STANFORD UiL:IVERSITY &1EDIC.\L CENTER
                     STANFORD, CALlFbRXIA 94305

January 27, 1975

STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Defiartmcnt 01 Genetics
(4IS) 497-5052

Mr. William Gorham
President
The Urban Institute
2100 M Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20037

Dear Bill,

  Thank you for sending me Dr. Sowell's manuscript. It was not only
a privilege to read it, it was a pleasure. It is a subject I often approach
with dread on account of the level of polemical nonsense and it was a delight
to see a treatment that stuck close to facts and to the clear presentation
of an analytical methodology.

   You should then assess my few critical remarks in the light of global
admiration. Certainly it deserves to be published under your imprint.
I do have a few suggestions that you may or may not wish to take into account.

   The treatment of temporal change in I.Q. measurement is masterful.
I have seen many other allusions to the studies on immigrant groups* but
I have never seen the actual numbers derived from contemporary measurements
put down as they are here nor with the kind of critical discussion that they
deserve and that Sowell rightfully gives them. One feels one hardly needs
go any further in discussions of the central thesis!

   I do have to offer some comment with respect to the general theme of
sex difference in the way that Sowell uses it.'Wbile it is indeed true,
as Sowell introduces the subject on page 7, that certain traits among iemales
are more buffered against environmental variation, I would hesitate very
strongly to elevate this to a general principal that could be used in the
reverse sense for syllogistic reasoning. Differential heritability by sex
needs to be taken sui generis, case by case, and for a situation as complex
as development of intelligence very specific interactions of culture and
gender can hardly be ignored. Not to mention a whole range of issues that
would get us into sex discrimination policy discussions, the generally more      -
rapid intellectual maturation of girls, and their perceived greater co-
operativeness in school situations where discipline is a great problem,
would a priori be expected to confuse the findings.

  On the other hand, the empirical data on difference in variance by sex
should not be ignored but could well be put as requiring a plausible
explanation in terms of the respective models. I do not think there is a
strong a priori case along the lines implied by the statement under sex
difference on page 7. In any event, to the extent that SDwell wishes to

LT. J. I'. !iENNEDY, JR. L.4RORATORIF.S FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE, DEDICATED TO RESEARCH 1% MEZThL RETARDWION

over

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY              HEREDITY              NEUROBIOLOGY              DEVELOPiMENTAL MEDICINE


Mr. William Gorham             -2-              1/27/75

persevere with this argument, I think he should document the other
attributes which have been found to show the response that he implies.

  My other main criticism is perhaps more one of statement than of
analysis, but I thought the general discussion on page 5 might be
challenged or might be readily misunderstood. Perhaps you want to try out
just this one presentation on a number of other people to be sure my own
responses are not idiosyncratic. I have no quarrel at all, of course, with
the general concepts of the I.Q. plane. In the end one must make some
statement to the effect that I = f(h,e). I am rather less happy with the
general notion that either h or e can be described by a single metric -
that is that one can ignore terms that relate to very specific interactions
between particular genes and particular environment. (An outstanding
example would be the needs for special education, not merely better
education in general, to respond to the needs of the congenitally deaf so
as to raise their I.Q. from 0 to 100). My own prejudices about this general
problem would lead me to give much more weight to such issues of specific
interaction without suggesting that they are necessarily very much more
cogent in discussions as between races than they are within them. However,
we may be discussing a culture context in which relatively rather more is
being demanded'of the schools than of the home environment in which such
specificities are the most likely to be recognized and dealt with, without
the benefit of external social policies.

  But what I think is either left out or not clearly stated is that the
problem of heredity versus environment is not whether there exists such a
plane with extreme points of the obvious kind that Sowell correctly and
clearly articulates; but rather the actual distribution in a given population
of the inputs that are recognized as the values along the h and the e axes.

At the bottom of page 5 Sowell asserts thatThe statement that intelligence
is due y percent to heredity and z percent to environment is not meaningful.n
I would have said that it has a very definitetieaning which is very often
misunderstood; that the attribution of heritability is one that attaches not
to the trait "intelligence" but to the population which then contains its
own characteristic distribution of the h and e factors that result:in a
manifest level of intelligence. I am not sure whether we are here discussing
a difference in verbal taste or a more fundamental conceptual discrepancy.

  My further comments are more by way of picking at rather small nits
but I hope you think them more beneficial than otherwise.

