Radiolab - G: Problem Space

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

In the first episode of G, Radiolab’s miniseries on intelligence, we went back to the 1970s to meet a group of Black parents who put the IQ test on trial. The lawsuit, Larry P v Riles, ended with a ban on IQ tests for all Black students in the state of California, a ban that’s still in place today. This week, we meet the families in California dealing with that ban forty years later. Families the ban was designed to protect, but who now say it discriminates against their children. How much have IQ tests changed since the 70s? And can they be used for good? We talk to the people responsible for designing the most widely used modern IQ test, and along the way, we find out that at the very same moment the IQ test was being put on trial in California, on the other side of the country, it was being used to solve one of the biggest public health problems of the 20th century. This episode was reported and produced by Pat Walters, Rachael Cusick and Jad Abumrad, with production help from Bethel Habte. Music by Alex Overington. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Lee Romney, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Moira Gunn and Tech Nation, and Lee Rosevere for his song All the Answers. Radiolab’s “G” is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Hey, this is G. I'm Radio Lab miniseries. Episode 2. I'm Pat Walters. Pat. And in episode one, we told the story of a guy who was given an IQ test when he was a boy. And it changed the course of a boy.

life. Not for the better. His name was Darrell, but he came to be known as Larry P. He took on that pseudonym when he became the center of a court case that basically put the IQ test itself on trial. For months, lawyers presented evidence that the tests Darrell took were racially biased, and in 1979, a federal judge banned the IQ test for use on African American children for making decisions about special education in the state of California. The test could still be given to white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids, just not to black kids. Now, as you can imagine, this has caused some issues. Test, test, test.

Chapter 2 begins about 25 years later. Okay, we're in Hayward, California, a little town just south of Oakland, not too far from where Darrell lived. Then it starts. Hello. How are you? Tired. With a couple.

Hi, well, my name is Pamela. Louis. My name is Ricky Lewis. I am Nicholas Lewis's mother. I'm the dad of Nicholas, the son that we fought for to have equal rights. That's it. It's great. It's kidding. It's 2004. Pam and Ricky have five kids. One's in middle school. One's in high school. And their youngest, Nicholas, is in kindergarten. And how did you

learn about this thing? It was just by pure action. It was just by pure accident. I picked up a stupid paper that my husband brought home from work one day because he worked for the daily review. Back then, Ricky had a job delivering papers to local businesses. Yes, if they had extras, I would take one, mainly for the sports. So you got all your warriors gear on? Yes, I do. Go warriors. Anyhow, one day, Ricky comes in with some extra papers. Pam grabs a piece of it, and she sees this article. And it was just a little tiny thing about a court case.

Not the Larry P case, a different court case, but it mentioned the Larry P case. And it said black kids in California cannot be given IQ tests. And I seen it, and when I was reading it, I was like, this can't be true. In this day and age? She says she immediately thought of Nicholas. He didn't look Caucasian. None of my kids look Caucasian. You can tell they're biracial.

And she thought, is this going to affect him? Like, are people going to be making decisions about what tests he can and can't have because of the color of his skin? It sparked me to call the school and find out, is this true? And he told us it was a 1968 court ruling, and it was true. Now, just for the record, the case was decided in 79, not 68, but whatever. At that point, were you thinking... Well, I was dumbfounded. This ruling has lasted all these years.

Did he explain that, like, the ruling banned tests that were found to be biased against African-American students? I did not care, Pat. I did not care. My son was going to have the same rights. Any other child. I mean, my wife and I, we just told them that's not right. After that first conversation, Pam and Ricky ended up having a series of meetings with the school, some of which ended in yelling. I threatened.

I told them, I'll go to, I'll sue you guys. And eventually, after a few of these meetings, the school administrator came back to them and said, basically, look, we know. know you're upset, here's what we can offer you. Do you remember the offer that was given to us? Well, he said that our child would be able to take that test if we just put him down as Caucasian. That ridiculous offer, if you mark Nicholas down Caucasian, he will get the tests.

But if you choose to mark him African-American, then he will not. The superintendent said you had to mark either or. I remember this coming up. We tracked down the school administrator who was on the other end of that conversation. My name is Dr. Blaine Coak. He works in a different school district now.

