blogs, and books, such evolutionary issues have long fascinated me. During the early 1980s I even participated in the field, studying under Harvard’s E.O. Wilson and felt that if physics had not been an option, evolutionary biology would have been my next choice. I remember telling all my skeptical friends in 1979 that Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was probably one of the most important books of the decade, and I stand by that opinion today.

Yet although our understanding of the origins of modern humans and their biologically-influenced behavior has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of decades, these world-changing developments seem to have received extremely scanty coverage in the mainstream press, meaning that many of them have probably not penetrated into the public consciousness of those who are not academic specialists. The assumptions and world-views of most American intellectuals and journalists often seem stuck in the 1980s, clinging to ideas that are almost completely outmoded and incorrect, much like Soviet biology into the 1960s was still crippled by the Stalinist legacy of Trofim K. Lysenko, who had argued for the inheritance of acquired characteristics and purged all those biologists who disagreed.

America’s own Lysenko is surely the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose platform in the prestige media and widely assigned books have massively influenced entire generations of college students and thinkers. Unfortunately, just like his Soviet counterpart, Gould promoted ideologically motivated misrepresentations of reality, sometimes backed by outright scientific fraud, and people who read his books are regularly absorbing falsehoods.

In a further parallel to the Soviet case, Gould and his Marxist circle of friends and allies, including Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and several others, regularly sought to purge or otherwise silence their most honest and courageous colleagues. During the 1970s, Harvard’s Wilson became their particular target for daring to publish his landmark book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and their wild ideological charges led radical student demonstrators to demand the university fire one of its brightest tenured stars and even to physically assault the mild-mannered Wilson at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences. Although Gould seems to have been a rather mediocre scientist, some of his radical allies such as Lewontin were first-class researchers, but also ideologues who allowed their politics to dictate their science.

While I was a graduate student at Cambridge University during the mid-1980s, these events occasionally came up in casual discussions across the dining tables. On one such occasion, a former grad student of Lewontin’s said that during the height of the sociobiology controversy he had asked his mentor why he was leveling such ridiculous accusations against a colleague, with the reply being that those accusations were admittedly scientific nonsense, but they served the political interests of Marxism, which was far more important. Meanwhile, given Gould’s strength in words but his weakness in thinking, I find it reasonably likely that he simply believed many of the absurdities he was spouting.

As the years and the decades have gone by, I’ve always assumed that Gouldism was about to lose its grip on American intellectual life, but that assumption has always proven wrong. The totally absurd notion that genetics plays a relatively small role in influencing most human behaviors represents a zombified doctrines, absorbing endless seemingly fatal scientific wounds at the hands of prominent scholars but remaining almost unkillable, more like a religious dogma than a scientific doctrine.

For example, in 2002 Harvard’s Steven Pinker, one of America’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, published The Blank Slate, an outstanding critique of this incorrect reigning dogma, which specifically included a lengthy debunking of Gould, Lewontin, and their circle. Not only was the book a huge seller and glowingly discussed throughout the MSM, but I was stunned to read an equally favorable review in The Nation, pole-star of America’s political Left. I naturally assumed that the full collapse of Gouldism was underway, an impression enhanced once the august New York Times later published an article describing an important instance of Gould’s scientific fraud.

But a year or two ago, when I heard smart intellectuals still citing Gould, I asked a prominent academic how that would possibly be the case. He explained that whereas in the 1990s, probably 99% of intellectuals believed in Gould, the massive revelations of recent years had merely reduced that support to 95%, leaving Gouldism almost as entrenched as ever. Whereas worldwide support for Stalinism substantially collapsed following Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” Gouldian nonsense seems to have largely avoided that fate.

But perhaps that is now about to change.

One of the oddities of American intellectual life is that although a full-fledged scientific revolution in human genetics and evolution has been taking place for the last couple of decades, very little of this has been reported in the mainstream media, perhaps because the findings so totally contradict the numerous falsehoods that so many senior editors presumably imbibed during the introductory anthropology courses they took to satisfy their science distributional requirement as undergraduates.

Indeed, when I consider the major news stories on evolutionary breakthroughs I have read in our MSM over the last dozen years, the overwhelming majority seem to have been written by a single individual, Nicholas Wade of The New York Times, who recently retired after twenty years as a editor and reporter at our national newspaper of record, following previous decades of work at top scientific publications such as Nature and Science.

When I asked around a little, my impression was confirmed. Our nation of over 300 million may be in the forefront of evolutionary discovery, but Wade has long been almost the only reporter seriously covering these fascinating developments in the mainstream print media. Meanwhile, the weekly New York Times Science Section seems to be moving in the direction of People Magazine, with so much of the coverage seemingly focused on phone apps, dieting, and phone apps to assist with dieting. For example, fully half of the Letters page in this morning’s print edition was devoted to a heated debate on the “Science of Overeating.”

But while his former colleagues often focus on the transient and the trivial, Wade has spent the last couple of years producing an outstanding book to bring awareness of the revolutionary discoveries of modern genetic research to a broader American audience. Generations of Soviets had been taught the inheritance of acquired characteristics in their universities, and I assume they must have been shocked to discover it was all an ideologically motivated hoax. I suspect that many complacent American intellectuals may have a similar reaction to Wade’s book, which focuses on the highly touchy subject of the genetic nature of our distinct human races and the implications for society and history, bearing the descriptive title A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. I’d certainly rank Wade’s book as the most important popular presentation of these ideas at least since Pinker’s Blank Slate. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I was also very pleased to see him substantially cite my own major articles from the last couple of years on race, IQ, and wealth and the Social Darwinist roots of modern China.

All too many socially-conditioned Americans have absorbed the Lewontin-Gould mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” which from a scientific perspective is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good parallel. It is perfectly correct that the notion of “hill” is ill-defined and vague—what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt from a hill and a hill from a mountain?—but nevertheless denying the reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity. Similarly, the notion of distinct human races—genetic clusters across a wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness—is an obviously useful and correct organizing principle, and one which was probably accepted without question by everyone in the history of the world except for deluded Americans of the last fifty years.

Anyway, let us suppose that the Gouldians rising up to denounce the heretic, such as anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, are given their way and the common term “race” is purged from our scientific vocabulary as being meaningless. Well, large-scale genetic population clusters obviously continue to exist in the real world and are an important element in ongoing research, both medical and evolutionary. So it would make sense to conveniently replace an overly cumbersome multisyllabic phrase with a short single-syllabic word now suddenly gone unused, namely “race.”

Indeed, I would suggest that one of the sources of present-day confusion is that the very term “race” has undergone an unfortunate metamorphosis over the course of the 20th century. Today, when people speak of “races” they are almost invariably referring to the continental-scale mega-races such as Asians, Africans, and Europeans. These “races” certainly exist and are highly meaningful and distinct in genetic terms, with blogger Steve Sailer slyly noting that the cover of Prof. Luca Cavalli-Sforza definitive tome on human genetic diversity displays a colored worldwide map looking much like what Sen. Strom Thurmond in his dotage might have drawn on a napkin with crayons.

But I would argue that restricting the term race to merely that small handful of huge groupings is extremely wasteful and we are far better off also applying the term to its traditional meaning, typically aimed at much smaller population groups. One hundred years ago, every educated individual casually used phrases such as “the Anglo-Saxon race,” “the Hungarian race,” and “the Chinese race,” and this is exactly the usage to which we should restore. To be sure, these particular genetic population clusters are naturally grouped into higher-level clusters as well—with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles all being branches of the larger Slav race, itself a component of the European mega-race, but the word can remain flexible in scale without producing any serious confusion. All these groups are exactly the sort of natural statistical clusters that regularly appear during genetic population analysis, and we might as well use the traditional popular term for them rather than inventing an entirely new one.

