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view · edit Frequently asked questions Is there really a scientific consensus that there is no evidence for a genetic link between race and intelligence? Yes, and for a number of reasons. Primarily: No evidence for such a connection has ever been published. A statement signed by 143 senior human population geneticists states categorically that genetics research in no way supports the view that "recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results". (See this, this, and this for context.) As understanding of the human genome and the science of population genetics advances, it has become increasingly clear that race is not a biologically meaningful way to categorize human population groups. See for example this statement by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Even if we take ancestral population groups to be proxies for race, most subject-matter experts agree that cognitive differences between such such groups are unlikely to exist. A group of prominent geneticists explain why here. Extensive evidence has been published which indicates that observed differences in IQ test performance between racial groups are environmental in origin. A group of leading psychologists summarizes some of these findings here. Most researchers view the idea of a genetic connection between race and intelligence as scientifically obsolete. See e.g. this statement by the editorial board of Nature. Isn't it true that different races have different average IQ test scores? On average and in certain contexts, yes, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. Crucially, the existence of such average differences today does not mean what racialists have asserted that it means (i.e. that races can be ranked according to their genetic predisposition for intelligence). Most IQ test data comes from North America and Europe, where non-White individuals represent ethnic minorities and often carry systemic burdens which are known to affect test performance. Studies which purport to compare the IQ averages of various nations are considered methodologically dubious and extremely unreliable. Further, important discoveries in the past several decades, such as the Flynn effect and the steady narrowing of the gap between low-scoring and high-scoring groups, as well as the ways in which disparities such as access to prenatal care and early childhood education affect IQ, have led to an understanding that environmental factors are sufficient to account for observed between-group differences. And isn't IQ a measure of intelligence? Not exactly. IQ tests are designed to measure intelligence, but it is widely acknowledged that they measure only a very limited range of an individual's cognitive capacity. They do not measure mental adaptability or creativity, for example. You can read more about the limitations of IQ measurements here. These caveats need to be kept in mind when extrapolating from IQ measurements to statements about intelligence. But even if we were to take IQ to be a measure of intelligence, there would still be no good reason to assert a genetic link between race and intelligence (for all the reasons stated elsewhere in this FAQ). Isn't there research showing that there are genetic differences between races? Yes and no. A geneticist could analyze a DNA sample and then in many cases make an accurate statement about that person's race, but no single gene or group of genes has ever been found that defines a person's race. Such variations make up a minute fraction of the total genome, less even than the amount of genetic material that varies from one individual to the next. It's also important to keep in mind that racial classifications are socially constructed, in the sense that how a person is classified racially depends on perceptions, racial definitions, and customs in their society and can often change when they travel to a different country or when social conventions change over time (see here for more details). So how can different races look different, without having different genes? They do have some different genes, but the genes that vary between any two given races will not necessarily vary between two other races. Race is defined phenotypically, not genotypically, which means it's defined by observable traits. When a geneticist looks at the genetic differences between two races, there are differences in the genes that regulate those traits, and that's it. So comparing Africans to Europeans will show differences in genes that regulate skin color, hair texture, nose and lip shape, and other observable traits. But the rest of the genetic code will be essentially the same. In fact, there is much less genetic material that regulates the traits used to define the races than there is that regulates traits that vary from person to person. In other words, if you compare the genomes of two individuals within the same race, the results will likely differ more from each other than a comparison of the average genomes of two races. If you've ever heard people saying that the races "are more alike than two random people" or words to that effect, this is what they were referring to. Why do people insist that race is "biologically meaningless"? Mostly because it is. As explained in the answer to the previous question, race isn't defined by genetics. Race is nothing but an arbitrary list of traits, because race is defined by observable features. The list isn't even consistent from one comparison to another. We distinguish between African and European people on the basis of skin color, but what about Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American people? They all have more or less the same skin color. We distinguish African and Asian people from European people by the shape of some of their facial features, but what about Native American and Middle Eastern people? They have the same features as the European people, or close enough to engender confusion when skin color is not discernible. Australian Aborigines share numerous traits with African people and are frequently considered "Black" along with them, yet they are descended from an ancestral Asian population and have been a distinct cultural and ethnic group for fifty thousand years. These standards of division are arbitrary and capricious; the one drop rule shows that visible differences were not even respected at the time they were still in use. But IQ is at least somewhat heritable. Doesn't that mean that observed differences in IQ test performance between ancestral population groups must have a genetic component? This is a common misconception, sometimes termed the "hereditarian fallacy". In fact, the