Charles Murray writes this piece in today’s Opinion Journal.  There are lots of people who aren’t going to like what he has to say.  Not at all.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

There are many people who object violently to this idea.  They will argue that IQ (or “g” — general intelligence) is not real, or is in some other way meaningless.  Dennis Prager, for example, argues that IQ tells you nothing about the values a person may have.  However, I’d be willing to bet money that he hires a lot more interns and other employees with an IQ near 120 than he hires with an IQ near 80.  Other people find the existence of hard-wired differences in intelligence clash with their notions of egalitarianism.

What’s more:

There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.

On the other hand, we have articles like this one:

Genetic selection and genetic engineering also are on the horizon. Scientists are likely to discover ways to prevent or cure crippling mental or emotional diseases that would otherwise affect children. Once solutions are found, they are certain to be embraced and employed by parents.

 

Once obvious illnesses can be cured, the enhancement of “normal” soon follows. For example, research into ways to prevent age-related mental degeneration is bound to produce insights into how to enhance memory and reaction time for healthy individuals.

Cures for mental disfunctions, including various forms of dyslexia, will arise and be implemented first.  But then what?  What exactly is “normal”?  To the extent that intelligence depends on the wiring in the brain, will we come to see a lack of that wiring equivalent to, say, congenital blindness or deafness? 

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