The Mismeasure of Minds: Notes

Neuroscience, Race, and Intelligence after The Bell Curve

• Hillary Clinton's 1996 book, It Takes a Village, discusses brain science and early child development.
• Clinton cites discoveries in neuroscience, molecular biology, and psychology, emphasizing the importance of early childhood brain development.
• She highlights research on the amygdala and Daniel Goleman's theories on emotional intelligence.
• Clinton notes that early experiences, such as being held, touched, fed, spoken to, and gazed at, are key in laying down the brain's mechanisms that govern feelings and behavior.
• She argues that a child's character and potential are not predetermined at birth and that the first few years are crucial for brain architecture construction.
• Clinton's discourse is a critical response to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.
• She refutes their implication that intellectual potential cannot be altered and that intervention for those with fewer resources is unnecessary.
• Clinton cites studies showing that at-risk children thrive in stimulating environments, referencing Craig Ramey's Abecedarian Project in North Carolina, which improved the IQs of mainly African American and poor infants through early education and nutrition.
• She calls The Bell Curve unscientific and insidious, arguing that choosing not to help families develop their children's brains is a decision based on a different agenda, not evidence.
• In April 1997, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton cohosted a conference on new brain research and its implications for young children.
• Neuroscientist Carla Shatz compared brain development to stringing telephone wires, with a second phase of development involving testing connections to determine correct and incorrect ones.
• Developmental psychologist Deborah A. Phillips connected brain wiring to educational outcomes, noting adverse effects in sub-optimal child care environments.
• Hillary Clinton stated that a baby's brain structure is a work in progress influenced by interactions with the child.
• President Clinton announced plans to extend healthcare coverage and expand early educational opportunities for poor children, aiming to use brain science to highlight the impact of impoverished environments on a child's brain during the first three years of life.
• Jerome Kagan argues that it is preposterous to presume that simple interactions like kisses or scoldings significantly alter a child’s brain.
• John T. Bruer critiques using neuroscience to guide educational practice, stating that neuroscience doesn't have enough information about neurons and synapses to do so yet.
• Bruer disparages the notion that the brain of a poor child suffers specifically due to social circumstances, he claims that any environment enables the acquisition of sensory, motor, and working memory functions.
• Bruer counsels caution against using neuroscience to support cultural and political values, asserting that even under the worst conditions, a child's brain retains plasticity and can regain normal function with appropriate sensory experience.
• Steven Pinker cites Hillary Clinton's policy pronouncements based on childhood brain development as misguided, stating that there is no evidence that providing extra stimulation enhances brain growth, or that there is a critical period for cognitive development that ends at three.
• The Bell Curve reignited debate over race and intelligence, suggesting genetic explanations for cognitive differences between races and a causal relationship between intelligence and class structure.
• Herrnstein and Murray argued that children of unmarried, less intelligent mothers tend to have low cognitive ability, behavioral problems, and disproportionate representation in prison.
• Critics argue that genuine neuroscientific evidence is the key to proving that The Bell Curve was pseudoscience.
• Researchers have sought a causal relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive function in developing brains, relying on neuroplasticity theory to show that poor children are both more exposed to environmental harms and more available to early educational enrichments.
• A 2002 review cited data associating SES with health, cognitive, and socioeconomic outcomes, but conceded hard evidence remained elusive.
• It’s accepted that growing up in poverty is associated with reduced cognitive achievement, but little is known about the underlying neurocognitive systems responsible for this effect.
• A profile of poverty may provide more specific targets for intervention programs and renew societal obligation to poor children by reframing the problem as more than mere educational and economic opportunity, extending to the physical integrity of children.
• The enterprise of seeking to disprove the science of The Bell Curve with the real science of early childhood development remains unrealized.
• Questions persist about whether the damages of poverty to neurocognitive abilities can be reversed, at what stage intervention becomes ineffective, whether neuroplasticity is inherently a liberal theory of brain development, and whether locating a causal connection between socioeconomic status and early cognitive development will finally banish scientific racism or might only result in further unintended consequences.
• The Bell Curve appeared in the early fall of 1994, selling 400,000 copies in its first two months after publication.
• It received coverage in nearly every major newsmagazine and newspaper in the country and prompted passionate counterarguments, especially for its contentions concerning racial differences in intelligence.
• Bob Herbert of the New York Times described The Bell Curve as "a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship."
• Herbert argued that factors such as the legacy of slavery, oppression, lack of political representation, poverty, inadequate healthcare, segregation, and discrimination contribute to social pathology and lower intelligence test scores among African Americans.