heritability of differences between individuals and families within a given population group tells us nothing about the heritability of differences between population groups. As geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell explains: We need to get away from thinking about intelligence as if it were a trait like milk yield in a herd of cattle, controlled by a small, persistent and dedicated bunch of genetic variants that can be selectively bred into animals from one generation to the next. It is quite the opposite – thousands of variants affect intelligence, they are constantly changing, and they affect other traits. It is not impossible for natural selection to produce populations with differences in intelligence, but these factors make it highly unlikely. To end up with systematic genetic differences in intelligence between large, ancient populations, the selective forces driving those differences would need to have been enormous. What’s more, those forces would have to have acted across entire continents, with wildly different environments, and have been persistent over tens of thousands of years of tremendous cultural change. Such a scenario is not just speculative – I would argue it is inherently and deeply implausible. The bottom line is this. While genetic variation may help to explain why one person is more intelligent than another, there are unlikely to be stable and systematic genetic differences that make one population more intelligent than the next. What about all the psychometricians who claim there's a genetic link? The short answer is: they're not geneticists. The longer answer is that there remains a well-documented problem of scientific racism, which has infiltrated psychometry (see e.g. and ). Psychometry is a field where people who advocate scientific racism can push racist ideas without being constantly contradicted by the very work they're doing. And when their data did contradict their racist views, many prominent advocates of scientific racism simply falsified their work or came up with creative ways to explain away the problems. See such figures as Cyril Burt, J. Phillipe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Hans Eysenck, who are best known in the scientific community today for the poor methodological quality of their work, their strong advocacy for a genetic link between race and intelligence, and in some cases getting away with blatant fraud for many years. Isn't it a conspiracy theory to claim that psychometricians do this? No. It is a well-documented fact that there is an organized group of psychometricians pushing for mainstream acceptance of racist, unscientific claims. See this, this and this, as well as our article on scientific racism for more information. Isn't this just political correctness? No, it's science. As a group of scholars including biological anthropologists Agustín Fuentes of Princeton and Jonathan M. Marks of the University of North Carolina explain: "while it is true that most researchers in the area of human genetics and human biological diversity no longer allocate significant resources and time to the race/IQ discussion, and that moral concerns may play an important role in these decisions, an equally fundamental reason why researchers do not engage with the thesis is that empirical evidence shows that the whole idea itself is unintelligible and wrong-headed". These authors compare proponents of a genetic link between race and IQ to creationists, vaccine skeptics, and climate change deniers. At the same time, researchers who choose to pursue this line of inquiry have in no way been hindered from doing so, as is made clear by this article: . It's just that all the evidence they find points to environmental rather than genetic causes for observed differences in average IQ-test performance between racial groups. What about the surveys which say that most "intelligence experts" believe in some degree of genetic linkage between race and IQ? These surveys are almost invariably conducted by advocates of scientific racism, and respondents to these surveys are also almost exclusively members of groups that promote scientific racism. In short, they are not representative samples of mainstream scientific opinion. These surveys tend to have very low participation rates, and often consist of fewer than 100 respondents. Many of the surveys suffer from methodological flaws, such as using leading questions. This leads to an increase in responses from those who agree, and a decrease from those who disagree. Generally speaking, the better the methodology of the survey, the lower agreement it shows with the claim of a genetic link between race and intelligence. Even the most poorly structured surveys, conducted among members of groups that are dominated by advocates for scientific racism, show much doubt and difference of opinion among respondents. The vast majority of respondents have absolutely no qualifications to speak on genetics. Is there really no evidence at all for a genetic link between race and intelligence? No evidence for such a link has ever been presented in the scientific community. Much data has been claimed to be evidence by advocates of scientific racism, but each of these claims has been universally rejected by geneticists. Statistical arguments claiming to detect the signal of such a difference in polygenic scores have been refuted as fundamentally methodologically flawed (see e.g. ), and neither genetics nor neuroscience are anywhere near the point where a mechanistic explanation could even be meaningfully proposed (see e.g. ). This is why the question of a genetic link between race and intelligence is largely considered pseudoscience; it is assumed to exist primarily by advocates of scientific racism, and in these cases the belief is based on nothing but preconceived notions about race. What is the current state of the science on a link between intelligence and race? Please see the article itself for an outline of the scientific consensus. What is the basis for Misplaced Pages's consensus on how to treat the material? Misplaced Pages editors have considered this topic in detail and over an extended period. In short, mainstream science treats the claim that genetics explains the observable differences in IQ between races as a fringe theory, so we use our own guidelines on how to treat such material when editing our articles on the subject. Please refer to the following past discussions: RfC on race and intelligence Race and IQ: "no evidence" for genetic component? RfC: What sources should we use to establish notability and relative balance of different viewpoints? No "direct" evidence for a genetic component RfC on racial hereditarianism

