Searching for justice: The discovery of IQ gains over time.

Abstract

Humane-egalitarian ideals, whose aims are group justice and reducing environmental inequality and privilege, must be tested against reality, as revealed by psychology and other social sciences. Four issues are addressed: the equation between IQ and intelligence, whether group potential is determined by a group's mean IQ, whether the Black-White IQ gap is genetic, and the meritocratic thesis that genes for IQ will become highly correlated with class. Massive IQ gains over time test the lQ-intelligence equation, reveal groups who achieve far beyond their mean IQs, and falsify prominent arguments for a genetic racial IQ gap. Class IQ trends suggest America is not evolving toward a meritocracy, but a core refutation of that thesis is needed and supplied. Finally, the viability of humane ideals is assessed against a worst-case scenario. This article is an attempt to make explicit the connecting thread of 20 years of research into group IQ differences. On one level, the various researches recommended one another. Massive IQ gains over time revealed that the present generation has a huge IQ advantage over the previous generation. Yet the IQ advantage did not seem to be accompanied by a corresponding achievement advantage, which suggested the possibility that the mean IQ of Chinese and Japanese Americans might underpredict their achievements. IQ differences between the generations are clearly environmental in origin. Yet heritability of IQ within generations is robust, which suggested that high within-race heritability estimates do not signal a genetic IQ gap between Black and White populations. From this, it is a natural extension to address the meritocracy

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