The IQ debate expands in The Australian News when discussing the cultural biases in IQ testing. It was made worse when Harvard University former president Larry Summers touched off a controversy in 2005 when he stated there was a genetic reason why he was having difficulty recruiting women professors in math and physics. He said he felt that men were more likely to be found at the upper and lower ends of the spectrum in these fields. Enter James Watson who recently indicated that Africans have a lesser intelligence than Westerners, setting off a controversy of his own. He said he hoped everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find that this is not true.” He clarified his statement by saying that while society wants to assume equal powers of reason, this is just not the case.
The question is whether or not Watson’s statements were racist or not or if he was simply stating the facts as he knew them. He admitted later that he did not know the facts when he spoke. He apologized to those who had drawn from his remarks that Africa is somehow “genetically inferior”. Another question remains and that is whether or not there is a difference between intelligence and race. Is this too sensitive a question for science to explore? The problem is that the concepts of intelligence and of race are less clear-cut than we assume them to be. IQ tests as they exist today are culturally-biased. There may need to be some kind of IQ testing alternative in order to be able to address the issue of race and intelligence.