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Representation of the current state per key players

I get the sense that in the contentions of WP:FRINGE regarding hereditarian views, etc., while we can agree we need to include how we got "here" (with details in History of...), the article should be clear on current scholarship. Current opinions of key players would offer (additional) valuable perspective. I offer this passage from Flynn's The spectacles through which I see the race and IQ debate, Intelligence (2010):

  The fact that the GQ gap between blacks and whites is larger than the IQ gap has causal significance. If blacks did eliminate the IQ gap without eliminating the GQ gap, they would still be less able to solve the most complex cognitive problems, which might be deemed the most significant. Moreover, the fact that blacks have an unusual problem with complexity shows that an explanation of the IQ gap should look for aspects of the black environment that discourage cognitive challenge or at least, downgrade its presence. I took upon myself the burden offering a scenario of a succession of black environments from conception to early adulthood based on the deprivation of complexity (Flynn, 2008). It is significant that when the racial IQ gap was eliminated among post-war German occupation children, the GQ gap was gone. This is not to claim that this study settles the debate; rather it gives us confidence that if the IQ gap proves to be entirely environmental, the GQ gap will prove so as well.
   American blacks are not in a time warp so that the environmental causes of their IQ gap with whites are identical to the environmental causes of the IQ gap between the generations. The race and IQ debate should focus on testing the relevant environmental hypotheses. The Flynn Effect is no shortcut; correlations offered by Rushton and Jensen are no shortcut. There are no shortcuts at all.

Flynn, J. R. (2008). Where have all the liberals gone? Race, class, and ideals in America. Cambridge University Press.

I'd be interested in editors' considered thoughts on representation of such positions. I would note Flynn's use of the word "debate." Let's leave arguments over primary and secondary and journals and university texts aside for the moment, and for a change let's use plain English and not shorthand WP:ACRONYMS. Perhaps it would help to commit that any opinions stated should not be used in a diff later. I'd like to see if it's possible to have a conversation, not a staking out and defending of a position with offensive thrusts to take out the opposition. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 15:47, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

He's simply responding to issues raised in what was the latest stage of a long running debate. The Flynn effect noted that the IQ gap between blacks and whites had narrowed; Jensen and Rushton responded that there was no corresponding narrowing of the g gap, saying the Flynn effect hasn't shown any environmental explanation for g. Flynn responds that he has a study showing where the g gap has essentially disappeared (occupied German born children) that lends confidence (though preliminary and not definitive) the g gap too has an environmental explanation. Flynn agrees with Jensen/Rushton that the Flynn effect is not the be-all end-all of the debate. But he disagrees with their confidence that the g and racial inheritance link remains robust. Professor marginalia (talk) 17:32, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

My question wasn't so much regarding analyzing Flynn, it was whether there is value at R&I (or perhaps History of...) to current perspectives from key players in the R&I debate. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 13:33, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Update on EB, Smedley

