What I.Q. Doesn't Tell You About Race

My title for this piece is the subtitle of "None of the Above," Malcolm Gladwell's review of What Is Intelligence?, a new book by James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, New Zealand. The book and the Gladwell review deal with "the Flynn effect," discovered over 20 years ago by Flynn himself. Flynn noticed in 1984 that, according to Gladwell, "I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as [intelligence] tests had been administered."

Many social scientists have long thought I.Q. ("intelligence quotient") reveals something innate and largely genetic in each individual human being's intrinsic mental capacity, something "real" which I.Q. tests supposedly show is larger in some of us than in others of us. True, the nurture we get as infants and the environment we are brought up in contribute heavily to our person-to-person I.Q. differences, for better or for worse. Yet we each supposedly start out life with an immutable mental potential that varies with our heredity. If we have the right genes, we can be smart. If not, we're average — or, worse, we're morons, idiots, imbeciles.

Thus, when intelligence tests in the first half of the 20th century showed significant I.Q. differences among various races and ethnic groups, those groups who scored lower on average were deemed genetically inferior. The people Gladwell calls "I.Q. fundamentalists" believed — as many still do — that the genes we inherit by virtue of our race put brackets around our potential for mental achievement, as measured by I.Q. tests.


I.Q. fundamentalism is something like religious fundamentalism as it applies to Darwin's theory of evolution and the origin of species. Creationists counter Darwin by asserting that natural selection might be able to account for some degree of variation within fixed species established by the divine creator, but it isn't powerful enough to make new species. I.Q. fundamentalists say the influence of environmental factors might be able to swing I.Q. up or down around a point fixed either high or low by heredity or race, but it can't turn a dope into a mental giant.

But that's what the Flynn effect seems to show: the passage of time and the succession of generations can turn below-average I.Q.s into above-average I.Q.s, and above-average scores into genius-level scores. That's why the I.Q. tests have to be constantly "renormed" (made harder) to hold the average score at 100.

How could time and generational succession, occurring over far too few years for genetic improvements to take root and make a difference, make people smarter? What sort of cultural evolution accounts for it?


Flynn and Gladwell say the question itself is flawed. We are not getting smarter in any fundamental sense. Rather, we are getting more modern. Gladwell: "An I.Q. ... measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."

I.Q. tests don't really measure intelligence, then. They measure the extent to which our cultural milieu has fashioned what Gladwell calls "scientific spectacles" for us and taught us to put them on.

When the Flynn effect is broken down into subcategories of mental functioning, it is the category of I.Q. test questions called "similarities" in which we beat the pants off our fathers, and especially our grandfathers. Questions in this category ask us to say what goes with what, and why — as in "In what way are dogs and rabbits alike?" The "right" answer is supposedly the "taxonomic" one: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. "A nineteenth-century American," though, says Gladwell, "would have said that 'you use dogs to hunt rabbits.' "

For a like reason, when I.Q. tests were given to members of the Kpelle tribe in Liberia, the self-styled "wise" of the tribe would — wrongly, per the official answer book — sort potatoes (a food) with knives (a tool), because you use the latter to cut the former. Only when asked how a "fool" would answer the same questions did the Kpelle sort potatoes with other foods and knives with other tools.

The Kpelle, as members of a traditional society, did not wear "scientific spectacles" and automatically assume that a "taxonomic," category-based answer was best. Nor did our nineteenth-century American ancestors, unless they were in the minority who were highly educated. Today, college degrees and "scientific spectacles" are more prevalent ... and people generally have higher I.Q. scores (unless, that is, the tests are renormed).


But not all Americans have benefited to an equal extent from the Flynn effect, or at an equal pace. In the last century, various immigrant groups (Italians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Hispanics, and others) were called inferior for failing to score as high on intelligence tests, on average, as people of Northern and Western European descent. The gaps were erased — and then some, in the case of Asians — in succeeding generations.

Except, sadly, in the case of African Americans. Though blacks narrowed the I.Q. gap during the 25 years following World War II, "that trend stalled" over the subsequent quarter century, Gladwell notes. Though, Gladwell adds, "more recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again," the gap still perplexes social scientists and encourages I.Q. fundamentalists to deem blacks inferior.

But, Flynn shows, blacks start out life with I.Q. parity, according to the (admittedly crude) tests measuring infant cognitive functions. By age four, blacks' I.Q.s are on average just a tad behind whites', at 95.4 to whites' 100. But by age 24, the black shortfall has widened to 83.4.