As for the full contents of Wade’s book, several reviews have already noted a few small glitches here and there and I myself certainly took issue with some of his arguments. For example, I think he is much too accepting of Gregory Clark’s influential 2007 book arguing that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain because the British had undergone nearly a thousand years of uniquely strong selection for economic success, a thesis I find extremely doubtful. I also think Wade should have given far more attention to the seminal Cochran-Harpending theory that the rapid growth of human population after the development of agriculture has produced an equally rapid acceleration in mutation-driven evolution during the last ten thousand years, and Wade’s omission surely explains why the notoriously arrogant and irascible Gregory Cochran published such an unfriendly review on his own blogsite. Certainly everyone should explore all sides of the ongoing debate and a small racialist website has conveniently gathered together annotated links to the dozens of reviews across the web, favorable, unfavorable, and mixed. But reading the book itself is essential for anyone interested in the current state of human evolutionary science.

I’d originally intended to publish my own perspective several weeks ago and was delayed by other pressing matters. But I have been very pleased to see that Wade’s book is beginning to receive the major attention it so greatly deserves. American intellectuals must begin shedding a half-century of lies and dishonesty based on the dismally unscientific dogma of Stephen Jay Gould and instead start to discover what modern evolutionary biologists and genetic researchers have all known for years or even decades. A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times may represent a huge step forward in achieving this important goal.

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American Pravda: Our Deadly World of Post-War Politics

American Pravda: Our Deadly World of Post-War Politics

Ron Unz • July 2, 2018

Although my main academic focus was theoretical physics, I always had a very strong interest in history as well, especially that of the Classical Era. Trying to extract the true pattern of events from a collection of source material that was often fragmentary, unreliable, and contradictory was a challenging intellectual exercise, testing my analytical ability. I believe I even contributed meaningfully to the field, including a short 1985 article in The Journal of Hellenic Studies that sifted the ancient sources to conclude that Alexander the Great had younger brothers whom he murdered when he came to the throne.

However, I never had any interest in 20th century American history. For one thing, it seemed so apparent to me that all the basic political facts were already well known and conveniently provided in the pages of my introductory history textbooks, thereby leaving little room for any original research, except in the most obscure corners of the field.

Also, the politics of ancient times was often colorful and exciting, with Hellenistic and Roman rulers so frequently deposed by palace coups, or falling victim to assassinations, poisonings, or other untimely deaths of a highly suspicious nature. By contrast, American political history was remarkably bland and boring, lacking any such extra constitutional events to give it spice. The most dramatic political upheaval of my own lifetime had been the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon under threat of impeachment, and the causes of his departure from office—some petty abuses of power and a subsequent cover-up—were so clearly inconsequential that they fully affirmed the strength of our American democracy and the scrupulous care with which our watchdog media policed the misdeeds of even the most powerful.

In hindsight I should have asked myself whether the coups and poisonings of Roman Imperial times were accurately reported in their own day, or if most of the toga-wearing citizens of that era might have remained blissfully unaware of the nefarious events secretly determining the governance of their own society.

Since my knowledge of American history ran no deeper than my basic textbooks and mainstream newspapers and magazines, the last decade or so has been a journey of discovery for me, and often a shocking one. I came of age many years after the Communist spy scares of the 1950s had faded into dim memory, and based on what I read, I always thought the whole matter more amusing than anything else. It seemed that about the only significant “Red” ever caught, who may or may not have been innocent, was some obscure individual bearing the unlikely name of “Alger Hiss,” and as late as the 1980s, his children still fiercely proclaimed his complete innocence in the pages of the New York Times. Although I thought he was probably guilty, it also seemed clear that the methods adopted by his persecutors such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon had actually done far more damage to our country during the unfortunate era named for the former figure.

During the 1990s, I occasionally read reviews of new books based on the Venona Papers—decrypted Soviet cables finally declassified—and they seemed to suggest that the Communist spy ring had both been real and far more extensive than I had imagined. But those events of a half-century earlier were hardly uppermost in my mind, and anyway other historians still fought a rear-guard battle in the newspapers, arguing that many of the Venona texts were fraudulent. So I gave the matter little thought.

Only in the last dozen years, as my content-archiving project made me aware of the 1940s purge of some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, and I began considering their books and articles, did I begin to realize the massive import of the Soviet cables. I soon read three or four of the Venona books and was very impressed by their objective and meticulous scholarly analysis, which convinced me of their conclusions. And the implications were quite remarkable, actually far understated in most of the articles that I had read.

Consider, for example, the name Harry Dexter White, surely unknown to all but the thinnest sliver of present-day Americans, and proven by the Venona Papers to have been a Soviet agent. During the 1940s, his official position was merely one of several assistant secretaries of the Treasury, serving under Henry Morgenthau, Jr., an influential member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. But Morgenthau was actually a gentleman-farmer, almost entirely ignorant of finance, who had gotten his position partly by being FDR’s neighbor, and according to numerous sources, White actually ran the Treasury Department under his titular authority. Thus, in 1944 it was White who negotiated with John Maynard Keynes—Britain’s most towering economist—to lay the basis for the the Bretton Woods Agreement, the IMF, and the rest of the West’s post-war economic institutions.

Moreover, by the end of the war, White had managed to extend the power of the Treasury—and therefore his own area of control—deep into what would normally be handled by the Department of State, especially regarding policies pertaining to the defeated German foe. His handiwork notably included the infamous “Morgenthau Plan,” proposing the complete dismantling of the huge industrial base at the heart of Europe, and its conversion into an agricultural region, automatically implying the elimination of most of Germany’s population, whether by starvation or exodus. And although that proposal was officially abandoned under massive protest by the allied leadership, books by many post-war observers such as Freda Utley have argued that it was partially implemented in actuality, with millions of German civilians perishing from hunger, sickness, and other consequences of extreme deprivation.

At the time, some observers believed that White’s attempt to eradicate much of prostrate Germany’s surviving population was vindictively motivated by his own Jewish background. But William Henry Chamberlin, long one of America’s most highly-regarded foreign policy journalists, strongly suspected that the plan was a deeply cynical one, intended to inflict such enormous misery upon those Germans living under Western occupation that popular sentiment would automatically shift in a strongly pro-Soviet direction, allowing Stalin to gain the upper hand in Central Europe, and many subsequent historians have come to similar conclusions.

Even more remarkably, White managed to have a full set of the plates used to print Allied occupation currency shipped to the Soviets, allowing them to produce an unlimited quantity of paper marks recognized as valid by Western governments, thus allowing the USSR to finance its post-war occupation of half of Europe on the backs of the American taxpayer.

Eventually suspicion of White’s true loyalties led to his abrupt resignation as the first U.S. Director of the IMF in 1947, and in 1948 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he denied all accusations, he was scheduled for additional testimony, with the intent of eventually prosecuting him for perjury and then using the threat of a long prison sentence to force him to reveal the other members of his espionage network. However, almost immediately after his initial meeting with the Committee, he supposedly suffered a couple of sudden heart attacks and died at age 55, though apparently no direct autopsy was performed on his corpse.

Soon afterward other Soviet spies also began departing this world at unripe ages within a short period of time. Two months after White’s demise, accused Soviet spy W. Marvin Smith was found dead at age 53 in the stairwell of the Justice building, having fallen five stories, and sixty days after that, Laurence Duggan, another agent of very considerable importance, lost his life at age 43 following a fall from the 16th floor of an office building in New York City. So many other untimely deaths of individuals of a similar background occurred during this general period that in 1951 the staunchly right-wing Chicago Tribune ran an entire article noting this rather suspicious pattern. But while I don’t doubt that the plentiful anti-Communist activists of that period exchanged dark interpretations of so many coincidental fatalities, I am not aware that such “conspiracy theories” were ever taken seriously by the more respectable mainstream media, and certainly no hint of this reached any of the standard history textbooks that constituted my primary knowledge of that period.

