San Antonio College Library

Arthur Jensen has systematically developed a seminal concept first discovered by Charles Spearman in the 1920s: individual and group differences in mental ability exist, and these differences can be measured by a single, general factor, g. On its surface, this concept seems innocuous. However, Jensen does not draw back from its most controversial conclusions - that the average differences in IQ and other abilities found between sexes and racial groups...

Over the past century many influential books and articles have appeared in which authors have offered "irrefutable" empirical evidence for the genetic origins of human intelligence. At the same time, unfortunately, nearly all that has been written in defense of the nurture side of the "nature vs. nurture" debate has been polemical in nature, concentrating mainly on shooting holes in the opposition's arguments. Perhaps, then, Gary Collier's most outstanding...

Most parents believe that their child's personality and intellectual development are a direct result of their child-rearing practices and home environment. This belief is supported by many social scientists who contend that the influences of "nature" and "nurture" are inseparable. Challenging such universally accepted assumptions, The Limits of Family Influence argues that socialization science has placed too heavy an emphasis on the family as the...

For decades, millions of parents have been told that they are primarily responsible for things gone wrong with their children. Mothers and fathers have internalized this message, producing an unrealistic and damaging sense of guilt, and even betrayal. Parents do affect their children, but how much? Our children are not born as blank slates. They come to us encrypted with their own predilections, biases, strengths, and weaknesses, many of which are...

"How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out well? How much blame when they turn out badly? This book explodes some of our deepest beliefs about children and parents and gives us something radically new to put in their place. With eloquence and wit, Judith Harris explains why parents have little power to determine the sort of people their children become. It is what children experience outside the home, in the company of their...

Publisher's description: Following his highly praised and bestselling book Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Matt Ridley has written a brilliant and profound book about the roots of human behavior. Nature via Nurture explores the complex and endlessly intriguing question of what makes us who we are. In February 2001 it was announced that the human genome contains not 100,000 genes, as originally postulated, but only 30,000. This...

Breaking new ground and old taboos, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray tell the story of a society in transformation. At the top, a cognitive elite is forming in which the passkey to the best schools and the best jobs is no longer social background but high intelligence. At the bottom, the common denominator of the underclass is increasingly low intelligence rather than racial or social disadvantage. The Bell Curve describes the state of scientific...

Controversial psychologist Arthur R. Jensen gives his views on, "general intelligence, racial differences in IQ, cultural bias in IQ tests, and wheter differences in IQ are due primarily to heredity or to social factors."

"The Bell Curve drew a lot of attention. But was it sound science? When it was first published in 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's bestselling book The Bell Curve set off a firestorm of controversy about the relationships among genetics, IQ, and various social outcomes. Much of the reaction was polemical and based on whether readers agreed with the authors' conclusions about welfare dependency, crime, and differences in earnings. But...

LB 49.50.