But back when he was meeting with Pam and Ricky, he says, I was in a situation of really having to defend this ruling. And he says when Pam and Ricky got upset, he actually called the state school board. Ask them, like, what are we supposed to do about this? The only resolution I was given to kind of help was that the parent has the right to determine what race the child is. I turned on, looked at him, I looked at my husband, I looked back at him, I said, so you want me to deny my husband's heritage for my son to have this right.

That really got to her. Yeah. I would agree. You know, it really doesn't make a lot of sense. I was totally pissed at this point. I've had many friends tell me that parents became irate, disappointed. Very upset. Frustrated.

Very upset. I ended up talking to a bunch of school psychologists who work in the California public schools. I'm James Hiramoto. Jana Baker. And they confirmed for me that situations like what happened with Pam and Ricky, they're not that unusual. Sometimes a reaction might be, well, why not? or, well, what if I say that it's okay? Like, as a parent, can I just, like, sign something to prove that it's okay, that I don't care?

No. What happens if they check African-American and Caucasian? If it's marked anywhere, there is nothing. It talks about percentage. Have you had kids you've assessed where you've thought, like, well, maybe they're African-American. And so just to be safe, I'm going to not use an IQ test. I have. I have.

That's so weird. It is. It is a very awkward situation. Wait, can I ask a basic question? Two questions, actually. I mean, first, do schools use IQ tests as much these days as they used to back in the Larry P days when the band was put in place? Not quite as much as they used to, but they still use them a ton. So more than a million kids a year are given the whisk,

which is that IQ test that we talked about all of the last episode and is still the most widely used IQ test. Since then, lots of other IQ tests have been made and released. The Arthur Point scale, Ketellhorn, Infant Intelligence Scale, Columbia Mental Maturity Scale. All of these tests you're hearing are actually banned for black kids in California still. Giselle developmental schedule, good enough Harris drawing test, Merrill Palmer

Preschool performance test Well, that brings me My second question, which is Ravens Progressive Matrices Have the test changed? I mean, it's been a while. Have the places

that were found to be biased been de-biased? Yeah, well, that question led me to... Are you still there, Dr. Kaufman? I am here. This guy named Alan Kaufman. I'm just trying to park.

No problem. A woman just left the car blocking me. Okay. Cautamont strives. He's a professor at the Yale Medical School, and he says the tests have changed, and he would know because he was one of the first people to start changing them. Story is, starting in 1968, I was working for the psychological corporation in New York City. Alan was a young guy at the time.

And he starts working with a psychologist named David Wexler. David Wexler invented the whisk, the test we talked about all last episode. David Wexler was really the founder of clinical assessment. He was like this giant in the field. And Alan, this 20-something nobody... My assignment was to help him revise the whisk. Now, this was happening right as the Larry P. trial was getting started. The Black Psychologist Association was very vocal.

So Kaufman says the test company had pretty much accepted, like, we need to change the test. but Wexler, not so much. So I would go to his apartment on the east side of New York City. And they would go question by question. What is the color of rubies? Kaufman argued that question is clearly biased. I mean, the correct answer on the test is rubies are red, but A, if your family had more money, you were more likely to know what a ruby was.

And B, Kaufman says, Ruby was a popular name in the black community. So certain kids might think the question was referring to, people, not gems. That item was eliminated. But I understand it didn't always go that easily with him. No. No, and it was a little vein that he had on his scalp. But I knew when he got upset, it would start to pulse a little.

And he was so upset. I thought it was going to explode. He says they had knocked down, drag-out fights about questions. But many of the questions we talked about in the last episode ended up being removed. There were a bunch of changes. And so by the end of this process, how much of the test was different? Oh, probably 40% different. Since that original revision, the whisk has been revised three more times.

Hello, Susie? Yes. This is Susie Rayford. I'm the primary developer of the Wexler Intelligence Scales. I write the questions, design the research plan. And Susie says the test today is way different than it was back in the 70s. In fact, about 10 years ago, they replaced every question on the test. And then we also statistically analyze the items to see if...

She says they're now able to do these sort of advanced statistical comparisons where they can compare the responses of rich black kids to rich white kids, poor black kids to poor white kids. It goes through that kind of scrutiny. And if one group performs differently on a question, they'll get rid of it. You welcome that because you don't want to put something out that's wrong or that's going to hurt people. The biggest change, though, is the way the test is standardized.

