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Who We Are »
Betsy Combier

Help Us to Continue to Help Others »
Email: betsy.combier@gmail.com

 
The E-Accountability Foundation announces the

'A for Accountability' Award

to those who are willing to whistleblow unjust, misleading, or false actions and claims of the politico-educational complex in order to bring about educational reform in favor of children of all races, intellectual ability and economic status. They ask questions that need to be asked, such as "where is the money?" and "Why does it have to be this way?" and they never give up. These people have withstood adversity and have held those who seem not to believe in honesty, integrity and compassion accountable for their actions. The winners of our "A" work to expose wrong-doing not for themselves, but for others - total strangers - for the "Greater Good"of the community and, by their actions, exemplify courage and self-less passion. They are parent advocates. We salute you.

Winners of the "A":

Johnnie Mae Allen
David Possner
Dee Alpert
Aaron Carr
Harris Lirtzman
Hipolito Colon
Larry Fisher
The Giraffe Project and Giraffe Heroes' Program
Jimmy Kilpatrick and George Scott
Zach Kopplin
Matthew LaClair
Wangari Maathai
Erich Martel
Steve Orel, in memoriam, Interversity, and The World of Opportunity
Marla Ruzicka, in Memoriam
Nancy Swan
Bob Witanek
Peyton Wolcott
[ More Details » ]
 
Environment and IQ
Studies show that the issue has changed: it is no longer a matter of whether the environment matters but when and how it matters. And poverty, quite clearly, is an important part of the answer.
          
July 23, 2006
Idea Lab
After the Bell Curve
By DAVID L. KIRP, NY TIMES

LINK

When it comes to explaining the roots of intelligence, the fight between partisans of the gene and partisans of the environment is ancient and fierce. Each side challenges the other’s intellectual bona fides and political agendas. What is at stake is not just the definition of good science but also the meaning of the just society. The nurture crowd is predisposed to revive the War on Poverty, while the hereditarians typically embrace a Social Darwinist perspective.

A century’s worth of quantitative-genetics literature concludes that a person’s I.Q. is remarkably stable and that about three-quarters of I.Q. differences between individuals are attributable to heredity. This is how I.Q. is widely understood — as being mainly “in the genes” — and that understanding has been used as a rationale for doing nothing about seemingly intractable social problems like the black-white school-achievement gap and the widening income disparity. If nature disposes, the argument goes, there is little to be gained by intervening. In their 1994 best seller, “The Bell Curve,” Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray relied on this research to argue that the United States is a genetic meritocracy and to urge an end to affirmative action. Since there is no way to significantly boost I.Q., prominent geneticists like Arthur Jensen of Berkeley have contended, compensatory education is a bad bet.

But what if the supposed opposition between heredity and environment is altogether misleading? A new generation of studies shows that genes and environment don’t occupy separate spheres — that much of what is labeled “hereditary” becomes meaningful only in the context of experience. “It doesn’t really matter whether the heritability of I.Q. is this particular figure or that one,” says Sir Michael Rutter of the University of London. “Changing the environment can still make an enormous difference.” If heredity defines the limits of intelligence, the research shows, experience largely determines whether those limits will be reached. And if this is so, the prospects for remedying social inequalities may be better than we thought.

When quantitative geneticists estimate the heritability of I.Q., they are generally relying on studies of twins. Identical twins are in effect clones who share all their genes; fraternal twins are siblings born together — just half of their genes are identical. If heredity explains most of the difference in intelligence, the logic goes, the I.Q. scores of identical twins will be far more similar than the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins. And this is what the research has typically shown. Only when children have spent their earliest years in the most wretched of circumstances, as in the infamous case of the Romanian orphans, treated like animals during the misrule of Nicolae Ceausescu, has it been thought that the environment makes a notable difference. Otherwise, genes rule.

Then along came Eric Turkheimer to shake things up. Turkheimer, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is the kind of irreverent academic who gives his papers user-friendly titles like “Spinach and Ice Cream” and “Mobiles.” He also has a reputation as a methodologist’s methodologist. In combing through the research, he noticed that the twins being studied had middle-class backgrounds. The explanation was simple — poor people don’t volunteer for research projects — but he wondered whether this omission mattered.

Together with several colleagues, Turkheimer searched for data on twins from a wider range of families. He found what he needed in a sample from the 1970’s of more than 50,000 American infants, many from poor families, who had taken I.Q. tests at age 7. In a widely-discussed 2003 article, he found that, as anticipated, virtually all the variation in I.Q. scores for twins in the sample with wealthy parents can be attributed to genetics. The big surprise is among the poorest families. Contrary to what you might expect, for those children, the I.Q.’s of identical twins vary just as much as the I.Q.’s of fraternal twins. The impact of growing up impoverished overwhelms these children’s genetic capacities. In other words, home life is the critical factor for youngsters at the bottom of the economic barrel. “If you have a chaotic environment, kids’ genetic potential doesn’t have a chance to be expressed,” Turkheimer explains. “Well-off families can provide the mental stimulation needed for genes to build the brain circuitry for intelligence.”

