Michael Regilio
speaker
2,071 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 12 Jul
Michael Regilio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes and no. Eugenics definitely quieted down, at least for a while. But the notion that you could test someone's intelligence continued, which gets us to talking about the book, The Bell Curve.
You really can't talk about IQ without talking about the book The Bell Curve, and you really can't talk about the book The Bell Curve without talking about Arthur Jensen, who was before The Bell Curve. Arthur Jensen was an American psychologist who worked mostly out of UC Berkeley.
In 1969, he published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review called How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Now, this paper basically set off a bomb in the world of psychology because he suggested that genetics— played a part in black students scoring lower on IQ tests than white students.
Critics were fierce and pointed out that his research ignored the obvious roles of poverty, poor schools, racism and health inequality.
No, I mean, it struck at people's emotional core that there was something terribly wrong with that, and it didn't go well for Jensen at the time either. I mean, colleagues tried to formally censure him. He had protesters storming into his lectures.
So it was more than a bit shocking that after all that happened with Jensen, that in 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herenstein published a book called The Bell Curve, which claimed that genetics was a part of what contributed to IQ and, again... When we say genetics, Murray and Herrnstein broke that down by race. Predictably, a massive backlash followed the publication of the book.
Yeah. Absolutely. In reading some of the criticisms of the bell curve, I learned a few new things like that intelligence is what's called polygenetic. That is to say, it's influenced by a great many genes, each one contributing only a small amount and that there is no smart gene and that gene expression itself can be turned up or turned down by environmental factors.
And that's because it actually, apparently, lead paint chips are sweet and they taste good. Ooh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Gross. That's why kids eat lead paint chips. They taste like candy. At least the ones that I ate did.
Exactly. Environmental factors that can influence gene expression are stuff like diet, which we talked about, nutrition, but also toxics and chemicals.
Yeah. Absolutely. Also, physical activity, sleep, infections, exposure to UV light and other forms of radiation and stress. The stresses that come from living in poverty can lead to chronic stress, which can lead to elevated hormone levels like cortisol, which can affect gene expression like immune function.
Yeah, you definitely got a beach bod. By the way, that field of study is called epigenetics, and none of these arguments even touch on the whole race is a man-made construct and not a biological category.
And the fact of the matter is genetic differences between people or populations within what we call a race are very often far greater than the differences between any two people in what we consider to be a different race.
Yeah. Even though some people in America will explode if you profess the idea that race doesn't exist, the modern understanding of race is born out of racism, mostly European colonization. Hierarchies between population groups were devised to justify exploitation.
This isn't to say that population groups don't have shared heritage and culture, but a biologist can't see that stuff under a microscope. And as far as they're concerned, race just isn't a thing. Without rehashing the entire controversy, let's just say the overwhelming number of experts in the field disagree with the findings of Jensen and the bell curve.
Yeah, that's exactly the horseshoe. And by the way, I did say that to some college kids when I was doing this research. I was at a friend's house and their son was there with his girlfriend. And I said that and she had to leave the table because she didn't want to sit with me anymore because I said that race isn't a biological category.
I do get it because, again, people have a shared culture that they're very proud of. and a shared struggle that they're very proud that they made it through. And so they think that in some way you're coming after that when you say this, which you're absolutely not. I'm just talking about from a scientific perspective. This is just not something that that truly exists.
And by overwhelming number of racist organizations, I assume you mean all racist organizations agree with them.
Yeah, okay, fine. Let's get back to IQ. IQ tests have been changing for a long time now and working towards getting rid of cultural biases. A test known as the Wexler Adult Intelligence Scale was published in 1955, and modern editions continue to be released, including a fifth edition that just came out in 2024. There's also Raven's Progressive Matrices and the Kauffman Brief Intelligence Test.
These tests have tried to reduce these cultural biases as much as possible.
Yeah, those questions are gone. These tests focus on logical reasoning, pattern recognition, things that anyone could be good or bad at, regardless of background. The goal being to measure general cognitive ability with as little bias as possible. And there's also the idea that there are multiple types of intelligence. There's mathematical intelligence, spatial, linguistic.
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