Tulio: So then the race IQ gap is environmental then?
Well, I don’t know. Chuck at The Inductivist now says it is, and he is fighting with a bunch of hereditarians about that. And Chuck was originally a hereditarian.
The achievement gap may well be environmental if the British Blacks closed it. They say the achievement tests are a proxy for IQ, but they are not a perfect proxy, maybe .7 correlation. It might be interesting to see recent IQ tests.
in the case of British Black children, yes, their IQ’s beat White children at age 5 incredibly enough, but they crash back down to 86 when those children reach adulthood. A similar thing is happening in the US, where Black children now have an IQ of 90.5, but their IQ crashes back down to ~85 by adulthood.
There are a lot of theories about why this is happening, but one of the most depressing is that environmental effects are most prominent in youth, and that in adulthood, the genes start to kick in, and environmental effects fade into the background.
If we could close the achievement gap in the US like they did in the UK, it would be an awesome thing indeed. It would be one of the greatest achievements for Black Americans since the First or Second Liberations (Civil War and Civil Rights Act).
However, Black children in both the UK and the US are getting a lot smarter, and both cohorts are significantly closing the B-W IQ gap at least in childhood. I think smarter Black kids is a good thing in a lot of ways. You can sit back and count the ways that this is a good thing, but I think we both agree that it’s a huge positive.
