The studies examined IQ among blacks and found that whether the person was light-skinned or dark-skinned had more or less no bearing on that person’s IQ (the assumption being that skin tone is a rough proxy for degree of African descent).
Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:
the correlation between lightness of skin and IQ, averaged over a large number of studies reviewed by Shuey (1966), is in the vicinity of .10.
Assuming that correlation’s not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
That’s reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett’s claim against conflicting evidence hadn’t occurred to me.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic.
Being more precise (pedantic?), Nisbett wrote:
Assuming that correlation’s not a chance fluctuation, that would imply that there is a positive correlation between skin tone and IQ. But a meager one.
At the time I wrote the comment I recall some piece of evidence that I thought countered this very low positive correlation enough that it made sense to say “zero net evidence” but I honestly don’t remember what my reasoning was.
We should note btw that the existence of a positive correlation with skin tone doesn’t mean some of the IQ gap is genetic. There have been studies demonstrating social advantages to having light skin.
That’s reasonable; that you were mentally weighing up Nisbett’s claim against conflicting evidence hadn’t occurred to me.
Wholly agreed.