Sometimes rank newcomers to a given field will notice patterns less apparent to those long familiar with the topic, more easily discerning the forest amid the trees. My own very superficial knowledge of 20th century American history burdened me with fewer preconceived notions of the pattern of those times, and the substantial body-count of accused Soviet spies during the late 1940s gradually made me wonder about other sudden fatalities during that same era.

As an example, I came across Target Patton by Robert K. Wilcox, providing some very strong evidence that the 1948 fatal car crash that claimed the life of Gen. George S. Patton was not accidental, but was instead an assassination by America’s own OSS, fore-runner of the CIA, which was then also heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents. Unlike the above deaths, which were merely highly suspicious in their timing and concentrated sequence, in the case of Patton the evidence was considerably stronger, even including the eventual public confession decades later of the OSS assassin responsible, with his claims supported by the contents of his personal diary.

At the time of his death, Patton was America’s highest-ranking military officer stationed on the European continent and certainly one of our most famous war-heroes. But he had bitterly clashed with his civilian and military superiors over American policy towards the Soviets, whom he viewed with intense hostility. He died the day before he was scheduled to return home to America, there planning to resign his commission and begin a major national speaking-tour denouncing our political leadership and demanding a military confrontation with the USSR. Prior to stumbling across the book in question, which had been totally ignored by the entire American media, I had never encountered a hint of anything untoward regarding Patton’s death, nor had I been aware of the political plans he had formulated prior to his sudden fatal accident.

 

Once a possible pattern has been observed, accumulating additional pieces becomes a much more natural process. A year or so after encountering the strongly substantiated claims of Patton’s assassination, I happened to read Desperate Deception by Thomas E. Mahl, a mainstream historian, whose book was released by a specialized military affairs publishing house. This fascinating account documented the long-hidden early 1940s campaign by British intelligence agents to remove all domestic political obstacles to America’s entry into World War II. A crucial aspect of that project involved the successful attempt to manipulate the Republican Convention of 1940 into selecting as its presidential standard-bearer an obscure individual named Wendell Wilkie, who had never previously held political office and moreover had been a committed lifelong Democrat. Wilkie’s great value was that he shared Roosevelt’s support for military intervention in the ongoing European conflict, though this was contrary to virtually the entire base of his own newly-joined party. Ensuring that both presidential candidates shared those similar positions prevented the race from becoming an referendum on that issue, in which up to 80% of the American public seems to have been on the other side.

Wilkie’s nomination was surely one of the strangest occurrences in American political history, and the path to his improbable nomination was paved by quite a number of odd and suspicious events, most notably the extremely fortuitous sudden collapse and death of the Republican convention manager, a key Wilkie opponent, which Mahl regards as highly suspicious.

Wilkie went on to suffer a landslide defeat at Roosevelt’s hands in November, but quickly reconciled with his erstwhile opponent, and was sent abroad on a number of important political missions. Future historians would surely have been fascinated to learn some of the internal details of how British intelligence operatives had managed to “parachute” an obscure lifelong Democrat into leading the top of the Republican ticket in 1940, thereby fatefully ensuring American entry into World War II. But unfortunately all of Wilkie’s personal knowledge of such momentous events was forever lost to posterity when he suddenly took ill and died of a heart attack—or according to Wikipedia 15 consecutive heart attacks—on October 8, 1944 at the age of 52.

One of the most powerful political figures of Roosevelt’s dozen years in office was his close aide Harry Hopkins, who actually moved into the White House in 1940 and remained a permanent resident for nearly the next four years. Although Hopkins hardly bore an exalted title, being an administrator of various New Deal programs and later serving as Commerce Secretary, he was frequently referred to as “the Deputy President” and certainly carried more weight than any of FDR’s vice presidents or Cabinet members, generally being regarded as the second most powerful political figure in the country.

Hopkins, a former social worker and political activist, was decidedly on the left, having his roots in a New York City progressive tradition that shaded into socialism, while being very strongly pro-Soviet in his foreign policy views. There are some indications in the Venona Papers that he may even have actually been a Soviet agent, and Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel took that position in their book The Venona Secrets, but John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the leading Venona scholars, doubted this likelihood based on technical arguments.

In the last year or so of Roosevelt’s life, his relations with Hopkins had frayed, and when FDR died in April 1945, thereby elevating Harry S. Truman to the presidency, Hopkins’ remaining influence disappeared. Having spent so many years at the absolute center of American power, Hopkins planned to publish his personal memoirs of the momentous events he had witnessed during the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, but he suddenly took ill and died in early 1946, age 55, surviving his longtime political partner FDR by only eight months. According to the authoritative references provided in his Wikipedia entry, the cause of death was stomach cancer. Or malnutrition related to digestive problems. Or liver failure due to hepatitis or cirrhosis. Or perhaps hemochromatosis. Although Hopkins had been in poor health for many years, questions do arise when the death of America’s second most powerful political figure is ascribed to a wide variety of somewhat different causes.

The particular timing of events may sometimes exert a outsize influence on historical trajectories. Consider the figure of Henry Wallace, probably still dimly remembered as a leading leftwing Democrat of the 1930s and 1940s. Wallace had been something of a Midwestern wonder-boy in farming innovation and was brought into FDR’s first Cabinet in 1933 as Secretary of Agriculture. By all accounts, Wallace was an absolutely 100% true-blue American patriot, with no hint of any nefarious activity appearing in the Venona Papers. But as is sometimes the case with technical experts, he seems to have been remarkably naive outside his main field of knowledge, notably in his extreme religious mysticism and more importantly in his politics, with many of those closest to him being proven Soviet agents, who presumably regarded him as the ideal front-man for their own political intrigues.

From George Washington onward, no American president had ever run for a third consecutive term, and when FDR suddenly decided to take this step during 1940, partly using the ongoing war in Europe as an excuse, many prominent figures in the Democratic Party launched a political rebellion, including his own two-time Vice President John Nance Garner, who had been a former Democratic Speaker of the House, and James Farley, the powerful party leader who had originally helped elevate Roosevelt to the presidency. FDR selected Wallace as his third-term Vice President, perhaps as a means of gaining support from the powerful pro-Soviet faction among the Democrats. But as a consequence, even as FDR’s health steadily deteriorated during the four years that followed, an individual whose most trusted advisors were agents of Stalin remained just a heartbeat away from the American presidency.

Under the strong pressure of Democratic Party leaders, Wallace was replaced on the ticket at the July 1944 Democratic Convention, and Harry S. Truman succeeded to the presidency when FDR died in April of the following year. But if Wallace had not been replaced or if Roosevelt had died a year earlier, the consequences for the country would surely have been enormous. According to later statements, a Wallace Administration would have included Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State, Harry Dexter White at the helm of the Treasury, and presumably various other outright Soviet agents occupying all the key nodes at the top of the American federal government. One might jokingly speculate whether the Rosenbergs—later executed for treason—would have been placed in charge of our nuclear weapons development program.

As it happens, Roosevelt lived until 1945, and instead of running the American government, Dugan and White both died quite suddenly within a few months of each other after they came under suspicion in 1948. But the tendrils of Soviet control during the early 1940s ran remarkably deep.

As a striking example, Soviet agents became aware of the Venona decryption project in 1944, and soon afterward a directive came down from the White House ordering the project abandoned and the records of Soviet espionage destroyed. The only reason that Venona survived, allowing us to later reconstruct the fateful politics of that era, was that the military officer in charge risked a court-martial by simply ignoring that explicit Presidential order.