It is a slew of adverse environmental factors that account for this, Flynn shows, by keeping African Americans from learning to put on the "scientific spectacles" of the modern American mind. There's no reason to believe blacks aren't just as smart, but they don't necessarily end up filtering the world through the same cognitive categories as the supposed mental giants among us do.

Miracles and Mini-Miracles

The End of Certainty by Ilya Prigogine

In A God of Beckoning? I embroidered upon the science laid out in Ilya Prigogine's book The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature a theological theory, if you will. It was a theory of mini-miracles. Where Prigogine saw occasions of pure random chance sparking evolutionary changes in living systems in the natural world, I saw opportunities for God to work little miracles.

Every time one of Prigogine's so-called dissipative systems — all living systems are dissipative systems — reaches a crossroads in the course of its development, a little miracle can occur. Instead of blind luck being responsible for which future path the system is going to take out of its present instability, God can beckon and the system can freely follow ... or not. God does not coerce compliance.

If the system indeed responds positively to God's call to it, it is as if it is echoing Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she answered the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation told of in Luke's Gospel. Mary assented by saying, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it to me according to your word." No coercion there.

Prigogine's pure science contains no such theological speculations. And it applies equally well to other types of systems subject to motion and change, including the moving, roiling particles that make up atoms, as understood today by quantum physics. Quantum objects, too, are supposed to be probabilistic with respect to the odds of whether certain events occur or not. I'd say they, too, are candidates for mini-annunciations and mini-miracles.

Likewise, the systems studied in the branches of physics called thermodynamics and chaos theory — not to mention in the theory of classical dynamics inherited from Newton — are aptly described by Prigogine's mathematics. These as well can receive and assent to mini-annunciations, in my theory, and be the occasions of mini-miracles.

All these types of systems have in common the fact that they change irreversibly over time. This means they evolve. Evolution is a word we typically associate with the origin of biological species, à la Darwin. Some believers in God feel the theory of evolution works against religion. In my view, there is ample reason to believe that the evolutionary history of living systems and of the several other kinds of systems subject to Prigogine's mathematical descriptions amount to a skein of mini-annunciations assented to, making for mini-miracles without number. All that is necessary to bridge theology to science is an image of every so-called "chance event" as being an opportunity for a mini-annunciation and a mini-miracle to occur.


It seems to me all of a sudden — I don't think I really believed this before — that a belief in miracles is indispensable to a belief in God. Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, confirms this in his op-ed piece "Much revealed in telling of the Hanukkah story."

The Jewish festival of Hanukkah which began last Tuesday night, and which Greenberg discusses, might be seen as a memorial of a military victory of the Jews over Seleucid Greek hegemony some 2,200 years ago, but Greenberg brings out the fact that what it really celebrates is a miracle. After the Jews' victory, there didn't seem to be enough oil to light the lamps of their Temple in Jerusalem, and keep them lit until a new oil supply could be prepared. But, no; a seeming one-day supply lasted fully eight days: the "miracle of the lights."

Greenberg explains it thus:

In the glow of the candles, the heroic feats of the Maccabees [in defeating their non-Jewish enemies] have become transmuted into acts of divine intervention. The blessing over the candles recited each night of the holiday goes: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who wrought miracles for our fathers in days of old." Miracles, not victories.

... The victory is to be celebrated not for its own sake but for what it reveals.

One more violent confrontation has been lifted out of history and enters the realm of the sacred. A messy little guerrilla war in the dim past of a forgotten empire has become something else, something that partakes of the eternal. ... [This] may be the greatest miracle of Hanukkah: the transformation of the oldest and darkest of human activities, war, into a feast of illumination.

... If there is one, unchanging message associated with this minor holiday magnified by time, it can be found in the unchanging portion of the Prophets designated to be read for the Sabbath of Hanukkah. It is Zechariah 4:1-7, with its penultimate verse:

Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.

The Spirit of God is revealed not by might, nor by power ... but by miracles. The candlelight which by ordinary reckoning would last only a day instead lasts a week and a day. A world which by ordinary reckoning hasn't a prayer of evolving animals with God-blessed souls does so anyway. Who is to say that all such miracles are not skeins of mini-miracles? Such occasions of surprise would not defy the laws of nature at all, except that an event which by ordinary reckoning is the product of blind chance would actually be in a long series of nature's numberless assents to God's ceaseless mini-annunciations?