• Critics emphasized what they saw as The Bell Curve’s reliance on fraudulent evidence concerning a genetic basis for human intelligence.
• Harvard sociologist Christopher Winship wrote that The Bell Curve might have “serious flaws” but that it offered a number of “potentially valuable insights,” including the book’s assertion that “cognitive ability is largely immutable.”
• James J. Heckman acknowledged that The Bell Curve’s “challenge to contemporary assumptions about the malleability of human beings and the relative importance of environmental factors is courageous and long overdue.”
• The American Psychological Association's report on The Bell Curve noted that all genetic effects on the development of observable traits are potentially modifiable by environmental input and that it was “a common error” to conclude “that because something is heritable it is necessarily unchangeable.”
• The APA report discounted the view that a “differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites” was merely a reflection of “differences in socioeconomic status.”
• The APA report drily concluded, “Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support.”
• Defenders of The Bell Curve seized the moment, with the Wall Street Journal publishing "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," signed by more than fifty experts.
• The statement supported The Bell Curve’s guiding principles, including that intelligence tests provided an excellent means of cognitive assessment; that IQ tests were not culturally biased against minorities; that differences in IQ did exist within racial or ethnic groups, but also that differences in IQ existed between racial and ethnic groups; that these group differences in intelligence were likely due far more to “heritability” and “genetics” and much less to “environment"; and that “the bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100,” while “the bell curve for American blacks [is centered] roughly around 85.”
• The Wall Street Journal statement asserted that there was a “practical importance” to the science of racial differences in IQ.
• Employment that required “routine decision making or simple problem solving (unskilled work)” could be handled by individuals with lower IQs, but given that the modern world had grown “highly complex,” this “complexity” meant that “a high IQ is generally necessary to perform well” in “the professions” and in positions of “management.”
• Herrnstein and Murray argued that the ability of an individual to grasp complexity is one of the things that cognitive ability is most directly good for and that the inescapable complexity of contemporary life meant that what was easier for the cognitive elite was becoming (more and) more difficult for everyone else.
• An increased segregation of persons not by race but by cognitive skills was inevitable, they warned, and they went on to announce that when “the ablest blacks” chose to flee “the inner city,” it left “the inner city without its former leaders and role models.” Increased isolation and dependency in these most impoverished—and least mentally competent—communities would ensue, while “the cognitive elite” (both white and minority) found itself in the role of having to establish “an expanded welfare state for the underclass that also keeps it out from underfoot.”
• Psychologist Gottfredson riffed freely on The Bell Curve’s logic in her own polemical writing, observing how “from birth to death, life continually requires us to master abstractions, solve problems, draw inferences, and make judgments on the basis of inadequate information." No surprise that “life is difficult at the low end of the IQ bell curve.”
• As for the children of the cognitive underclass, schools had to begin to use materials that were “the most essential” and the most basic—and presented “in the most accessible way”—so that these kids would be able to learn anything at all.
• Gottfredson concluded with the harsh punch line, “Civil rights advocates resolutely ignore the possibility that a distressingly high proportion of poor Black youth may be more disadvantaged today by low IQ than by racial discrimination, and thus that they will realize few if any benefits (unlike their more able brethren) from ever-more affirmative action.” And so at the edges of her arguments—or perhaps at their core, it was not consistently clear—always lurked the not-so-hidden subtext of racial differences in intelligence.
• Gottfredson acknowledged that “intelligence” in humans was likely “multiple,” but she always returned—as had Herrnstein and Murray—to the singular significance of general intelligence (or “g”). It was not in the end a terribly different argument from the one that educational psychologist Arthur Jensen had been making (and making repeatedly) since the late 1960s, and it ultimately sought to diminish the role that more squishy and “less cognitive traits such as personality or interests” played in terms of predicting whether an individual would likely make it in work and in life.
• The book’s advocates cheered how Herrnstein and Murray disobeyed cultural conventions and used (what they said were) empirical verities to debunk liberal orthodoxies.
• Brains Built over Time
  • The Bell Curve provides the context for understanding efforts to articulate an alternative perspective emphasizing brain development plasticity in early childhood.
  • Hillary Clinton's statements that animated It Takes a Village in 1996, became the subject of media campaigns to educate the public about the political implications of neuroplasticity.
  • The special edition of Newsweek stated how pediatricians could now watch an infant’s brain grow—courtesy of positron-emission tomography—which made it possible to witness in real time as “the regions of a baby’s brain turn on, one after another, like city neighborhoods having their electricity restored after a blackout."