In the wake of the Venona Papers, publicly released a quarter century ago and today accepted by almost everyone, it seems undeniable that during the early 1940s America’s national government came within a hairsbreadth—or rather a heartbeat—of falling under the control of a tight network of Soviet agents. Yet I have only very rarely seen this simple fact emphasized in any book or article, even though this surely helps explain the ideological roots of the “anti-Communist paranoia” that became such a powerful political force by the early 1950s.

Obviously, Communism had very shallow roots in American society, and any Soviet-dominated Wallace Administration established in 1943 or 1944 probably would sooner or later have been swept from power, perhaps by America’s first military coup. But given FDR’s fragile health, this momentous possibility should certainly be regularly mentioned in discussions of that era.

If important historical matters are excluded from the media, a younger generation of scholars may never encounter them, and even with the best of intentions the historiography they eventually produce may contain enormous lacunae. Consider, for example, the prize-winning volumes of political history that Rick Perlstein has produced since 2001, tracing the rise of American conservatism from prior to Goldwater down to the rise of Reagan in the 1970s. The series has justly earned widespread acclaim for its enormous attention to detail, but according to the indexes, the combined total of nearly 2,400 pages contains merely two glancing and totally dismissive mentions of Harry Dexter White at the very beginning of the first volume, and no entry whatsoever for Laurence Duggan, or even more shockingly, “Venona.” I’ve sometimes joked that writing a history of post-war American conservatism without focusing on such crucial factors is like writing a history of America’s involvement in World War II without mentioning Pearl Harbor.

Sometimes our standard history textbooks provide two seemingly unrelated stories, which become far more important only once we discover that they are actually parts of a single connected whole. The strange death of James Forrestal certainly falls into this category.

During the 1930s Forrestal had reached the pinacle of Wall Street, serving as CEO of Dillon, Read, one of the most prestigious investment banks. With World War II looming, Roosevelt drew him into government service in 1940, partly because his strong Republican credentials helped emphasize the bipartisan nature of the war effort, and he soon became Undersecretary of the Navy. Upon the death of his elderly superior in 1944, Forrestal was elevated to the Cabinet as Navy Secretary, and after the contentious battle over the reorganization of our military departments, he became America’s first Secretary of Defense in 1947, holding authority over the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Along with Secretary of State Gen. George Marshall, Forrestal probably ranked as the most influential member of Truman’s Cabinet. However, just a few months after Truman’s 1948 reelection, we are told that Forrestal became paranoid and depressed, resigned his powerful position, and weeks later committed suicide by jumping from an 18th story window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Knowing almost nothing about Forrestal or his background, I always nodded my head over this odd historical event.

Meanwhile, an entirely different page or chapter of my history textbooks usually carried the dramatic story of the bitter political conflict that wracked the Truman Administration over the recognition of the State of Israel, which had taken place the previous year. I read that George Marshall argued such a step would be totally disastrous for American interests by potentially alienating many hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, who held the enormous oil wealth of the Middle East, and felt so strongly about the matter that he threatened to resign. However, Truman, heavily influenced by the personal lobbying of his old Jewish haberdashery business partner Eddie Jacobson, ultimately decided upon recognition, and Marshall stayed in the government.

However, almost a decade ago, I somehow stumbled across an interesting book by Alan Hart, a journalist and author who had served as a longtime BBC Middle East Correspondent, in which I discovered that these two different stories were part of a seamless whole. By his account, although Marshall had indeed strongly opposed recognition of Israel, it had actually been Forrestal who spearheaded that effort in Truman’s Cabinet and was most identified with that position, resulting in numerous harsh attacks in the media and his later departure from the Truman Cabinet. Hart also raised very considerable doubts about whether Forrestal’s subsequent death had actually been suicide, citing an obscure website for a detailed analysis of that last issue.

It is a commonplace that the Internet has democratized the distribution of information, allowing those who create knowledge to connect with those who consume it without the need for a gate-keeping intermediary. I have encountered few better examples of the unleashed potential of this new system than “Who Killed Forrestal?”, an exhaustive analysis by a certain David Martin, who describes himself as an economist and political blogger. Running many tens of thousands of words, his series of articles on the fate of America’s first Secretary of Defense provides an exhaustive discussion of all the source materials, including the small handful of published books describing Forrestal’s life and strange death, supplemented by contemporaneous newspaper articles and numerous relevant government documents obtained by personal FOIA requests. The verdict of murder followed by a massive governmental cover-up seems solidly established.

As mentioned, Forrestal’s role as the Truman Administration’s principal opponent of Israel’s creation had made him the subject of an almost unprecedented campaign of personal media vilification in both print and radio, spearheaded by the country’s two most powerful columnists of the right and the left, Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, only the former being Jewish, but both heavily connected with the ADL and extremely pro-Zionist, with their attacks and accusations even continuing after his resignation and death.

Once we move past the wild exaggerations of Forrestal’s alleged psychological problems promoted by these very hostile media pundits and their many allies, much of Forrestal’s supposed paranoia apparently consisted of his belief that he was being followed around Washington, D.C., his phones may have been tapped, and his life might be in danger at the hands of Zionist agents. And perhaps such concerns were not so entirely unreasonable given certain contemporaneous events.

Lord Moyne, the British Secretary for the Middle East, had been assassinated in 1944 and UN Middle East Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte had suffered the same fate in 1948. Declassified British documents eventually revealed an assassination plot against Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin that same year, and Margaret Truman’s memoirs mention a failed assassination attempt against her own father in 1947. Zionist factions were responsible for all of these incidents. Indeed, State Department official Robert Lovett, a relatively minor and low-profile opponent of Zionist interests, reported receiving numerous threatening phone calls late at night around the same time, which greatly concerned him. Martin also cites subsequent books by Zionist partisans who boasted of the effective use their side had made of blackmail, apparently obtained by wire-tapping, to ensure sufficient political support for Israel’s creation.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, powerful financial forces may have been gathering to ensure that President Truman ignored the unified recommendations of all his diplomatic and national security advisors. Years later, both Gore Vidal and Alexander Cockburn would separately report that it eventually became common knowledge in DC political circles that during the desperate days of Truman’s underdog 1948 reelection campaign, he had secretly accepted a cash payment of $2 million from wealthy Zionists in exchange for recognizing Israel, a sum perhaps comparable to $20 million or more in present-day dollars.

Republican Thomas Dewey had been heavily favored to win the 1948 presidential election, and after Truman’s surprising upset, Forrestal’s political position was certainly not helped when Pearson claimed in a newspaper column that Forrestal had secretly met with Dewey during the campaign, making arrangements to be kept on in a Dewey Administration.

Suffering political defeat regarding Middle East policy and facing ceaseless media attacks, Forrestal resigned his Cabinet post under pressure. Almost immediately afterwards, he was checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital for observation, supposedly suffering from severe fatigue and exhaustion, and he remained there for seven weeks, with his access to visitors sharply restricted. He was finally scheduled to be released on May 22, 1949, but just hours before his brother Henry came to pick him up, his body was found below the window of his 18th floor room, with a knotted cord wound tightly around his neck. Based upon an official press release, the newspapers all reported his unfortunate suicide, suggesting that he had first tried to hang himself, but failing that approach, had leapt out his window instead. A half page of copied Greek verse was found in his room, and in the heydey of Freudian psychoanalyical thinking, this was regarded as the subconscious trigger for his sudden death impulse, being treated as almost the equivalent of an actual suicide note. My own history textbooks simplified this complex story to merely say “suicide,” which is what I read and never questioned.

Martin raises numerous very serious doubts with this official verdict. Among other things, published interviews with Forrestal’s surviving brother and friends reveal that none of them believed Forrestal had taken his own life, and that they had all been prevented from seeing him until near the very end of his entire period of confinement. Indeed, the brother recounted that just the day before, Forrestal had been in fine spirits, saying that upon his release, he planned to use some of his very considerable personal wealth to buy a newspaper and begin revealing to the American people many of the suppressed facts concerning America’s entry into World War II, of which he had direct knowledge, supplemented by the extremely extensive personal diary that he had kept for many years. Upon Forrestal’s confinement, that diary, running thousands of pages, had been seized by the government, and after his death was apparently published only in heavily edited and expurgated form, though it nonetheless still became a historical sensation.