A God of Beckoning?

The End of Certainty by Ilya Prigogine

The late Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's 1997 book The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature reformulates the mathematics of physics to show an irreversible arrow of time. Prigogine focuses on systems made of objects in motion — objects as large as planets, stars, and galaxies and as small as molecules, atoms, and the subatomic particles studied in quantum physics. He shows that the objects' changing locations — their movements — are describable as the shifting relationships of mathematical waves.

When waves are superposed atop one another, they may cancel each other out, or they may reinforce one another. When waves of closely related wavelengths reinforce one another in just the right way, they create resonances. Prigogine shows how resonances in nature make for instability, first, and then new order.

When a violinist bows a string, the body of the violin resonates in sympathy with the frequencies at which the string vibrates in air — the fundamental frequency of the note being played along with all its harmonic overtones — to make music. When resonances occur in natural systems, they provide opportunities for new and more complex order to arise. I discussed these ideas about resonances in more detail in Chance ... or God? and in The World as Music.


Resonances in nature's dynamical systems — systems made of moving objects and thus undergoing change over time — are associated with instabilities. In the "phase space" representing all the possible states a system may visit during the course of its journey in time, at those points where resonances occur there is chaotic unpredictability. Certain of the systems which interest Prigogine most are "dissipative" ones; imbibing energy and exporting waste, they hold themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium. These dissipative systems include all living organisms. When these far-from-equilibrium systems experience the instabilities associated with resonances, they "choose" between two or more new arcs through their phase space. These new paths represent a higher and more complex order than the order which existed before the instability. Accordingly, new order emerges spontaneously out of chaos.

What Prigogine's mathematical descriptions do not tell us is why the system chooses one new path instead of another. In the simplest case, that of a "pitchfork bifurcation," the system has two equally likely choices and picks one of them. Why that one? Why not the other? How is the choice made?

The choice is probabilistic. Descriptively, the same laws of chance apply to a pitchfork bifurcation as to the flip of a coin. Statistically, over a long enough series of trials, half the time the coin will come up heads and half the time tails. Likewise, at a pitchfork bifurcation the dissipative system seemingly has a 50% chance of picking path A and a 50% chance of picking path B.

In Chance ... or God? I suggested that the supposedly random decision made by a dissipative system is somehow influenced by a God who "stills the seas" of chaos to allow new order to emerge. This is an idea which does not appear in Prigogine's discussion, since it lies beyond science.


It may be that at any given branching point, God is equally happy with path A or path B. But it seems likely — since God is thought by many believers to prefer the specific evolutionary pathways that allowed intelligent creatures such as ourselves to arise on earth — that in at least some bifurcations God has a definite preference. What happens then?

Setting aside the question of how God does whatever he does, what does he do? Does he, for example, somehow coerce a dissipative system at a crossroads of instability to take path A rather than path B?

My own inclination is to believe that God never forces such divinely favored choices on nature. If we think about what such a policy of coercion would imply, we have little choice but to imagine God as canceling whatever freedom nature-per-se was originally granted to make its own choices. But why would God create nature in such a way as to have nominal freedom of choice but no real freedom, in that God himself preempts nature's freedom at the drop of a hat?

My feeling is also that the imaginable divine methodology that lies at the opposite conceptual extreme is not the case either: the one in which God takes no purposive action whatever. True, it is not unthinkable that God somehow designed the world in such a way that, left entirely to its own devices, it might (albeit gradually) evolve creatures like us. But that would imply that God is blithely unconcerned about the possibility of "wrong" choices made by nature along the way, not really caring whether a free Mother Nature errs and evolves a soulless world by accident.

We are taught by our religions, however, that God rues our choices when they don't correspond to his own desires. Why wouldn't that apply to nature writ large?


If God neither coerces nature nor is content with whatever probabilistic choices nature happens to make, "right" or "wrong," is there some middle conceptual ground which allows God to call forth from nature the evolutionary pathways he prefers? I would like to believe that there is.

Specifically, I would like to imagine that God in effect "beckons" to the physical world. The world can then freely "choose" whether or not to follow.

If the world does not respond to God's beckoning, then the "godless" picture drawn by Prigogine says it all. When an evolving dissipative system arrives at a pitchfork bifurcation — to take the simplest case — it chooses blindly which of two possible paths to follow. The two paths, in the case of the pitchfork bifurcation, are equiprobable. One is as likely to be taken as the other, and the question of how the actual choice is made is unanswerable.

