math and IQ

[Leslilake1 at aol.com]

I only did introductory graduate work in linguistics and am pretty clueless 
about higher math, but I can't believe there's much relationship between 
language structure and mathematical ability or IQ.  Japanese and Chinese 
belong to different language families and are structurally quite different 
(although Japanese characters were adapted from Chinese ones, along with a 
lot of vocabulary), and both are quite different and unrelated to the 
Indo-European languages (i.e. most European languages, Sanskrit, Farsi, 
etc.).  At the same time, minority groups in many countries tend to have 
lower IQ scores (and, I assume, produce fewer mathematicians) than the 
majority populations, despite often speaking the majority language.  It's not 
just blacks and whites in the U.S. - there's also an IQ difference (of a 
rather similar # of points, as I recall from a comparison I read in the 
mid-eighties) between majority populations and "discriminated" minority 
groups such as the burakumin in Japan and the Lapps (in whichever country the 
Lapps live in!).  I remember these two especially because they were 
"non-racial" minorities, i.e., you couldn't tell by looking, as an outsider, 
that they were "different" from the majority population, but the comparison 
went through a whole bunch of countries and talked about minority populations 
I'd never heard of.    

Another thing about IQ is that scores in every country, for every tested 
group, have been rising steadily in this century - something that would not 
happen if IQ were actually measuring some fixed, "inherent" intelligence.  
The difference between my IQ and my great-grandmother's is probably 
approximately as large as the average black-white difference in the US - and 
it's not because I'm "smarter" than my great-gramma was.  IQ is bullshit, in 
my opinion (my IQ is 140, or was in high school, and I'm dumb as a post about 
anything that matters, including math - but I can read fast.)    

 
4:59 -0800 (PST)

 From: Adam Pressler <adampopulist at yahoo.com>

 Subject: Race and math scores (was: Seligman on intelligence)

 

 Without getting too deep into the Bellcurve bullshit...It seems that since 
the rules of

 expression for mathematics is universal across

 cultures, but the rules of expression for language are

 not, maybe someone growing up speaking a germanic

 language (for example) may have an edge over someone

 speaking a romance language when it comes to

 mathematics.

 

 In other words, maybe the structure of certain spoken

 languages may be more similar than others to the

 structure of mathematics - and this may give some

 people an edge in math over others.

 

 I'm hoping there are some linguists or

 psychometricians in the group who may be able to

 address this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 > [A Daniel Seligman sampler...]

 > 

 > And on average they [Orientals (sic)] are smarter. >

 That is the message

 > of most of the 

 > studies performed by Richard Lynn of the University

 > of Belfast, who 

 > has tracked Oriental IQs in many different parts of

 > the world and 

 > found them usually superior to those of Caucasians.

 > With the American 

 > IQ average normalized at 100, Japanese in Hawaii

 > average 108. (Lynn's 

 > latest estimate for Japan itself is 110.) In

 > Singapore, Lynn found 

 > Chinese kids averaging 110 (vs. 96 for the Malays).

 > Research in Hong 

 > Kong in the Sixties and Seventies generally showed

 > native Chinese 

 > youth at about the same IQ level as the British,

 > although the latter 

 > obviously came from a select group of families.

 > Arthur Jensen of the 

 > University of California at Berkeley, who closely

 > studied children in 

 > San Francisco's Chinatown in the early Seventies,

 > show them superior 

 > to white children; beginning around the third grade,

 > they show 

 > nonverbal scores averaging an extraordinary 110. >>