The government documents unearthed by Martin raise additional doubts about the story presented in all the standard history books. Forrestal’s medical files seem to lack any official autopsy report, there is visible evidence of broken glass in his room, suggesting a violent struggle, and most remarkably, the page of copied Greek verse—always cited as the main indication of Forrestal’s final suicidal intent—was actually not written in Forrestal’s own hand.

Aside from newspaper accounts and government documents, much of Martin’s analysis, including the extensive personal interviews of Forrestal’s friends and relatives, is based upon a short book entitled The Death of James Forrestal, published in 1966 by one Cornell Simpson, almost certainly a pseudonym. Simpson states that his investigative research had been conducted just a few years after Forrestal’s death and although his book was originally scheduled for release his publisher grew concerned over the extremely controversial nature of the material included and cancelled the project. According to Simpson, years later he decided to take his unchanged manuscript off the shelf and have it published by Western Islands press, which turns out to have been an imprint of the John Birch Society, the notoriously conspiratorial rightwing organization then near the height of its national influence. For these reasons, certain aspects of the book are of considerable interest even beyond the contents directly relating to Forrestal.

The first part of the book consists of a detailed presentation of the actual evidence regarding Forrestal’s highly suspicious death, including the numerous interviews with his friends and relatives, while the second portion focuses on the nefarious plots of the world-wide Communist movement, a Birch Society staple. Allegedly, Forrestal’s staunch anti-Communism had been what targeted him for destruction by Communist agents, and there is virtually no reference to any controversy regarding his enormous public battle over Israel’s establishment, although that was certainly the primary factor behind his political downfall. Martin notes these strange inconsistencies, and even wonders whether certain aspects of the book and its release may have been intended to deflect attention from this Zionist dimension towards some nefarious Communist plot.

Consider, for example, David Niles, whose name has lapsed into total obscurity, but who had been one of the very few senior FDR aides retained by his successor, and according to observers, Niles eventually became one of the most powerful figures behind the scenes of the Truman Administration. Various accounts suggest he played a leading role in Forrestal’s removal, and Simpson’s book supports this, suggesting that he was Communist agent of some sort. However, although the Venona Papers reveal that Niles had sometimes cooperated with Soviet agents in their espionage activities, he apparently did so either for money or for some other considerations, and was certainly not part of their own intelligence network. Instead, both Martin and Hart provide an enormous amount of evidence that Niles’s loyalty was overwhelmingly to Zionism, and indeed by 1950 his espionage activities on behalf of Israel became so extremely blatant that Gen. Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, threatened to immediately resign unless Niles was fired, forcing Truman’s hand.

Classics Professor Revilo Oliver, for decades a very influential figure in far right circles, had been a founding member of the John Birth Society and editor of its magazine, but angrily resigned in 1966, claiming that its leader Robert Welch, Jr. had accepted an offer of heavy financial support in return for focusing solely upon Communist misdeeds and scrupulously avoiding any discussion of Jewish or Zionist activities. Based on the evidence, that accusation appears to have considerable merit, with the JBS leadership soon treating indications of “anti-Semitism” as grounds for immediate expulsion. Major Communist political influence had largely disappeared in America by the late 1940s, while Jewish and pro-Israel influence grew enormously from the early 1960s onward, and by focusing almost exclusively upon the former and totally avoiding the latter, the JBS organization increasingly presented a totally delusional view of American politics, which surely contributed to its eventual decline into complete irrelevance.

Among those who grow skeptical of establishment media verdicts, there is a natural tendency to become overly suspicious, and see conspiracies and cover-ups where none exist. The sudden death of a prominent political figure may be blamed on foul-play even when the causes were entirely natural or accidental. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But when a sufficient number of such persons die within a sufficiently short period of years, and overwhelming evidence suggests that at least some of those deaths were not for the reasons long believed, the burden of proof begins to shift.

Excluding the much larger number of less notable fatalities, here is a short list of six prominent Americans whose untimely passing during 1944-1949 surely evoked considerable relief within various organizations known for their ruthless tactics:

• Wendell Wilkie, lifelong Democrat nominated for President by the Republicans in 1940, Died October 8, 1944, Age 52, Heart attack.
• Gen. George Patton, highest-ranking American military officer in Europe, Died December 21, 1945, Age 60, Car accident.
• Harry Hopkins, FDR’s “Deputy President,” Died January 29, 1946, Age 55, Various possible causes.
• Harry Dexter White, Soviet agent who ran the Treasury under FDR, Died August 16, 1948, Age 55, Heart attack.
• Laurence Duggan, Soviet agent, Prospective Secretary of State under Henry Wallace, Died December 20, 1948, Age 43, Fall from 16th story window.
• James Forrestal, former Secretary of Defense, Died May 22, 1949, Age 57, Fall from 18th story window.

I do not think that any similar sort of list of comparable individuals during that same time period could be produced for Britain, France, the USSR, or China. In one of the James Bond films, Agent 007 states his opinion that “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” And I think these six examples over just a few years should be enough to raise the eyebrows of even the most cautious and skeptical.

Foreign leaders outraged over America’s destructive international blundering have sometimes described our country as possessing physical might of enormous power, but having a ruling political elite so ignorant, gullible, and incompetent that it easily falls under the sway of unscrupulous foreign powers. We are a nation with the body of a dinosaur but controlled by the brain of a flea.

The post-war era of the 1940s surely marked an important peak of America’s military and economic power. Yet there seems considerable evidence that during those same years, a varied mix of Soviet, British, and Zionist assassins may have freely walked our soil, striking down those whom they regarded as obstacles to their national interests. 

Meanwhile, nearly all Americans remained blissfully unaware of these momentous developments, being lulled to sleep by “Our American Pravda.”

=====================

The Nature of Human Intelligence: A Textbook

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-nature-of-human-intelligence-a-textbook/

The Nature of Human Intelligence: A Textbook

James Thompson • July 3, 2018

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Online publication date: January 2018
Print publication year: 2018
Online ISBN: 9781316817049

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316817049

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/nature-of-human-intelligence/EA400EC57513FF0E7742ED32F6E0A5AE

I do not wish to quote myself too often, but in my 2013 review of Sternberg’s Handbook of Intelligence I raised an eyebrow about how often he quoted himself, and by means of an internal citation count questioned whether his choice of authors constituted a fair representation of the field. In a reply, Sternberg said that since he was developing the field beyond general intelligence, it was natural that he should be quoting the new approaches he had initiated.

Sternberg begins his latest volume with an explanation: he has invited the 19 most cited psychometricians to contribute (the late lamented Buz Hunt was too ill to participate). This method is good, and will set a standard for other editors to follow. Respect.

1. Intelligence as Potentiality and Actuality. Phillip L. Ackerman
   
2. Hereditary Ability: g Is Driven by Experience- Producing Drives. Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr.
   