This provocative finding was confirmed in a study published last year. An analysis of the reading ability of middle-aged twins showed that even half a century after childhood, family background still has a big effect — but only for children who grew up poor. Meanwhile, Turkheimer is studying a sample of twins who took the National Merit Scholarship exam, and the results are the same. Although these are the academic elite, who mostly come from well-off homes, variations in family circumstances still matter: children in the wealthiest households have the greatest opportunity to develop all their genetic capacities. The better-off the family, the more a child’s genetic potential is likely to be, as Turkheimer puts it, “maxed out.”

n seeking to understand the impact of nature and nurture on I.Q., researchers have also looked at adopted children. Consistent with the proposition that intelligence is mainly inherited, these studies have almost always found that adopted youngsters more closely resemble their biological than their adoptive parents. Such findings have supported the assumption that changing a child’s life circumstances won’t alter the hard facts of nature.

But researchers in France noted a shortcoming in these adoption studies and set out to correct it. Since poor families rarely adopt, those investigations have had to focus only on youngsters placed in well-to-do homes. What’s more, because most adopted children come from poor homes, almost nothing is known about adopted youngsters whose biological parents are well-off.

What happens in these rare instances of riches-to-rags adoption? To answer that question, two psychologists, Christiane Capron and Michel Duyme, combed through thousands of records from French public and private adoption agencies. “It was slow, dusty work,” Duyme recalls. Their natural experiment mimics animal studies in which, for instance, a newborn rhesus monkey is taken from its nurturing biological mother and handed over to an uncaring foster mother. The findings are also consistent: how genes are expressed depends on the social context.

Regardless of whether the adopting families were rich or poor, Capron and Duyme learned, children whose biological parents were well-off had I.Q. scores averaging 16 points higher than those from working-class parents. Yet what is really remarkable is how big a difference the adopting families’ backgrounds made all the same. The average I.Q. of children from well-to-do parents who were placed with families from the same social stratum was 119.6. But when such infants were adopted by poor families, their average I.Q. was 107.5 — 12 points lower. The same holds true for children born into impoverished families: youngsters adopted by parents of similarly modest means had average I.Q.’s of 92.4, while the I.Q.’s of those placed with well-off parents averaged 103.6. These studies confirm that environment matters — the only, and crucial, difference between these children is the lives they have led.

A later study of French youngsters adopted between the ages of 4 and 6 shows the continuing interplay of nature and nurture. Those children had little going for them. Their I.Q.’s averaged 77, putting them near retardation. Most were abused or neglected as infants, then shunted from one foster home or institution to the next.

Nine years later, they retook the I.Q. tests, and contrary to the conventional belief that I.Q. is essentially stable, all of them did better. The amount they improved was directly related to the adopting family’s status. Children adopted by farmers and laborers had average I.Q. scores of 85.5; those placed with middle-class families had average scores of 92. The average I.Q. scores of youngsters placed in well-to-do homes climbed more than 20 points, to 98 — a jump from borderline retardation to a whisker below average. That is a huge difference — a person with an I.Q. of 77 couldn’t explain the rules of baseball, while an individual with a 98 I.Q. could actually manage a baseball team — and it can only be explained by pointing to variations in family circumstances.

Taken together, these studies show that the issue has changed: it is no longer a matter of whether the environment matters but when and how it matters. And poverty, quite clearly, is an important part of the answer.

That is not to say that an affluent home is necessarily a good home. A family’s social standing is only a proxy for the time and energy needed to keep a youngster mentally engaged, as well as the social capital that helps steer a child to success. There are, of course, many affluent parents who do a bad job of raising their children, and many poor families who nurture their kids with care and intelligence. On average, though, well-off households have the resources needed to provide better settings for the fullest development of a child’s natural abilities. In “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” the University of Kansas psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley find that by the time they are 4 years old, children growing up in poor families have typically heard a total of 32 million fewer spoken words than those whose parents are professionals. That language gap translates directly into stunted academic trajectories.

Is there a way to reduce such gaps? In recent years, the case for investing in early-childhood education has become stronger and stronger. The federal Early Head Start program for infants and toddlers is effective when it is well implemented — in part because it succeeds in getting parents more involved with their children. Recent research also shows that one year of high-quality state prekindergarten can give children as much as a seven-month advantage in vocabulary; this, in turn, is a good predictor of how well they will read when they are in primary school. As you would expect, poor children benefit the most, especially when they are in classes with middle-class youngsters.

The push for universal preschool is not a red-state-blue-state issue; the pioneers in the area are Oklahoma and Georgia, not generally known for social progressivism. And with the support of business groups and prominent philanthropists like Susan Buffett, the daughter of Warren Buffett, it may enter the national agenda. If it does, it will be a small step toward a society in which not only the most fortunate children will be able to “max out” their potential.