  The statement on the very first page that the question is ultimately
an empirical one,independent of anyone's beliefs,hopes or fears, assumes
that we are not in fact also bedeviled by semantic confusion.From the wide
range of current controversies we can extract a meaningful issue and this
is the one that Sowell then further addresses. I am raising essentially
the same issue in commenting on page 4 where there is an assertion about
the heredity-environment controversy. There are, in fact, very many such
controversies and it is only the better defined of them,,that will lend
themselves to the further statements that, for example, it is well understood
that intelligence is a result of both heredity and environment*and so forth.

over


Mr. William Gorham

-3-

  At page 6 the linear model is in fact very close to what Jensen
has asserted and Shockley assumed. But perhaps I am responding to it
mainly in terms of my own argument about specificity.

There were some pages I particularly enjoyed, like page 21!

  Page 25-26. I guess I would have made a somewhat weaker theorem which
is still devastating and run the argument in the other direction to some
extent. A demonstration of dramatic shifts with time in other ethnic groups,
not plausibly explained at all by genetic change, is a devastating attack
on the invariance of I.Q. with respect to other social situations, Whether
or not the social pathology of the European immigrants can be compared with
that of our black American populations is another question that really did
not have to be addressed. For the very rapid progress of the Jewish
immigrants one can scarcely forget that for thousands of years no Jewish
group has ever accepted the imputation of inferiority no matter how brutally
this was thrust upon them.(And particularly in the intellectual sphere!)
It would take us needlessly far afield to go into the specific elements of
social pathology that are related to retardation in I.Q. measurement. One
cannot but note a high degree of correlation between cultural convergence
and the convergence of the I.Q. scores. But this is not the place to go into
the more general aspects of the arguments about meritocracy as economic utility.

   Page 26 in re sex differences. I think Jensen could cope with such
data ad hoc. It would be rather easy to invent perhaps somewhat credibly
genes that specificically interact with sex to account for any result that
may be found.

  Page 28. For Sephardic Jews in Israel I would qualify with the term
Oriental.

  If this is to be the definitive publicatibn, would it be possible to
derive measures of variance as well as mean for use in the various tables
on I.Q. of different groups?

  42b makes a very cogent point. My copy was missing page 63, so I have
no hint as to reference 59a, I have often wondered about the`representiveness
of samples that purported to describe the "average black populatid'.

  Page 55~56. My previous remarks about the analysis based on sex
difference apply here as well. The term inescapable corollary is especially
at issue.

Page 60, reference 11, Is American'IndianOstill an acceptable epithet?

   Appendix: Research Methods. I am interested that you do not use the
census occupational classification. You might wish to discuss some of the
(possibly excellent) reasons not to. I know that the census would classify
a number of the people under number 7 as professionals. But who is a writer,
artist or other profession of this nature ? Does that include you and me?
On matters that have to do with educational performance, I would have thc+ught
it.would be particularly interesting to separate out such categories as
school teachers and librarians, writers, journalists, etc. with the implied

over


Mr. William Gorham            -4-             1/27/75

preoccupation with verbal skills that they reflect. In retrospective
summary I guess I would recommend that the discussion and material on
sex difference be abbreviated for the purpose of the present paper at
least on the basis of my belief that the theoretical premise has been over-
stated. On the other hand, it deserves to be spelled out in considerable
detail as a separate rather more technical document where the theoretical
issues can be discussed at greater length and at a more technical level.

  The material on temporal change is manifestly beyond challenge on such
theoretical grounds although I confess I have not spent a great deal of time
trying to think of possible criticisms. Most of the distortions - attempts
at assimilation in particular - would tend to work in the opposite direction
although I have no empirical data to support this. (I have in mind those
Jews who attempted to anglicize their names and whether they are an unbiased
sample with respect to intelligence or schooling - perhaps they are even
selected on the basis of some difficulty in competition rather than the converse).
One can think of analogs of course for other ethnic groups. Akin to that would
be the ambiguities raised by inter-marriage, about which exactly the same
questions could be raised.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr

* P.S. There is an excellent exposition on *' The Mental Testing Controversy:
Race and Nationality, 1919-1930" in the Ph.D. dissertation by H. Cravens,
1969, American Scientists and the Heredity Enviironment Controversy 1883-1940
(available from University Microfilms, 69-21678). Cravens pointsout that
Brigham recanted his earlier racist views (see Psychological Review 37:164,
1930). Cravens also cites the "Last Review of Racial Psychology'* as the
termination of the field for that interval: Pinchner.Intelligence Tests
Psychological Bulletin 32:453, 1935. Perhaps the samb'material is covered
in reference 75 in Sowell's paper.