Books in Brief: Straight Talk about Mental Tests

Straight Talk about Mental Tests, by Arthur R. Jensen (Macmillan/ Free Press, 269 pp., $12.95). “To question the doctrine of the genetic equality of human races in mental abilities is to violate what is unquestionably the most powerful taboo in the twentieth century.” So says psychologist Arthur Jensen in his new book, Straight Talk about Mental Tests—and Mr. Jensen certainly ought to know. For, in seeking over the past 14 years to shed light on the vexing social problem of the black IQ deficit, he has persistently and courageously defied this anti-intellectual, neo-Lysenkovian taboo; and, as a result, he has been subjected to a scurrilous campaign of vilification and abuse. (Hell hath no fury like an academic egalitarian scorned.) Quite a bit of this abuse, however, comes from people who literally do not know what Mr. Jensen is talking about; and so, in a wholly admirable effort to raise the low level of public discourse on the subject of race-related differences in intelligence, Mr. Jensen has written a book that, unlike his four previous books about heredity, intelligence, and mental testing, is specifically aimed at a popular audience: a detailed, nontechnical summary of current findings in the field of human intelligence bearing the deceptively narrow-gauge title Straight Talk about Mental Tests. Mr. Jensen’s book deals chiefly with four topics central to the “IQ controversy”—the nature and validity of mental tests, cultural bias in mental testing, the heredity-versus-environment problem, and the causes of observed race and class differences in intelligence. In addition he supplies clear and concise explanations of a variety of topics ranging from Mendelian genetics to the psychometric use of the standard deviation formula. Carefully avoiding a polemical tone and abstaining altogether from “playing the role of social philosopher,” the author has instead successfully put together an exemplary introductory “text” for the concerned layman unsatisfied with what Mr. Jensen calls “the popular and sensational literature of the Sunday-supplement variety.” (A useful pendant to Straight Talk about Mental Tests that does deal with the polemical and philosophical aspects of heredity and intelligence, and which is one of Mr. Jensen’s own six suggestions for further reading in the field, is Richard J. Herrnstein’s IQ in the Meritocracy.) The results add up to the single best book of its kind currently available.