3. Culture, Sex, and Intelligence: Descriptive and Proscriptive Issues. Stephen J. Ceci, Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn, & Wendy M. Williams
   
4. The Nature of the General Factor of Intelligence. Andrew R. A. Conway & Kristof Kovacs
   
5. Intelligence in Edinburgh, Scotland: Bringing Intelligence to Life. Ian J. Deary & Stuart J. Ritchie
   
6. Intelligence as Domain-Specific Superior Reproducible Performance: The Role of Acquired Domain- Specific Mechanisms in Expert Performance. K. Anders Ericsson
   
7. Intelligence, Society, and Human Autonomy. James R. Flynn
   
8. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences: Psychological and Educational Perspectives. Howard Gardner, Mindy Kornhaber, & Jie-Qi Chen
   
9. g Theory: How Recurring Variation in Human Intelligence and the Complexity of Everyday Tasks Create Social Structure and the Democratic Dilemma. Linda S. Gottfredson
   
10. Puzzled Intelligence: Looking for Missing Pieces. Elena L. Grigorenko
    
11. A View from the Brain. Richard J. Haier
    
12. Is Critical Thinking a Better Model of Intelligence? Diane F. Halpern & Heather A. Butler
    
13. Many Pathways, One Destination: IQ Tests, Intelligent Testing, and the Continual Push for More Equitable Assessments. Alan S. Kaufman
    
14. My Quest to Understand Human Intelligence. Scott Barry Kaufman
    
15. Mapping the Outer Envelope of Intelligence: A Multidimensional View from the Top. David Lubinski
    
16. The Intelligence of Nations. Richard Lynn
    
17. Intelligences about Things and Intelligences about People. John D. Mayer
    
18. Mechanisms of Working Memory Capacity and Fluid Intelligence and Their Common Dependence on Executive Attention 287 Zach Shipstead & Randall W. Engle
    
19. Successful Intelligence in Theory, Research, and Practice. Robert J. Sternberg

First up is Phillip Ackerman, distinguishing between intellectual potentiality and actuality. I don’t agree with many of his arguments, so let me explain them. Ackerman is good at distinguishing between sheer general problem-solving brain power and accumulated, skilled knowledge. Intelligence testing includes plenty of the former, and a selection of the common denominator of the latter. He notes that when you get into wide ranging content areas, men and women differ considerably, and argues that the only reason we don’t have separate normative data for the sexes is that Lewis Terman preferred that the sexes be declared equal on the Stanford Binet, and achieved this by counter-balancing items so they appeared the same. One learns something every day. Academic domains of general knowledge usually show a male advantage, but women are ahead in health matters. Ackerman proposes that effort is a big part of actual human achievement, and who would quibble with that, save some of the facts? Practice makes one third perfect.

His chapter has one data table, and one theoretical figure.

Thomas Bouchard next, on hereditary ability. He immediately counters (and refines) Ackerman’s effort argument with Darwin’s admission that Galton has convinced him that intelligence is hereditary and of major importance:

You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.

It is worth emphasizing Darwin’s astute comment that there is a difference between intelligence and motivation (zeal) and effort (hard work), and that the difference is important. Galton himself was well aware of the difference and argued that all three were influenced by heredity. “The triple event, of ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour[,] is inherited”. Galton’s speculative proposal has been nicely confirmed. We now know that virtually all traits (human and nonhuman, psychological and otherwise) are influenced by heredity.

Bouchard goes through a scrub-clearing exercise on the hoary objections about what intelligence is (Gottfredson’s explanation is perfectly good); the reality of g: g is inevitable if the range of tests and range of intellects is wide enough and sample sizes big enough; the notion that at some threshold higher intelligence doesn’t matter: it is monotonically effective;

This chapter is more evidence based, in my view, but that may be because it is treading a path I am in favour of. This chapter gives one figure with data.

Chapter 3
Culture, Sex, and Intelligence: Descriptive and Proscriptive Issues
Stephen J. Ceci , Donna K. Ginther , Shulamit Kahn , & Wendy M. Williams

Lots of data and figures on sex differences, stereotypes and a growth mindset.

Chapter 4
The Nature of the General Factor of Intelligence
Andrew R. A. Conway & Kristof Kovacs

About the relationship between working memory, executive attention, and intelligence. This line of work has culminated in a new theory of the positive manifold of intelligence and a corresponding new model of the general factor, g. We refer to this new framework as process overlap theory (POT) (Kovacs & Conway, 2016b ).

Chapter 5
Intelligence in Edinburgh, Scotland: Bringing Intelligence to Life
Ian J. Deary & Stuart J. Ritchie

People who tend to be good at one mental ability tend to be good at others also; these include remembering things, manipulating information, working out general principles from a set of examples and then applying them more broadly, thinking quickly, organising mental work, working things out in two or three dimensions, knowing word meanings, and knowing facts about the world.

These are action packed pages, written with aplomb by leading researchers in the business.

Chapter 6
Intelligence as Domain- Specific Superior Reproducible Performance
The Role of Acquired Domain- Specific Mechanisms in Expert Performance
K. Anders Ericsson

The two of us started a long- term practice study with a CMU student, Steve Faloon (SF), whose initial span was around seven digits. After several hundred hours of practice with the digit- span task, SF attained a digit- span of 82 digits, which is an improvement of more than 1,000%. Th is research has been described in considerable detail elsewhere (Chase & Ericsson, 1981 , 1982 ; Ericsson, 2013 ; Ericsson, Chase, & Faloon, 1980 ), so I will focus on the implications for immutable mental capacities as well as for how very high levels of performance in domains of expertise can be acquired. In fact, when SF was presented rapidly with lists of consonants (digit span for consonants), his span was unchanged (around six consonants) even after SF’s digit span had been increased by well over 300%. Some of my colleagues argued that these demonstrations of improved memory for rapidly presented digits, but only for digits, were relatively uninteresting because nobody cares about acquiring such a useless memory skill with no obvious real- world benefits. A fundamentally different interpretation of our findings is that they demonstrate evidence that anybody interested in acquiring increased ability to rapidly store and retrieve information in a particular domain of activity should be able to do so by acquiring domain-specific memory skills.

He concludes:

First, the standard practice of selecting children and adolescents for future advanced- level education based on the traditional tests of intelligence needs to be reconsidered, given their lack of relation to performance among skilled performers. Second, our educational system should not simply train students to rapidly acquire introductory and relatively superfi cial knowledge in many domains. Students should be taught and trained to attain an advanced level of performance in at least one domain, so they will know how they can improve performance in their future profession and how expert performance can be attained with appropriate practice with feedback under the guidance of teachers.

I must say that I think he is demonstrably incorrect. General intelligence remains the best predictor across the whole range of ability. I think that Ericsson should at least note the problem of restriction of range. The top performers on intellectual tasks are far brighter than average. If you then go on to correlate intelligence test scores with elite performance, you should correct the correlations for restriction of range.

Also, in describing the heroic individuals who spent two years boosting their forwards digit span from 7 digits to 80 digits (without it boosting any other form of working memory) I think it would be good to mention Shannon on information theory and “chunking”

Chapter 7
Intelligence, Society, and Human Autonomy
James R. Flynn

James Flynn’s chapter is very different in style from the others. It is written in philosophical terms, and often advances very general concepts, like “mental exercise”. It is engaging, easy to read, yet to my mind often speculative. (However, I know that some of his speculations have received strong support). Flynn argues that even if mental skill improvements “are not on g” they are still of real-life importance. That makes sense to me. He argues that minds adapt to the needs of the times, and brain change with mental exercise, such that the hippocampus enlarges when tasks require considerable memorization. Perhaps so.

Here I wish to introduce some all- important concepts: that the brain is like a muscle that profits from exercise; over time, society changes in terms of what cognitive exercise it asks us to do; and the very stuff of our brain alters to allow us to meet the challenges of our time and place. These concepts apply to our physique. If we all went from swimming to weightlifting in a generation, our physical muscles would alter dramatically. If no one drives a car in 1900 and everyone drives a car in 1950 and all cars have an automatic guidance system in 2000, the size of the hippocampus (the map- reading area of the brain) would increase and then decrease in a few generations (Maguire et al., 2000 ). What IQ gains over time deliver is a historical message about new demands on our cognitive abilities.

