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Many people who are uneducated about the matter of cognitive abilities tests may say certain things such as “IQ tests are biased towards white males”.”IQ tests don’t test anything of worth” or “IQ is just a number and doesn’t mean anything in life”. All of these are untruths. I will show in this article how and why those aren’t true, as well as showing that IQ is one of the best predictors of success in life.

“IQ Tests Are Biased Towards White Males”

This is my favorite one from IQ deniers. They seem to think that by saying tests are biased towards white males, especially those from the West, that it will invalidate over 100 years of IQ testing and any and all racial gaps concerning them. It doesn’t work like that.

Many deniers may say “They’re (IQ tests) biased towards white males because there are certain words on the test that underprivileged peoples don’t get to learn”. They may say that due to IQ tests having certain words on them that aren’t taught to them in their environments, that they’re biased and don’t accurately assess black American’s intelligence.

But Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein say in The Bell Curve that those words that only a privileged person would know, which, if I remember the example from the book correctly was something to do with yachts, was removed from IQ tests decades ago, so those points are moot whenever someone brings them up.

If IQ tests were biased towards white males, then why do Ashkenazi Jews score between 107-115? Why do Indian American Immigrants score 112? Why do East Asians score 106?(pg 236) These are questions that people never seem to answer, because it seems that all they were told is that the tests for cognitive ability are biased towards the majority, when no matter where IQ tests are carried out on East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews and Indian immigrants, they score higher than whites every time. How is that explained by a test bias towards the ones it was supposedly invented to assess who was superior in intelligence?

Two years after The Bell Curve came out, a paper was published called Mainstream Science on Intelligence, which corroborated the findings in The Bell Curve. To quote from the publication:

Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.

Right here, from the publication from 52 signatories from the leading researchers in the field of intelligence all say that IQ tests are not culturally biased at all to those who don’t speak the language, which of course means non-white populations as well as white populations who don’t speak English.

If they were biased towards white males, then we can say that if we put those from different races into white homes, test their IQs at the beginning of the study, and assess IQ at adulthood, we’d be able to see if it was true, if IQ tests were really biased against other races. Well, the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study happened (pg 256), and the SD gap literally stayed the same at 1.2 SDs.

What the Minnesota Study also tells me is this: it’s clear as day that black mothers are not conducive to an intellectual environment. Why, if black mothers were, would they need to be taken out as a variable and have the black kids be raised by white women? That, in my opinion, should end the debate right there. Seeing as the mother’s IQ is the best predictor of the child’s. Those mixed-race white and black kids with white mothers have higher IQs than those with black mothers. Because the prenatal environment is important to a developing and growing fetus. This should end the debate right where it is, but instead, we still have people who want to push that IQ tests are biased towards white males, which I have shown that it’s not the case at all.

Finally, to quote from the paper Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, which was funded by the APA Taskforce, headed by Neisser:

Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans.

“IQ Tests Don’t Test Anything of Worth”

This is another denialist tactic that those who wish to deny the worth of the IQ test. What they measure are short-term memory, verbal ability, analytical thinking, mathematical ability and spatial reasoning. How anyone can believe that they don’t test anything of worth, even after hearing about what it does test is beyond me. I touched on success in life in regards to IQ in this article. IQ tests do mean a lot to life success, along with personality traits (coming in a future post).

There isn’t that high of a correlation with IQ and monetary success (around .33), so you’re going to find those who have high IQs and not have attained a lot of wealth, whereas you’ll also find those with lower IQs who have attained wealth, due in part to certain personality characteristics, all of which are at least 50 percent heritable.

The table above (pg 322, The Bell Curve), shows how after controlling for IQ (IQ 100), that blacks and Hispanics have substantially higher probabilities than whites of being in high IQ occupations (which I would reason that’s due to Affirmative Action).

(pg 323) After controlling for IQ, wage differences almost disappear! If America were so racist, why then, do blacks and ‘Latinos’, who are matched for IQ, then make the same amount of money? Almost as if IQ is one of the best predictors of monetary success in life.

(pg 326) After controlling for IQ, poverty differentials decrease by three-quarters for both ethnic groups. Why is that? Because, as I’m showing with all of these examples, when matching for IQ, gaps substantially shrink, disappear entirely or have those ethnic groups actually have more success than whites when matched for IQ, proves that IQ is one of the most important things in life, due to those with high IQs being able to reason better than those with lower IQs.

(pg 338) This is one of my favorites. Because we know that average IQ for a criminal is 85, even after all variables are controlled for, the IQ for criminals is still at 85, showing that low cognitive ability is a cause for being incarcerated as well. Showing that the gap disappears by almost three quarters shows, in my opinion, that the remaining incarcerated blacks may have the 2-repeat MAOA-L gene, as well as higher testosterone, are the cause for the remaining quarter who do get incarcerated.

Clearly, IQ tests are so biased that they show all of these things disappear or even reverse with certain variables when IQs are matched at 100 with ethnicity.

So to those who say “IQ is just a number which doesn’t mean anything in life”, you’d have to explain how these things happen when matched for IQ. Did those who get high scores not feel the effects of so-called white supremacy?

I’m sure we’ve heard of the B.I.T.C.H. IQ test before. Which supposedly tests ‘black cultural homogeneity’, but it’s just nonsense, as evidenced by:

Shucking means: Stone fox means: T. C. B. means: “Bo Diddley” is a: Hattie Mae Johnson is on the Country. She has four children and her husband is now in jail for non-support, as he was unemployed and was not able to give her any money. Her welfare check is now $286 per month. Last night she went out with the highest player in town. If she got pregnant, then nine months from now how much more will her welfare check be? “Money don’t get everything it’s true.”

These are all actual questions on this ‘so-called IQ test’. What a joke right?

Those who say that IQ tests are biased towards white males, or anyone affluent for that matter, have no idea what they’re talking about. None of what they say has any basis in fact and is clear wishful thinking. If IQ tests were so biased, other races/ethnicity wouldn’t score higher than whites. If IQ tests were so biased, why would those blacks and ‘Latinos’ who score at 100 show certain gaps closing, closed and even had an advantage over whites when matched for IQ (which was due in part to Affirmative Action, obviously)?

Those who say that IQ tests are biased are true ideologues and those views have no basis in reality.

For those who are interested, Arthur Jensen wrote a whole book on this subject.