But if the world indeed responds positively to God's beckoning, then the system in question "defies the odds" and follows the path God intends it to follow.


It is for several reasons that I like this image of God beckoning and the world freely responding by defying the odds and following the evolutionary pathways God favors.

One reason is that, as far as I can see, it comports perfectly with Prigogine's mathematics and physics. According to his model, various types of physical systems, including those which he terms dissipative, have certain characteristics in common: they are best described by probability distributions; they can be modeled abstract waves stacked atop one another; they have irreversible arrows of time; they are prone to points of instability that mimic chaos; from these chaotic instabilities new order arises probabilistically. Nothing in my image of a God "beckoning" to a natural world, which then freely responds by "defying the odds" and picking from supposedly equiprobable options in accordance with God's preferences, contradicts that.

Rather, when the metaphorical coin of a probabilistic choice made by nature happens to come up "heads" — as presumably desired by God, inasmuch as it furthers his plans for an evolving world — then for all we know it happened by blind luck.

Every metaphorical or actual coin flip represents what students of probability and statistics call a "trial." There is no way to learn whether or not an ordinary, non-metaphorical coin-flip, seen as an individual trial, has a truly random result ... as opposed to being a response to some unseen factor that has influenced the coin to come up heads.

True, when one makes a long series of trial flips, one expects half the flips to come up heads and half tails. But if it just so happens that there are a lot more heads than tails in any series of trials, then, well, so be it. It is not totally impossible for a truly fair coin to come up heads 100 times in a row, or 1,000, or even 1,000,000. So if the results of 10,000 flips are 7,500 heads and 2,500 tails, the coin could still be fair.

Likewise, if the results of 10,000 choices made by evolving dissipative systems in the natural world go in favor of what we assume God would prefer fully 7,500 times out of 10,000 — or 9,000, or 9,999, or 10,000 — we still have no proof that there really is a God. Prigogine's "godless" picture of chance alone making choices in the natural world could still be all that's going on.


Prigogine's systems cannot help but evolve. This is one meaning of the arrow of time which his equations demonstrate. Just as Darwin showed, as biological systems evolve, new species originate. Presumably, evolutionary novelty enters the picture at bifurcation points where dissipative systems' behavior patterns grow unstable. At these points, resonances make for chaotic behavior ... and then new order unfailingly arises.

My suggestion is that Darwinian evolution is real, but that God "beckons" to systems at crossroads of instability. Then they may (or may not) freely choose to follow one particularly "blessed" arc through phase space instead of any of the other possibilities. For all science can detect, this choice is a matter of blind chance.

The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, one of the best known popular writers on evolution science, had it that our species appeared on earth by blind luck. If we were to rewind the tape of evolutionary history and play it again, he famously said, Homo sapiens would surely never appear. The odds against our ever having evolved are astronomical. That we did evolve is a matter of, again, blind luck.

Gould may have been right about the astronomical odds against our appearance, if evolutionary changes happen at random. Other theorists offer better odds, ones that hinge on the tendency of the systems which Prigogine calls dissipative to "self-organize." Self-organizing systems are biased in favor of ever-increasing complexity, which makes it easier to imagine ourselves as (in the words of theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman) "we the expected."

Yet the views of Gould, Kauffman, and Prigogine are all basically "godless" — as they should be, since science has no way to detect the influence of God on evolutionary processes. But it should be kept in mind that there still may be a God who beckons to nature and elicits behavior which science is powerless to disentangle from the workings of chance.


Beckoning-and-following is one useful metaphor for what happens when a superintending God modifies the workings of chance. Another might involve an image of calling-and-responding: God calls to nature and nature answers back by doing his bidding. Yet another analogy is my favorite: annunciation-and-assent.

Chapter 1 of the Gospel of Luke tells the story of the angel Gabriel coming unexpectedly to a not-yet-married Mary and announcing God's intent to give her a son, to be named Jesus, without benefit of having had the usual marital relations. "And Mary said, 'Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it to me according to your word.' "

When God beckons to a dynamical system undergoing a crisis of instability, I take what happens to be a sort of mini-annunciation. If the system responds by, in effect, saying "be it to me according to your word," a mini-miracle occurs. It is by a series of such mini-miracles that evolution defies the odds and produces creatures like us that find favor with God.