I'm back from my vacation to Minnesota and North Dakota, where I satisfactorily avoided unprovoked whale attacks (see here if that confuses you).

An interesting article in the Washington Post this morning reports that new research suggests that IQ scores are influenced both by genetics and socio-economic class. This undercuts the pervasive suggestion that disproportionately low minority test scores are evidence of "innate genetic inferiority," as the article puts it.
The article explains:

Like corn in depleted soil, the thinking goes, minorities and the poor (two categories with so much overlap that researchers find it difficult to tease apart their effects) perform worse not because of their genes but because they are raised in an environment lacking in resources and poisoned by racist attitudes.

This is an interesting hypothesis, and if proven would arguably have a wide variety of implications. I have long argued that class division is a grander social problem than race, but that they are so intertwined it is difficult to disucss them separately. Presumably, however, there will come a time when they are not so linked. Perhaps this will be due to the University of Michigan's new Supreme Court-mandated policy, although I somehow doubt it.
- posted by Anonymous @ 11:38 AM