Raising the Third World’s I.Q. with Iodine?

compiled by Lewis Loflin

December 4, 2008 Nicholas D. Kristof reports from Pakistan he has the answer for the low IQs of many Asians and Africans. It’s iodized salt! He reports,

Almost one-third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness. When a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world.

It is true that malnutrition is a big problem in many of these dysfunctional and backward countries. Most of this malnutrition is due to these violent and dysfunctional cultures. Case in point was the once prosperous Rhodesia, today called Zimbabwe. Under white rule there was no starvation and the nation was a food exporter. Faced with British and American boycotts, they (the West) helped install Communist Mugabe around 1980. ZANLA under Mugabe shot down civilian airliners and butchered the survivors. The West demanded black rule, now we got black mass starvation. Mugabe is still in power today. Iodized salt won't fix this problem.

He writes about Pakistan, a Muslim terrorist state. To quote, "Pakistan is typical of the challenges. Until recently, 6 in 10 Pakistani schoolchildren were iodine-deficient. Iodine just wasn’t on anyone’s mind. "I had never heard of iodized salt,” said Haji Sajjawal Khan, a 65-year-old owner of a small salt factory here, near the capital of Islamabad. Officials from the Micronutrient Initiative and other aid agencies reached out to factory owners like Mr. Khan and encouraged them to iodize salt, in part to help make Pakistanis healthier and more intelligent. "It will prevent people’s necks from being swollen and will make people smarter. So he agreed to add an iodine drip into his salt grinder."

One of the obstacles is the rumor that iodized salt is actually a contraceptive, a dastardly plot by outsiders to keep Muslims from having babies. That conspiracy theory spread partly because the same do-good advertising agency that marketed iodized salt also marketed condoms. Indeed, The Lancet, the British medical journal, reported last month that "Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of preventable mental impairment worldwide."

True, but what about Muslim culture? The constant intermarriage between first cousins? He reports, "in my travels I’ve been unnerved by coming across entire villages, in western China and elsewhere, eerily full of people with mental and physical handicaps, staggering about, unable to speak coherently. I now realize that the cause in some cases was probably iodine deficiency." But I thought all of these primitive cultures so admired by the multiculturalism cult were to be preserved?

The IQ gap in the US between blacks/Hispanics and whites is about 15. Do these selected minorities here get enough iodine?

Paroxysms of Denial

by Arthur Jensen

[...]

Nowadays the factual basis of The Bell Curve is scarcely debated by the experts, who regard it as mainstream knowledge.

The most well-established facts: Individual differences in general cognitive ability are reliably measured by IQ tests. IQ is strongly related, probably more than any other single measurable trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social variables. (Not mentioned in the book is that IQ is also correlated with a number of variables of the brain, including its size, electrical potentials, and rate of glucose metabolism during cognitive activity.) Individual differences in adult IQ are largely genetic, with heritability of about 70 percent. So far, attempts to raise IQ by educational or psychological means have failed to show appreciable lasting effects on cognitive ability and scholastic achievement. The IQ distribution in two population groups socially recognized as "black" and "white" is represented by two largely overlapping bell curves with their means separated by about 15 points, a difference not due to test bias. IQ has the same meaning and practical predictive validity for both groups. Tests do not create differences; they merely reflect them.

[...]

Although social problems involving race are conspicuously in the news these days, too few journalists are willing or able to discuss rationally certain possible causes. The authors' crime, apparently, is that they do exactly this, arguing with impressive evidence that the implications of IQ variance in American society can't be excluded from a realistic diagnosis of its social problems.

The media's spectacular denial probably arises from the juxtaposition of the book's demonstrations; first, that what is termed "social pathology" -- delinquency, crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, child neglect, permanent welfare dependency -- is disproportionately concentrated (for whites and blacks alike) in the segment of the population with IQs below 75; and second, that at least one-fourth of the black population (compared to one-twentieth of the white population) falls below that critical IQ point in the bell curve. Because the smaller percentage of white persons with IQs below 75 are fairly well scattered throughout the population, many are guided, helped, and protected by their abler families, friends, and neighbors, whose IQs average closer to 100. Relatively few are liable to be concentrated in the poor neighborhoods and housing projects that harbor the "critical mass" of very low IQs which generates more than its fair share of social pathology. The "critical mass" effect exists mostly in the inner city, which has been largely abandoned by whites. Of course thinking citizens are troubled. Thinking about possible constructive remedies strains one's wisdom.

But can any good for anyone result from sweeping the problem under the rug? Shouldn't it be exposed to earnest, fair-minded public discussion? Our only fear, I think, should be that such discussion might not happen. Consideration of the book's actual content is being displaced by the rhetoric of denial: name calling ("neo-Nazi," "pseudo-scientific," "racism"), sidetracks ("but does IQ really measure intelligence?"), non-sequiturs ("specific genes for IQ have not been identified, so we can claim nothing about its heritability"), red herrings ("Hitler misused genetics"), falsehoods ("all the tests are biased"), hyperbole ("throwing gasoline on a fire"), and insults ("creepy," "indecent," "ugly").

The remedy for this obfuscation is simply to read the book itself.