I know that I am somewhere between agnostic and just confused about secular rises in intelligence, and generally not on Flynn’s side of the argument about the changes in scores, and that will have influenced my reading of his chapter. I suppose the stumbling block in my mind is that there has been no Flynn Effect on maths and digit span. On the most basic tests: no change.

Chapter 8
The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Psychological and Educational Perspectives
Howard Gardner , Mindy Kornhaber , & Jie- Qi Chen

Gardner describes his ideas, their origins and development.

Support from psychometric findings: Gardner acknowledges the “positive manifold” across standardized tests, but correlations will be much reduced if the intelligence can be assessed in context;

No figures or tables. Supportive evidence referenced in a link. It would have been better to have discussed it in the chapter.

Chapter 9

g Theory
How Recurring Variation in Human Intelligence and the Complexity of Everyday Tasks Create Social Structure and the Democratic Dilemma
Linda S. Gottfredson

Gottfredson explains how she began to get interested in the topic of intelligence, and asked the basic question: “does the inherent nature of some work tasks and jobs require workers to do more difficult mental processing to carry out the tasks?”. Gottfredson factor analyzed the attributes of occupations, not workers. She tested claims from sociology with data from other disciplines.

She provides a data-rich account of what intelligence means in everyday life. Gottfredson connected dots that traditional psychometricians left dangling in space, because they thought everyone understood percentile ranks, and that the cognitive demands of tasks did not need to be explained in any detail.

Spotting and Confronting the Use of Deceptive Science
There was tremendous political and legal pressure on employers in the 1980s and 1990s to use “nondiscriminatory” tests, meaning ones having no disparate impact (different pass rates by race or gender; Gottfredson & Sharf, 1988 ). Efforts to increase test reliability and validity had boomeranged because they tended to increase, not reduce, disparate impact by race by better measuring g. Adding personality tests to a selection battery hardlydented the disparate impact. The temptation to “psychomagic” grew.

Chapter 10

Puzzled Intelligence
Looking for Missing Pieces
Elena L. Grigorenko

Grigorenko describes the work which needs to be done to substantiate the epigenomic hypothesis for intelligence.

Currently, there is no published human work substantiating the hypothesis that both across development and within individuals, fluctuations in intelligence can be attributed to individual differences in the epigenome in general and in the methylome in particular.

Chapter 11
A View from the Brain
Richard J. Haier

Excellent review of the field. Since I recently reviewed Richard Haier’s book on the subject I will not add anything further.

Chapter 12
Is Critical Thinking a Better Model of Intelligence?
Diane F. Halpern and Heather A. Butler

We agree with Stanovich ( 2010 ), who wrote that critical thinking is “What intelligence tests miss.” He argues that a critical piece is missing from the traditional conceptualization of intelligence or IQ, namely a rationality quotient (RQ). Stanovich and his colleagues question why seemingly smart, accomplished people do blatantly foolish things. They argue, and we agree, that IQ and rational thinking are different constructs.

However, they correlate 0.7. I think Stanovich has failed to substantiate his extensive claims.

With diminished interest I read the rest of the chapter, but there were better things waiting. In a study whether an intelligence test and a test of critical thinking were used to predict self-reported real-life errors of judgment, both were predictive, but the critical thinking test somewhat more so. However, self-report has notorious shortcomings. If critical thinking can really be taught, successful students should have achievements which are evident to others. For example, proportional to their incomes, and with due allowance for charitable donations, they should have more savings than uncritical thinkers.

Predicting real-world outcomes: Critical thinking ability is a better predictor of life decisions than intelligence
Heather A. Butler, Christopher Pentoney, Mabelle P. Bong
Given that such skills can be trained, even after allowing for weak confirmation, this is a promising result.

Chapter 13
Many Pathways, One Destination
IQ Tests, Intelligent Testing, and the Continual Push for More Equitable Assessments
Alan S. Kaufman

A good potted history of intelligence testing, particularly the Wechsler tests. Kaufman says they did not innovate from 1915 until 2008. This is exactly the date at which many British clinicians think that they deteriorated, becoming faddish, over-factored, less reliable, and impossible to compare with almost a century of clinical history. Some notable clinician stick to the old versions, and regard the new ones as publisher’s hype. However, Kaufman rightly makes fun of the habit of over-interpreting subtest score patterns.

I investigated data for the 2,200 children and adolescents in the WISC- R standardization sample and discovered that it is normal to have scatter. The average child had a V- P discrepancy (in either direction) of 10 points (Kaufman, 1976b ). One in four children had IQ discrepancies of more than 15 points, supposedly conclusive proof of brain damage. And subtest scatter? Th e WISC- R was comprised of 10 subtests whose scaled scores (standard scores with mean = 10 and SD = 3) could range from 1 to 19. Thus, one’s scaled- score range (highest scaled score minus lowest scaled score) could potentially be as high as 18. The average person had a scaled- score range of 7 + 2 points; a range of nine was entirely within normal range (Kaufman, 1976a).

Kaufman is someone I could talk to for a long time. The number of people who have administered more than 400 Wechsler tests is probably falling fast, and the number having done that as well as being active in intelligence research is pretty small.

He signs off his chapter by talking about the intelligence research his children are doing. Good news. Psychometrics is hereditable.

Chapter 14
My Quest to Understand Human Intelligence
Scott Barry Kaufman

Begins with a strong and touching personal story about being kept in special education for years because of a long-resolved hearing infection. No wonder this child wanted to learn about intelligence. He kept quiet about this early experience for years. Wise.

Kaufman describes his theory of personal intelligence.

Of course, the Theory of Personal Intelligence was influenced by many different perspectives, and I really view it as a synthesis rather than a completely new theory. According to Sternberg (1997, 2011), successful intelligence is defined as the ability to achieve one’s goals in life (in terms of one’s own personal standards), within one’s sociocultural context, by capitalizing on strengths and correcting or compensating for weaknesses, in order to adapt to, shape, and select environments, through a combination of analytical, creative, and practical abilities. Many elements of this theory have inspired the Theory of Personal Intelligence, including the personal definition of success, the importance of context and building on strengths, and the inclusion of abilities that go beyond IQ. The Theory of Personal Intelligence goes beyond ability, however, including engagement, character strengths, and other “noncognitive” traits in the model (Heckman, 2000 ; Peterson & Seligman, 1994 ).

As you may surmise, I don’t agree with this formulation. Eratostenes surpassed his sociocultural context, and whether he achieved his own goals in life might have been of interest to him, his mother and his friends, but did not influence his estimate of the circumference of the world. I see the above list as a way of asking another question “Did person X do well in life?”. That is, “did they use their talents well?” An important question. I would consider it the Mark Twain version of life success, in that if a kid gets to St Louis, they do well. As to actual success, then boring old IQ is the best predictor available, out of a weak bunch. I am all in favour of casting the net widely to catch abilities not yet detected, but when those focus on imagination (a great time waster) and creativity (a great morass of imponderables) barely a mouse crawls out from those mountains.

Chapter 15

Mapping the Outer Envelope of Intelligence
A Multidimensional View from the Top
David Lubinski

This is a very good summary of the work on high ability. It points out that there is no replication crisis in psychometrics. Many writers try to attach new labels to old constructs, but the underlying factors remain pretty constant, whatever they are called. I rate this work highly, and have covered it often, so I will commend it once again and pass on to other chapters, beyond asking you to remember the number 5.

Some years ago I was at a Royal Society conference, and over coffee heard two Fellows discussing that although the difference between elite athletes and average fitness could be measure accurately no such metric was available for mental ability. Boldly, I said that the brightest thinkers were 5 times as fast as the slowest, basing this on some observations by Jensen. They seemed will to accept this approximation.

Ninety- five years ago, Carl Emil Seashore (1922) pointed out that among a random sample of college freshmen, the top 5% can learn five times more academic material than the bottom 5% (per unit time), and that there are successive gradations in between these levels.