Dr. Audrey Smedley was quite gracious in her response to my inquiry. She authored the EB materials 1995 with updates in 2005, although she does not recall if the article I specifically mention was among those updated. With regard to the debate on race and intelligence, she suggested her own work Race in North America, the 2007 edition (third) for perspective, and indicated she is working on a new release: "But my sense is that the 'debate' has somewhat diminished in the scientific literature, and this will be reflected in the fourth edition which I am working on now." PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 13:31, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I would only note that "somewhat diminished" does not mean resolved. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 16:15, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Revival of test bias

I've had some correspondence with Indiana University. Suggested reading from Dr. Jonathan Plucker, aside from the tried and true classics (a characterization, not a list), is a recent article in the Journal of Applied Psychology which "examine how we normally determine test bias—in brief, the authors' conclusion was that we have NOT been doing it correctly, suggesting that bias in our cognitive tests is much more prevalent that the field has thought for some time." I'll update on Dr. Sternberg as I (hopefully) make progress. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 15:15, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for checking with up-to-date scholars on these issues. You are identifying yourself as one Wikipedian among many when you write your emails, correct? I have been thinking of a few scholars—some of whom I know in person— to write to about these issues. That would be for the same purpose, to be guided to the best current literature. The suggestions that you or anyone else gather will eventually be reflected in updates to my Intelligence Citations bibliography -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 15:48, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes (of course), I do, typically starting with "I am among a number of "Wikipedians"..." then whatever the topic is. I also indicate the source of my personal interest to document it is genuine—that is, I'm not contacting them because I've found a topic du jour that caught my passing fancy. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 16:09, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

A note on the Aguinis et al. test bias paper: It deals with bias in pre-employment testing, claiming that the consensus that there is no bias against minorities is unwarranted because the studies that have established this consensus lack statistical power to prove anything about test bias. Using simulated data, they show that it's possible that some pre-employment tests are biased (in one way or another). They speculate that things like stereotype threat could make the tests biased, although they have no evidence of this. They also acknowledge that studies on test bias that use college admission test data do have enough statistical power, and the results of those studies are pretty much identical to those using pre-employment testing data, i.e. there either is no bias or there's a slight bias in favor of minorities. I would not discuss this one single study in the article, until it has been established that their arguments are relevant.--Victor Chmara (talk) 17:17, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

There is another writing on the issue of test bias that I should link to here. The claim is that the usual method of showing that most tests are not biased is fundamentally flawed. I thought that was interesting, because I thought that the test bias issue has been a settled issue since the 1980s—certainly very mainstream authors on psychometrics who do not agree with Arthur Jensen on much else are happy to cite his book on the subject as the last word on test bias. I'll have to dig into the sources and see if I can wrap my mind around the contrary claim. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 17:48, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Just thought I'd provide the abstract from Aguinis et al., the emphasis is mine.

"We developed a new analytic proof and conducted Monte Carlo simulations to assess the effects of methodological and statistical artifacts on the relative accuracy of intercept- and slope-based test bias assessment. The main simulation design included 3,185,000 unique combinations of a wide range of values for true intercept- and slope-based test bias, total sample size, proportion of minority group sample size to total sample size, predictor (i.e., preemployment test scores) and criterion (i.e., job performance) reliability, predictor range restriction, correlation between predictor scores and the dummy-coded grouping variable (e.g., ethnicity), and mean difference between predictor scores across groups. Results based on 15 billion 925 million individual samples of scores and more than 8 trillion 662 million individual scores raise questions about the established conclusion that test bias in preemployment testing is nonexistent and, if it exists, it only occurs regarding intercept-based differences that favor minority group members. Because of the prominence of test fairness in the popular media, legislation, and litigation, our results point to the need to revive test bias research in preemployment testing."

