So if any of you know me, you know that I'm minoring in Anthropology. I love the study of humans socially and biologically through the evolution of time. The other day I was going through one of the books I had read for my Human Biological Variations course I had my sophmore year. The theme of the that class had to do with race....which makes sense hence the name of the course. The question we were trying to analyze during that whole semester is: what is race and does it matter?
One of the books we read was called "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Gould. This book really caught my amusement and interest as it talks about what intelligence is and ultimately what is race. This book is an argument to the book "The Bell Curve" by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which talks about IQ scores and inborn cognitive limits. In this book the argument is called biological determinism. "Shared behavioral norms, and the social and economic differences between human groups-primarily races, classes, and sexes- arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of bilogy. (Gould 1996: 52)"
"The Bell Curve" makes the suggestion that the IQ is an innate variance that everyone has that can determine an individual's intelligence....it does not take into consideration that there are environmental factors that can determine innate intelligence. Gould's book illustrates how this is a propostrous determination, he also explains how the IQ test is a terrible analysis of an individual's intelligence and that it leads to social class differences (even race differences) that are inaccurate and falsely protrayed. How does the IQ test lead to social class differences? It's just a test to see how intelligent right?
IQ is based on a test that was developed by Alfred Binet to determine where a child was educationally and to find out if they need extra help in school. It was not a measure of innate intelligence by any means and it should not be used as such. However, in today’s society the IQ test is now used to measure intelligence of an individual to the extent of getting jobs, determining a position in society, and even in schools as a labeling mechanism. The IQ test gives children and individuals a label that they live with in society which leads to social class differences.
The IQ test is a ridiculous tool to measure one’s intelligence. Environment is a big factor because what we’ve learned affects our intellect and reasoning. Our genes can only code for so much, the environment is what determines if we are to reach our potential for those coded genes. Culture, economics, politics and the physical environment all affect whether we reach our potential or not.
4 comments:
I agree! Great job with your articulate and inspiring analysis. You can tell you are in college girlfriend. :)
I think that the test is more of measure of how much potential one has to learn and excel, but I've always thought potential was bull crap. I hated seeing that on a report card, "not working to his potential" because everyone has different ways of learning and so forth.
Don't know if that made sense, but meh...
The IQ test is not a measure of how intelligent one is, but how quickly they think. The questions on an IQ test are so simple that with relative ease, any number of people could get 100% on. Rather, it is a test to see how quickly these simple questions can be processed in the brain, and because of the variety in types of questions (verbal, mathematical, spatial, etc.), how responsive, resilient, and versatile the brain is in its neural connections. Thus, when someone has an IQ, they are not necessarily smarter, they just think faster. Whenever someone makes an observation that is particularly critical and/or astute, we have a tendency to say he/she is "a genius." In reality, that is not too far from the truth, as these statements will often be thought of my someone else (perhaps far less intelligent by the way the IQ test measures) given enough time to analyze the problem.
The only thing I would argue with Jon, is your statement that when someone is called a "genius" it just means they came up with the idea faster than someone else.
However, if you look at all the famous scientists who came up with theories who are considered to be "geniuses" either now or back then really didn't think of the idea before everyone else.
For example, Charles Darwin was considered a genius of his time and ours because of this theory of evolution and Darwinism. However, he was the first one to come up with it, Alfred Russell Wallace came up with that idea first. Darwin actually used Wallace's idea for his own and just build upon it with research.
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