It usually tries to be representative of the census. This is Brandon Gamble again, the former school psychologist we heard from in the first episode. These days, the whisk is, quote, unquote, normed on a population that apparently follows the U.S. census. The samples are much better. So, given how much the test has changed, how do you feel about the fact that this band still exists, like still stops psychologists from giving IQ tests to black kids in California. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I think when the state dictates what psychologists can and can't do, that to me is a problem.

Because Brandon says an IQ test can give him useful information about a kid, regardless of their race. When you're talking about IQ tests, you're talking about abilities, your ability to see things visually and be able to answer questions around seeing patterns, right? And so you can target particular skills around cognition. Wait, hello, are you there now? Yes, can you hear me clearly? I can. I'll admit, I didn't completely understand what Brandon meant until I talked to this guy. My name is John Cato, and I'm a dad of a young man who experience a learning disability in his young life. John's encounter with the Larry P. Ban happened about 20 years.

years ago. He was living in Santa Monica, California at the time. He works in transportation. He was running the bus system there. And his son, Justin... He was, I believe, seven or eight. He was in first grade. And his teacher told John that Justin was having a really hard time with reading. Even if he gave him the simplest of things to read, he couldn't grasp what he read. The teacher wasn't really sure it was going on. They were wondering, is this just a reading specific thing, or is there some broader cognitive disability happening? So John decided to talk to a specialist. And he recommended first that I get an IQ test. And so I went to his elementary school and requested that from his principal. And she informed me that he could not have an IQ

test because in the state of California, it was not legal. And when the principal said that, what went through your mind? I thought it was crazy. I said, you know, she was trying to explain to me why it was not allowed. She knew there was some court case. And John says he got it. He understood. He remembers having to take an IQ test when he was in his 20s, trying to get ahead in the army.

To be an officer. And he says on that test... There were terms I never heard of. Like magenta. Well, when you grew up in a very poor neighborhood, it's basic colors. It's blue, red, purple, yellow, white, brown. I didn't know what that question meant.

Nonetheless, John says, when it came to his son, if taking that test, even if it was biased, could help him, so be it. And I understand, you know, the economic and environmental impacts about an IQ test, but my son needed one. I was not accepting the argument because of his ethnicity. They were prohibited from giving him a test. At first I asked if I could waive it. Is there anywhere I can waive this?

And I was told, no. I honestly said, well, okay, then he's not African-American. His mother is Caucasian, and my history of my family, it's mixed race. So let's reclassify him. She said, I guess you can do that. And then I said to her, look at the absurdity of that. Ultimately, Justin ended up getting IQ tested by that specialist outside the school system. And in the end, the test helped reveal that Justin had a very specific problem.

What was determined was Justin has this imagination. So when he was reading when he was younger, he couldn't separate the two. John says Justin would start to read a sentence, but before he could get too far into it, even just a few words, he would start to imagine what was going on and just get lost in that universe. He tried to read and go off and live it, and you can't do that. Like, he would just never get very far before his imagination would take over.

And the IQ test helped them figure that out? In a way, yeah, because the thing about an IQ test is, made up of all these sub-tests. And so the psychologist was able to use it to figure out that Justin was fine with math, his memory was fine. He had a good vocabulary. Processing speed and puzzle-solving abilities were fine. You know, so they were able to rule all these things out and investigate the root of the problem, which turned out to just be his really active imagination. It was a book, one book that got Justin to read, and it was Harry Potter. He wouldn't put that broke down. He was stamped late in tonight and started reading it. That was the end of his problem

of reading. Brandon Gamble says he's worked with hundreds of kids like Justin, where an IQ test helped him figure out what was going on. And so that's why Brandon says, like, the Larry P. Band isn't necessary anymore. He says the thing that he sort of keeps his eye on now when it comes to these tests isn't so much the racial bias question, but something kind of bigger. The basic idea that an IQ test could be used to define a kid. There was a period, and I would say from like the 1930s all the way through the 80s, people would just give the IQ or cognitive test. This is what happened to Daryl from the first episode.

And of course the test was skewed against him because of racial bias. But Brandon says even if it wasn't, even if Daryl had been a white kid, making a decision, any decision about his future by just using an IQ test. That's horrible. You really don't know that kid. It's only a snapshot of like a three-hour window of sitting down with this kid in a very abstract clinical setting. That can't be the totality of who that child is.

To really understand who a kid is, and every psychologist I talked to said this, you have to spend a lot of time with them. Visiting the home, like observing the child in the classroom, like extensive interviews with their families, especially if you're working cross-culture. There's some things that you may not understand. So it sounds like your perspective on the IQ test is that, like, you can evaluate students without the IQ tests. Yeah, if you can't do IQ testing, there's 99 other things you can do. Wait, so then why do it at all?