David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is writing a book about the universal preschool movement.

Another view:

February 26, 2006
'Better for All the World,' by Harry Bruinius
A Better Breed of American
Review by SALLY SATEL

LINK

IN 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared it "better for all the world" if the "manifestly unfit" could be stopped from reproducing. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," he famously wrote in his ruling in Buck v. Bell, which affirmed the constitutionality of forced sterilization of people deemed genetically inferior.

The disturbing history of the eugenics movement is not a secret, despite the subtitle of Harry Bruinius's highly readable new book. But it should surely be better known by the public, and Bruinius, writing in a novelistic style, has made an admirable effort to convey the "passions and unfulfilled longings of individuals, and the conspiracies and betrayals, and ironies that stand behind a scientific program to purify the human race though genetic engineering."

Bruinius's story begins in the mid-1800's with the British polymath Sir Francis Galton, who introduced the idea of intelligence as an inherited trait and — inspired by his cousin Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" — developed a science to promote it, which he named eugenics. In America, Galton's ideas were picked up by the biologist Charles Davenport, who in 1904 established Cold Spring Harbor laboratory on Long Island as a national center for eugenics research and policy planning.

Three years later, Davenport created a Eugenics Records Office and recruited an ambitious young high school teacher named Harry Laughlin to join him in an enormous project that sent fieldworkers across the country to identify the "germ-plasm" of unfit family strains so that it could be eradicated. Laughlin became an influential developer of American compulsory sterilization policy, which had officially begun in 1907 when Indiana passed a law allowing scientists to use surgical methods to eradicate the unfit — "the first law in human history," Bruinius writes, "allowing doctors to operate on otherwise healthy citizens against their will." He helped Congress formulate the 1924 Immigration Act, which kept out "inferior" people from Southern and Eastern Europe. Bruinius deftly plays up the contrast between the eugenicists' obsession with cold measurements of human value and their own messy lives, which were marked by disease and behavior that could have qualified them as unfit: Galton suffered from severe depression; Davenport had one child who was sickly and another who was apparently dyslexic; and Laughlin was afflicted with epilepsy.

In America and elsewhere, enthusiasm for eugenics was broadly supported by elites. In Britain, people as varied as Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw embraced its goals, and there was lively debate about how much the state itself should control reproduction of individuals. Eugenic science especially appealed to Fabian socialists, who saw it as further justification for abolishing class — after all, once the playing field was level the effect of heredity could finally express itself clearly and be studied.

In this country, eugenic theory and practice engaged the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, the birth control crusader Margaret Sanger and leaders of the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. It galvanized temperance advocates, suffragists, and liberal American churches and synagogues. Citizens enthusiastically entered "Fitter Family" and "Better Baby" contests.

Bruinius sees America's leading role in the eugenics movement as a reflection of its utopianism. "Seeing their country as a land of innocence, many Americans had long clung to the idea of self-purification, attempting to excise that which posed a danger to the social good," he writes. "Eugenics would combine an American self-consciousness with the new and unimpeachable authority of Science."

In the decade after Buck v. Bell, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Sweden, Norway and Japan all passed sterilization laws. But it was the influence of American eugenicists on the Nazis that is most chilling. Bruinius describes how Hitler modeled Germany's sterilization policies on California's 1909 sterilization law. While reports of Nazi racial policies provoked a growing outcry among the American public, eugenicists themselves remained enthusiastic, with some traveling to Germany to study its program. In 1936, Laughlin received an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University for his work in racial hygiene, and two years later he advised Congress to keep Jews seeking political asylum out of the United States even after the Kristallnacht pogrom.

Meanwhile, the poor quality of Laughlin's work was catching up with him. In 1935 a special committee issued a scathing report on the Eugenics Records Office, and in 1939 it was shut down by the president of the Carnegie Institution (its main backer), who cited the insufficiency of the research and, ironically, Laughlin's poor health. While eugenicists had trouble selling their idea of racial purity in the wake of the Holocaust, many states continued sterilizing patients in mental institutions until the mid-1960's, when sterilization laws finally fell into disuse. In the end, more than 65,000 mentally ill and developmentally disabled people in 33 states underwent the procedure. Some later sued the states for what one victim called "sexual murder." Several states have issued formal apologies, though Buck v. Bell remains standing to this day.

Bruinius stakes out little new ground beyond that already covered in Daniel Kevles's more substantial study, "In the Name of Eugenics" (1985). And his decision to pay minimal attention to the scientific ideas behind eugenics lightens the narrative at the cost of a fuller understanding of what fueled the passions of eugenicists. Bruinius ends by asking whether biotechnology and genetic engineering will usher in an age in which "genocide — cultural, ethnic or genetic — can seem a rational and desirable goal." Despite this melodramatic ending, his story is one worth hearing, and heeding.

Sally Satel, a physician, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of "One Nation Under Therapy."

Eugenics

 
© 2003 The E-Accountability Foundation