Hope this helps. I have a copy of the paper. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 18:40, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

File:Heritability plants.jpeg

Has anybody noticed that File:Heritability plants.jpeg does a poor job in illustrating what it wants to illustrate? The source graphic shows that deficient nutrition can cause differences in growth that are not in relation to normal growth. But File:Heritability plants.jpeg depicts corn plants whose growth under deficient nutrition seems to be in relation to normal growth. While the source shows the differences very clear (e.g. the third corn plant on the right side changes from much bigger than the second plant on the right to clearly smaller than the second plant on the right), it needs a close look to notice the differences in our graphic (the first plant on the left changes from the same size than the third plant on the left to smaller than the third plant on the left). There's no similar striking difference as in the source. --::Slomox:: >< 18:19, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Ethics of failing to note the self-identified race of 'scientists'

Surely it makes sense to note the supposed 'race' of the various 'scientists' quoted on this article. Would creating theories claiming to prove that the group to which the researcher belongs is 'intellectually superior' to the group that has been historically oppressed by the researcher's group represent a conflict of interest? I'll be interested to know what the literature says about this subject. Also, do fellow editors know whether Jensen, Lynn and Eynseck are white? It'd be interesting to know what percentage of writers who think that whites are intellectually superior are themselves white...Ackees (talk) 00:59, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

No it doesn't make sense for wikipedians to make such connections. If there's any relevant point to made along those lines any such correlations would absolutely have to be reliably and faithfully sourced.Professor marginalia (talk) 01:20, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. Reliable sources are key for such claims. In practice, I can identify researchers of various "races" who take each of the several most commonly taken positions on the issue of this article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 02:20, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Weijibaikebianji, that's fascinating! You're saying that there's a 'black' psychologist who believes themselves and their family to be genetically mentally inferior to their 'white' colleagues? Please en-darken us - who is this most deferential of academics? And what is the source of your information - is it a 'self-identified' racial profile, or your O.R.?

Professor marginalia, I wonder whether such connections have been made in the pertinent literature but which have somehow 'failed' to make their way into this article. Perhaps, editors have been so far unwilling to highlight this deep conflict of interest because it reflects a similar ethical failing in their own approach to the subject (along the lines of 'I was born brainier than thou'.) Ackees (talk) 09:02, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Ackees, I actually have no reason to believe from the sources that the hardline-hereditarian view of "race and IQ" issues is a "commonly taken position" (the phrase from my reply yesterday). Discussing just what the sources say and what is a mainstream position is a matter of ongoing debate here. Among the few authors on the subject who have self-identified in their writings as persons of African descent, here are some of the positions I have seen them support in their writings:

1) black persons currently have genuinely lower IQs, as a matter of group averages, than white persons, as a matter of group averages, and this difference is consequential in the real world (and not just the result of "test bias"), but the causation of this difference is cultural, and this group difference will diminish and possibly vanish over time;

2) black persons currently have genuinely lower IQs, as a matter of group averages, than white persons, as a matter of group averages, but this difference is not consequential in the real world, but primarily reflects test bias;

3) black persons currently have genuinely lower IQs, as a matter of group averages, than white persons, as a matter of group averages, and this difference is consequential in the real world (and not just the result of "test bias"), but the causation of this difference is primarily the environmental effects of societal racial prejudice and poverty, so fighting racial prejudice and poverty will cause this difference to vanish over time.

There are probably some other major positions on the basic issue that I haven't listed here. By contrast, the position

4) black persons currently have genuinely lower IQs, as a matter of group averages, than white persons, as a matter of group averages, and this difference is consequential in the real world (and not just the result of "test bias"), and the causation of this difference is primarily different gene frequencies in the black and white human populations, such that is unlikely that this group difference will ever diminish over time

is verifiably a position taken by some "white" scholars, but I'm not sure whether or not any black scholars have written in support of this position. I'm not at all sure that today (2010) this position can be characterized as mainstream any more—it was surely very commonplace during my childhood, but a number of testable hypotheses that logically follow from this position have been shown to be wrong. Twenty-first century views of genetics and especially twenty-first century views of the development of IQ over the lifespan strongly suggest that the gap between groups could close entirely. One "white" scholar whose thorough article about genetics I have at hand (it hasn't been entered into my citations list yet) points out that all available genetic evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that black people, as a matter of group averages of individual genotypes, have a superior genetic endowment for IQ when compared to white people, as a matter of group averages of individual genotypes. He is quite correct. Until environmental influences on IQ are much better understood, and until genetic influences are understood at the individual gene level and at the level of pleiotropy among multiple genes influencing multiple traits, we have no idea what genotype is most favorable for IQ. So today we have no idea which individuals (if any), have the best shuffle of genes for obtaining high IQ scores.