That is the forgotten aspect of intelligence: you can cover more ground faster, and so can travel further.

On page 251 there is a most interesting note on the Graduate Record examination, revealing that a score of 500 on the verbal scale puts you at the 59th percentile rank, but a score of 500 on the maths scale merely at the 18th percentile. Never accept a score without seeing the score distributions. Also, make a mental note that tests of maths ability are probably the most informative.

Chapter 16
The Intelligence of Nations
Richard Lynn

This is a very good summary of the work Richard Lynn has done for years on the ability levels of nations. He once said that, if only Physics is of any value, and all other disciplines are mere stamp collecting, then he has been a mere collector of country IQs. This chapter gives the correlations between national level and lots of other economic and social indicators. I have covered the national data many times before, so will not add further comment other than to say that the chapter is a very good starting point for new readers.

Chapter 17
Intelligences about Things and Intelligences about People
John D. Mayer

John Mayer is interested in social intelligence, and whether this exists as a separate ability. He also considers emotional intelligence and personal intelligence.

Here is an example from Mayer’s Test of Personal Intelligence which includes items such as:

If a person is outgoing and talkative, most likely, she is also inclined to be:
a. self- controlled
b. more assertive than average
c. anxious and impulsive
d. altruistic

The correct answer here is “b. more assertive than average,” because research on the big five personality traits indicate that talkativeness and sociability are more highly correlated with assertiveness than with the other listed alternatives.

So, if a person has personal intelligence, they will have noticed those features of human behaviour which are detected and confirmed by personality questionnaires.

Personal intelligence may also divide into two subsidiary factors that correlate about r = 0.80 with one another (Mayer, Panter, & Caruso, 2014 ). The first factor involves perceiving consistencies in people’s behaviors. The second factor represents reasoning about personality dynamics, such has how goals interrelate, and how multiple observers each may perceive the same person differently.

For example, personal intelligence correlates just r = 0.17 and r = 0.20 with SAT- Math and spatial intelligence measures, but rises to r = 0.39 with verbal intelligence (which presumably is midway between thing- and person- focused), and rises again to r = 0.53 with the Reading the Mind in the Eyes scale, a measure of understanding people, and exhibits an r = 0.69 with the MSCEIT understanding emotions and managing emotions areas (the latter, managing emotion area, arguably blends somewhat into personal intelligence at a conceptual level).

Chapter 18
Mechanisms of Working Memory Capacity and Fluid Intelligence and Their Common Dependence on Executive Attention
Zach Shipstead and Randall W. Engle

We did not set out to study intelligence. The question at the origin of this line of work was why complex memory span tasks correlate so highly and so consistently (Turner & Engle, 1989 ) with a huge array of real- world tasks when simple span tasks do so less well and very inconsistently (Dempster,1981 ). We attempted to answer this question by a combination of methods taken from both experimental psychology and differential psychology – a response to Cronbach’s ( 1957 ) complaint that the two approaches to psychology historically have disregarded each other.

Chapter 19

Successful Intelligence in Theory, Research, and Practice
Robert J. Sternberg

My reaction is that Successful Intelligence is a tautology: unsuccessful thinking is hardly intelligent.

Sternberg says:

Intelligence really is nothing in particular, as it is a construct humans have invented, largely to explain why some people are better at performing some classes of tasks than others (Sternberg, 1984a ). Many different metaphors can characterize intelligence (Sternberg, 1990 ), but these too are creations to help us understand our own invention

Well, all constructs are invented by humans, including “nothing” “particular” “people” “performing” and “tasks”. Are there more trenchant points to follow?

Sternberg continues:

Successful intelligence is one’s ability to choose, reevaluate, and, to the extent possible, attain one’s goals in life, within one’s sociocultural context. A successfully intelligent person recognizes his or her strengths and weaknesses and then capitalizes on strengths while compensating for or correcting weaknesses. He or she does so through a combination of analytical, creative, practical, and wisdom- based/ ethical skills (Sternberg, 2003 ).

I have an immediate problem with this definition, namely criterion heterodoxy, or the “rubber ruler” mistake. People’s goals in life differ, and their concepts of success. It would put me, as someone who became an academic to read, write and discuss psychology in relative tranquillity, on a par with others who also wanted and did those things, but who actually published more widely and consequently had a greater impact. I rank Sternberg more highly than myself. My next problem is that the actual ingredients in this successful intelligence turn out to be analytical, creative, practical and wisdom based. Agreed. Intelligent people are good at those things, some far more so than others, and all of these intellectual abilities correlate with each other, and with real life achievements.

Sternberg says:

what constitutes intelligent behavior may differ radically from one culture to another in terms of the adaptive requirements of the culture. For example, in a rural Kenyan village, knowledge of natural herbal medicine used to combat parasitic illnesses may be key to adaptation and hence intelligence (Sternberg et al., 2001); in the United States, such knowledge may be useless.

Well, no, actually. The rural Kenyan village in this story had many children with parasitic illnesses, so there was zero evidence that herbal concoctions were effective. When you read the small print in this study, the authors in fact gave the infested children US developed modern drugs, and showed that after proper treatment they functioned better. It also turned out that the measure of knowledge of herbal medicine they used was one in which agreeing that herbal medicines were effective counted as a point towards knowing things about herb medicines. I don’t think that this study proves anything about radical differences in what constitutes intellgent behaviour. Don’t let anyone sell you this argument in an Ebola epidemic. Equally, Sternberg notes that precocity in children is welcomed in the US but frowned upon in Kenya. This would be interesting if Kenya exceeded the US in intellectual achievements. This not being the case might suggest, if early child interventions have any influence at all, that Kenyans should try applauding their youngsters when they venture their premature observations.

Later in the chapter there is much work on the contributions of Successful Intelligence tests to the selection of university students, and this is the strongest aspect of the chapter.

Conclusions

I am sorry that I did not cover all the chapters in equal detail, and also sorry that this review is too long. I have not had time to make it shorter.

Textbooks are far more likely than original papers to be read by students. Textbooks also carry an air of authority not achieved by other publications, so may well determine how a topic is seen by a generation that will read little else on the subject. This textbook will convince them that there is real content in psychometric research. Those with more knowledge of the field may feel that some researchers are highly quoted on the slender basis that their conjectures seem uplifting, and that their schemes of self-improvement give heart to many hopeful readers. Other researchers provide results which may be less welcome, but their papers come out with a frequency and a wealth of content which demands attention.

Robert Graves was chastised by the tutors examining his thesis on the White Goddess of inspiration “for having favoured some poets over others”. All reviewers must do so. Must editors?

At one stage when reading this volume I thought that the noble plan of asking the most cited psychologists to contribute had gone horribly wrong. There are citations and citations. I wanted to admit that the editor should decide which sort of psychology they value and must invite contributions from those they regard as having the best ideas and supportive evidence, and must stand or fall on that. As I continued to read I returned to my view that gathering the most-cited authors has paid off.

I think that this is a better representation of the field than was achieved in previous volumes. It also shows many authors at their best, in that they have compressed their work into considered and readable summaries. The format of scientific papers, nobly striving for dispassionate rectitude, is too often stale and humourless, and proves hard going for most readers. These chapters are often better, with a moiety of conversational asides and personal disclosure.

We have had a good, well-balanced look at the most cited scholars on intelligence. Some are better than others. Are some of them cited purely because they have an uplifting message, and are on the side of the angels? Could be. Authors certainly differ in how much they are research based. Some rely on a few confirmatory studies, others are supported by a very wide range of research results. What unifies them is a deep interest in the subject, and the willingness to pursue their speculations by putting them to the test.

If students still read textbooks in university libraries, looking out at the campus lawns as their more feckless colleagues make their way to sunlit assignations, I think this volume will merit their quiet, scholarly approbation.

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