  • Rethinking the Brain, a text that discussed the brain's capacity to adapt, even as it counseled that there were “sensitive periods during which the brain is particularly efficient at specific types of learning,” and so therefore “the brain’s plasticity presents us with opportunities and responsibilities.” Brain plasticity, Time magazine, progressive leaning stressed how there existed an “urgent need, say child-development experts, for preschool programs designed to boost the brain power of youngsters born into impoverished rural and inner-city households.”
  • Collectively these news reports deliberately sought to turn political discussions away from the reasoning in The Bell Curve that used biology to reduce educational assistance for disenfranchised children and toward a liberal logic that invoked biology to increase funding for these same children.
  • The brain-as-computer metaphor, as when science journalist Sharon Begley observed, “It is the experiences of childhood, determining which neurons are used, that wire the circuits of the brain as surely as a programmer at a keyboard reconfigures the circuits in a computer.”
  • The brain-as-orchestra metaphor: “A baby is born with more than 100 billion brain cells,” some of which were “hard-wired” at birth. “But the rest are just waiting to be hooked up and played like orchestra instruments in a complex musical composition.”
  • The most important “windows of opportunity” metaphor. “Windows of opportunity” came to dominate discussion about early child development, with talk of how “different circuits” in a child’s brain “are most sensitive to life’s experiences at different ages,” and therefore children had distinct “windows of opportunity” in terms of their capacity to learn.
  • That the child’s brain was plastic and that it developed in relation to environmental factors were hardly novel perspectives in the 1990s. Donald O. Hebb had argued already in the late 1940s that “neural change” could be “induced by experience”; Hebb had posited that experience could modify the structure of the brain not only in animals but also in humans.
  • By the early 1960s, Berkeley neuroanatomist Marian C. Diamond along with her colleagues David Krech and Mark R. Rosenzweig, biological psychologists, announced “that increasing the environmental complexity of rats resulted in measurable changes in brain chemistry and in brain weight.”
  • By the 1970s, and building directly on the work of Diamond, Krech, and Rosenzweig, developmental psychologist William T. Greenough and his colleagues found evidence of significantly greater synaptic growth in rats weaned in “complex” rather than isolated environmental conditions.
  • Greenough extrapolated his findings to humans, postulating that the development of new synapses in young children was either “experience expectant” (that is, “designed to utilize the sort of environmental information that is ubiquitous” to all) or “experience dependent” (that is, unique “in both timing and character among individuals”).
  • With increasing force, psychologists and other commentators began to foreground what they stated were the profound implications of research on brain plasticity for the plight of children from disadvantaged circumstances.
  • By the mid-1990s, as the fiscal tug-of-war with skeptical conservatives continued, there was said to be neuroscientific evidence to support the greater investment of federal funding in these intervention programs.
  • A New York Times editorial in 1997 made its allusion to Herrnstein and Murray only slightly more oblique when it noted how “many people have accepted the notion that the brain has been genetically determined by the time a baby is born” but that “research by neuroscientists, however, shows that after birth, experience counts even more than genetics.”
  • Gov. requested more allocation for earlt education programs, and California governor Pete Wilson cited specifically the science of early brain development when he asked that more than $740$ million be added to the state budget for child assistance.
  • The Early Childhood Development Act of 1997, stated that “new scientific research shows that the electrical activity of brain cells actually changes the physical structure of the brain itself and that without a stimulating environment, a baby’s brain will suffer.” This federal legislation appropriated $1.5$ billion each fiscal year to support “good childhood learning services,” especially for the 25 percent of children in the United States who were living in poverty.
  • A politicization of early development research proceeded apace into the first decade of the new century. In 2000, the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine jointly published From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development.
  • The comprehensive study stated that new directions in neuroscience helped to formulate successful early-childhood-related policies and services.
  • The report argued that “early experiences clearly affect the development of the brain” and that “poor nutrition, specific infections, environmental toxins, and drug exposures, beginning early in the prenatal period, as well as chronic stress stemming from abuse or neglect throughout the early childhood years and beyond,” all posed threats “to the developing central nervous system."
  • Throughout, the text engaged a dynamic theory of child development by emphasizing “the interplay of nature and nurture.”The report argued that it was scientifically fallacious to embrace “the misleading and tired old nature-nurture debate.”
  • They re-conceived child development within a “transactional-ecological” framework, emphasizing each child was unique and each environment differently experienced. From Neurons to Neighborhoods cautioned