Thanks for asking the follow-up question about what I meant. I learn from that kind of interaction with a fellow thinking human being. Does what I wrote here help explain where I was coming from in my last comment? I welcome you to suggest further sources to add to this and related articles. The winding down of the current Arbitration Committee case should allow a more collaborative editing environment that should help with the long overdue clean-up of many of those articles. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 15:52, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Hello WeijiBaikeBianji, if you will allow me to summarize your answer to my question, "which 'black' psychologist believes themselves genetically mentally inferior to whites?", then your answer is, "actually, none". However, you will forgive me for prompting you with something of a rhetorical question - I am not a novice to this subject, I know perfectly well what the various positions are and who takes them. Your answer demonstrates that is only 'white' researchers that claim white genetic intellectual superiority to 'blacks' (and a minority at that). It is not O.R. to note the 'race' with which these researchers identify. But is particularly important as 'bias' is thought to be one of the key factors skewing 'results'. So, as well as being important, it is relevant to the subject. In fact, as a matter of principle, all articles in which 'race' or 'nation' controversies arise should probably note the 'race' of the protagonists in the dispute. This will allow readers to more fully understand the issue in the round - this need not imply that researchers are 'biased'. Although, after all, it is the researchers who claim that you can predict a person's mental function based on skin color. (We need not assume that readers will do, too). It will also be very useful for readers to note the 'race' of researchers who refute 'genetic inferiority/superiority' claims - as many of these are also 'white'. The information need not necessarily come from scientific literature, or be self-assigned, - no doubt there is much useful journalism which does not violate BLP.Ackees (talk) 09:54, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately, noting the race of current scholars in the field of "race" (widely construed) when it should have no bearing on reliability creates the perception of unreliability and bias. Let's not pretend otherwise, so let's not go there. Period. PЄTЄRS J VЄСRUМВА ►TALK 13:22, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Article to-do list

As a result of the current arbitration case over this article, it’s looking pretty likely that I (and a few other “article regulars”) will be topic banned from the article sometime soon. There have been some outstanding issues with this article that I’d been hoping to eventually address, but if my topic ban happens before the article’s protection expires (which also seems likely), I’m not going to have the opportunity to try and address them. So I was thinking it might be useful to some of the relative newcomers here if I could point out some of the specific things that I think still need to be done on this article at some point in the future. Some of these are things that I think everyone could agree need to be done, while for others I imagine there will be some disagreement over them, but I think they should still at least be discussed.

1: The current version of the lead section does not have consensus. This is actually one of the few areas where Mathsci and I agree. He’s pointed out in one of his arbitration subpages here that the last version of the lead section which had consensus was in April, which is correct. I also agree with him that April’s version of this section was better than the current version, although for different reasons: Mathsci explains his reasons for this on the page I linked to, while in my own case I think the main problem is that the manual of style for Misplaced Pages:LEAD states that the lead should be able to stand on its own as a concise version of the article, and the current lead does not come anywhere close to this. At the very least, an overview of the article ought to mention which racial groups have higher or lower average IQs. (Which is included in April’s version of the lead, but not the current one.)

2: The article contains several images showing how racial IQ gaps are reflected in SAT scores. Although these images are relevant and well-sourced, the article doesn’t contain any explanation of why the correlation between SAT and IQ would result in this. There are sources which discuss this; the article just doesn’t cite them. I’m pretty sure this problem has been discussed before, but it was during one of the periods when the article was protected, and after it was unprotected nobody remembered to add those sources to the article.

3: Someone needs to add more references to the processing efficiency section. This section was written almost entirely by Bpesta22, and I was hoping he could also add the references to it. (Being a newbie, he seemed to be having trouble figuring out how to use ref tags.) But he disappeared shortly after the beginning of the arbitration case, and once the arbitration case was underway I was too occupied with it to add the references myself. I can provide some suggested citations for this section, if anyone needs them, as long as I have enough time for that before my topic ban is implemented.