Excerpted from National Review, December 5, 1994, 48-50.

White racism is not the reason for black and Hispanic failure. It's self-inflicted. Blacks, etc. are not inferior and most are good people. What they need to do is stop depending on rich white people and those with a political agenda using them as pawns in their power games. Facts are not racism and blacks, others must learn to depend on their own communities and rebuild their families. No, they are not "African-Americans," they are Americans, period.

• Thomas Sowell:
• Race, IQ, and facts liberals ignore
• Race dialogue: same old stuff: It's Culture, Not Racism
• Do 'minorities' really have it that bad?
• Black Liberation Theology and The Audacity of Rhetoric
• It isn't white racism:
• IQ Will Put You In Your Place
• Black/Hispanic failure in public schools is not racial bias
• The Question of IQ versus Race, and the leftist' agenda
• Morality Gap Mirrors Asian/white versus black/Hispanic IQ Gap
• Black college graduation rates under 50 percent
• The real problem in American public schools is liberal racism
• Scoping Out Pepe (and Mexicans): Why We Should Get It Right, But Won't
• Far-left lunacy:
• How Marxism became racism
• Why the term Islamic or Liberal fascism?
• ACLU sues Palm Beach over black graduation rates
• Where are you Reverend Sharpton?
• On Obama, race hustler
• The Man Who Would Be President - Or the Manchurian Candidate?
• Race card? Ask Obama... he brought it up...
• One in Nine young black men in jail
• One in 100 black women in jail

From 1994 to 2006

Even in 2008, blacks and Hispanics, even in the many black/Democratic controlled school systems continue to fail and lag behind whites in the very same school systems. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse. But experts claim the IQ gap has narrowed and that sounds great. But in Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples (Psychological Science, October 2006 by William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn) I'll present some quotes,

Our values for black IQ use the convention that sets the white mean at 100 and SD at 15. For example, if pre-rise blacks were 1.1 white SDs below whites, this becomes an IQ of 83.5.

Whenever we refer to whites, we mean non-Hispanic whites. Hispanics score below other whites and in recent years, their numbers have dramatically increased. Were they not excluded, the black/white IQ gap would lessen irrespective of black gains. Two samples do not distinguish Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites...We adjusted...The adjustments made little difference.

The number of black/non-black marriages increased from about 1% in 1970 to 4.5% in 1990 (Farley, 1995; Staples, 1985). Thus, an increasing percentage of black children tested between 1980 and 2000 had half-white ancestry. For the moment, take it on faith that the relevant black/white IQ gap is less than 15 points. If such children scored half way between the black and white means, they would be 7.5 IQ points above the black mean. Arithmetic shows that the increase of such children (up 3.5%) would cause a rise of 0.263 IQ points (.035 x 7.5 = 0.263).

Perhaps blacks that can pass for white are more likely to wish to do so today. Even if this is so, the numbers must be very small. A scenario that would maximize the decline in the IQ differential: a child whose father or mother passed for white decides to declare herself black. If the socially white parents have provided an environment in which their children matched the white mean of 100, each such child would confer a bonus of 15 IQ points. If 1% more blacks fall into that category today, they would cause a rise of 0.15 IQ points. Shifting group membership is probably not very important.

The black/white IQ gap could be affected by changes in test content...There is no reason to believe that altered tests became easier for blacks.

Up to age 15, virtually all American children are in school and can be sampled and counted. One qualification: unlike the SB-4, the SB-5 sample included special education and limited English proficiency groups. Because a higher percentage of blacks than whites are in these categories, this would lower the SB-5 black mean and deflate the SB estimate of black IQ gains...

Gains are relatively uniform across the entire distribution of black ability, at least from the 3rd to the 88th percentiles. Only the bottom 2% showing heightened gains and even here, the difference is small. Another check: more blacks (mainly young males) have been incarcerated between 1980 and 1997 and might have escaped the later sample. We reviewed the NLSY data for a marked rise in the back/white gap at the ages of heavy incarceration and found nothing...

One can see the fine line the writers are presenting. What was never brought up was about half the black/Hispanic students drop out by the 10th grade and includes the worse ones. The ones that are left are the ones tested in later grades. I didn't see this factored in. Their final results,

The constancy of the black/white IQ gap is a myth. Blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on whites over the last 30 years. Neither changes in the ancestry of those classified as black nor changes in those who identify as black can explain more than a small fraction of this gain. Therefore, environment has been responsible. The last two decades have seen both positive and negative developments: gains in occupational status and school funding have been accompanied by more black preschoolers in single-parent homes and lower income in those homes (Neal, in press). We believe that further black environmental progress would engender further black IQ gains.

If this is true, it seems pouring a disproportionate amount of money at minorities is working as far as test. What if the same resources had been aimed at poor whites kids or whites in general? Also, public schools overall have declined. Does this figure in the many whites that have fled these horrible schools to attend private schools or home schooling? James R. Flynn is on record as promoting this idea, so is he biased? He is widely known for his discovery of the Flynn effect, the continued year-on-year rise of IQ scores in all parts of the world. Flynn campaigns passionately for liberal causes. So does his political view cross into this? He is a staunch opponent of The Bell Curve.

Read the whole article here

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