However, I disagree that nothing very significant has happened in the field since their publication
Me too! I just don't think there's been much new data brought to the table. I agree with you in counting Flynn's 1987 paper and the Minnesota followup report, and I'd add Moore's 1986 study of adopted black children, the recent meta-analyses by Jelte Wicherts and colleagues on the mean IQs of sub-Saharan Africans, Dickens & Flynn's 2006 paper on black Americans' IQs converging on whites' (and at a push, Rushton & Jensen's reply along with Dickens & Flynn's), Fryer & Levitt's 2007 paper about IQ gaps in young children, and Fagan & Holland's papers (200200080-6), 2007, 2009) on developing tests where minorities score equally to whites. I guess Richard Lynn et al.'s papers on the mean IQ of East Asians count as well, although it's really the black-white comparison that gets people's hackles up.
Having written out a list, it does looks longer than I expected...although it's not much for 30-35 years of controversy!
Also, even these books fail to present a satisfactory treatment of some basic questions where a competent statistician should be able to clarify things fully, but horrible confusion has nevertheless persisted for decades. Here I refer primarily to the use of the regression to the mean as a basis for hereditarian arguments.
Amen. The regression argument should've been dropped by 1980 at the latest. In fairness to Flynn, his book does namecheck that argument and explain why it's wrong, albeit only briefly.
satt:
The regression argument should've been dropped by 1980 at the latest. In fairness to Flynn, his book does namecheck that argument and explain why it's wrong, albeit only briefly.
If I remember correctly, Loehlin's book also mentions it briefly. However, it seems to me that the situation is actually more complex.
Jensen's arguments, in the forms in which he has been stating them for decades, are clearly inadequate. Some very good responses were published 30+ years ago by Mackenzie and Furby. Yet for some bizarre reason, prominent critics of Jensen h...
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