Nature/Nurture: Black Like Jim

I'm agnostic about many aspects of God's nature, but I'm pretty sure that She has a weakness for irony. According to this New York Times story, Jim Watson - remember him, the brilliant but sometimes obnoxious Nobel Prize winner who got in trouble for dissing African IQs - Jim, it seems, is 16% African. Watson became only the second person to disclose his complete DNA, and analysis apparently showed about 16% African and 9% Asian ancestral DNA. These numbers would be compatible with great-grandparents who were Black and Asian. (via Andrew Sullivan)

More substantively, Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent New Yorker article on IQ and heredity, based in part on a debate between Flynn and Jensen. Here is perhaps Flynn's biggest point:

Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.”

It is nearly impossible for a pure hereditarian to explain that away, although I'm sure they will try. The whole article is worth a read.

Gladwell is the author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

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