4: There’s one major section of the article which still needs to be discussed, and hopefully improved to the point where it can be added back in. (I say “back in” because it was added briefly during mediation, but then removed because we were trying to avoid large changes to the article while mediation was underway). This section would be about the way that race and intelligence affects society, including how racial IQ gaps are reflected in social variables which correlate with IQ. The current draft of this section is in my userspace here, where WavePart and Vecrumba have both made contributions to it. We attempted to discuss this section of the article in June here, and there weren’t any objections to it in terms of content, but Muntuwandi was of the opinion that it wasn’t appropriate to add this section to the article while the arbitration case was in progress. I think it would be good if this discussion could be resumed after the arbitration case is finished, even if I can’t participate in it. It doesn’t matter to me whether this section eventually gets turned into something that looks nothing like what’s in my userspace—I don’t have any devotion to this particular structure; I just think the literature discussing how race and intelligence affects society is something that should be included in the article.

I realize expecting this section to be added in my absence is a bit of a longshot, since I get the impression that not many people other than me care about the article covering this topic, and a lot of people feel very strongly that the article should not cover it. On the other hand, two of the original proponents of the article covering this topic were DJ and Varoon Arya, both of whom eventually stopped participating here because they couldn’t tolerate Mathsci’s behavior. Since Mathsci is presumably going to be topic banned also, perhaps after the end of the arbitration case these editors would be willing to come back.

The other editors who are likely to be topic banned (David.Kane and Mathsci) are welcome to add to this list, if they can think of anything else that belongs on it. --Captain Occam (talk) 18:59, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Occam, I agree that the relation of IQ gaps to corresponding gaps in abilities and skills in school, workplace, and elsewhere is a crucial question. However, I think your draft is not only too long, but also problematic in light of WP:SYNTHESIS. This recent article by Roland Fryer is interesting, because rather than trying to explain away the gaps in IQ and other tests, he treats them as gaps in real-life skills, and, among other things, replicates the finding that racial gaps in various social outcomes are greatly reduced, eliminated or even reversed when IQ differences are controlled for. (Fryer's main piece of evidence for the efficacy of educational interventions in closing gaps, the success of the Harlem Children's Zone students, seems, however, to be largely an artifact of the extremely lax standards used in New York student assessments in recent years.)

And yeah, the current lead section pretty bad, and the rest of the article isn't too great either. Why all the lengthy quotations?--Victor Chmara (talk) 22:53, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

As I said, I encourage the rest of you to completely overhaul the draft that’s in my userspace before adding it to the article. I’m sure it’s capable of being improved a lot beyond the improvements that I and others have made to it already. If you’re interested in examining this section’s evolution, this is what it looked like in January’s version of the article. This section’s on-and-off inclusion in the article actually dates back at least to 2006, and this is what it looked like back then.

I might even work some more on trying to improve this section in my userspace, if that’s allowed. Do you know whether a topic ban applies only to mainspace pages, or whether I’m not even allowed to edit pages related to this topic that are in my userspace? --Captain Occam (talk) 00:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for opening this section. Since back on 30 June 2009, when I linked to this article in its then form for a bibliography I was compiling at that time, I've had the sense that the actual professional literature on the subject and this article have not enjoyed much interchange. The current full-protected version of the article has some even worse problems with sourcing. There is a big, long to-do list of things that need to be fixed with this article, and I encourage other editors to use this section that Captain Occam has kindly opened to suggest changes. I'll try to set those out in some kind of orderly fashion in the next day or so. Major changes up to and including a title change for the article and mergers with other articles (or hiving off subarticles) all ought to be considered. Let's collaborate, and especially let's turn to the sources, and let's try to make the article much better. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 02:05, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Even though this is a topic that interests me, for a long time I was reluctant to get involved in this article because of what the editing atmosphere has been like. But if the new changes and discretionary sanctions cause as much improvement as everyone is hoping they will, I might finally feel differently about participating here. -Ferahgo the Assassin (talk) 04:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Does anyone have this source at hand?

I'll list some sources here, and update it by edits from time to time.

• Kenny, Michael G. (2002), "Toward a Racial Abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the Origins of The Pioneer Fund", Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 38: 259–283

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