I mean, like, I guess I get that it can be helpful sometimes, like in the case of the kid with Harry Potter. But, like, really what it was that helped the kid was Harry? Potter. You know, like, that's what helped him actually read better. So if we're in a situation now where we have all of these other tools available and we know that the IQ test, however useful it can be, it also has some very bad mojo historically attached to it, well, is it actually still worth keeping around? Yeah, I found myself thinking that a lot. You know, just like from a pure cost benefit perspective, maybe it needs to go.

Yeah. And that's what I've been feeling until we came across this one story that pretty much completely changed my mind about that. Really? We'll do that story after a quick break. Hello, this is Khalid from Tokyo. Radio Lab is supported in part by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. sloan.org.

Hey, welcome back to G, a radio lab miniseries. I'm Pat Walters. Okay, Pat, so what is the story that you were referring to that totally changed your mind about IQ testing? Well, I'm going to tell you, but first, let me do a quick digression. Maybe I should take a step back first. In talking about the ups and downs of the IQ test, it turns out so much of it has to do with how we talk about it.

So I want to go back to an interview I did. with Siddhartha Mukherjee. Why is a cancer geneticist talking about G? We talked to Mukherjee in the first episode of the series about the history of IQ tests and G, which is the shorthand for general intelligence. And in our interview, he kept circling back to this one idea about language.

One thing that we learned over and overall from the history of medicine is that the way you define terms, the way you define anything, makes an enormous difference as to how you evaluate it, and what value society, places on it. I can give you a thousand examples from the history of cancer. One he gave me that I thought was really interesting has to do with breast cancer.

The word radical mastectomy contained the word radical in it because it was meant to address the term root. Which apparently is what radical means of or pertaining to the root of something. Radical as in radish. But it morphed socially and culturally into a word that meant aggressive and brazen and therefore the right thing to do for a woman with a terrible disease. Like once that word came to mean extreme, Mukherjee says, more and more people who saw their cancer as extreme started to feel like that would be the appropriate response, even if it might not have been.

These words that we use in medicine and science are extraordinarily important. And when it comes to intelligence, he says, the thing you've got to remember... Right off the bat is that the word, intelligence is a colloquial word. I just cannot emphasize that enough. Like the concept of intelligence,

way predates modern Western science. Yes. Yeah, I mean, you can look at ancient literature, and you'll see that some people are smart and others, like Odysseus is really smart. Intelligence researcher Stuart Ritchie again. Ancient China. It has been defined through social and cultural practice.

It varies from one society to another, has varied from one society or another, and for the history of human beings, we have found that perfectly acceptable. Everybody understood that there were are lots of different ways to be intelligent. Like, to be intelligent just meant to be able to understand, which would mean a million different things,

until 1904, when Charles Spearman came along and said, We have planted our flag on intelligence. We know what this is and it is defined as your score on these tests. But the fact is, according to both of these guys, it might be a lot more complicated than that. There is something captured in the IQ test called G. I don't have a problem with G. Maybe it sends a shiver down my spine because of

human history. I don't have a problem with it fundamentally. It's a fact. But I do have an argument making a simple one-to-one translation between that idea and this thing, this word that carries so much value and meaning, the word being intelligence. Is there a better word? Yeah, well, we should have called it something like cognitive function. I mean, a lot of the researchers I talk to and psychologists and even the test makers seem to be using words like cognitive function or cognitive ability more. When I talk about intelligence, all I mean is, see, look, I'm using the word intelligence, even though I said at the start of the interview, I shouldn't use it.

But they also kind of slipped back into just calling it intelligence a lot. I mean, Mukherjee says, like, what an IQ test measures is your ability to navigate in problem space. Your ability to navigate in problem space. Yeah. I don't really know what that means. Like, I can't picture problem space. I can't be more specific than that

because that is exactly what it is. Sometimes an analogy helps, which is you meet a person who is a good general athlete. And when you see them manipulating their way through space, they have a particular way of manipulating themselves through space because they understand physical space. According to Mukherjee, problem space is kind of like that, but mental. Like how well can you move ideas, pictures, and numbers around in your head?

Your ability to navigate in problem space. Yeah, it's a little hard. That gives me something, though. I like the idea of space there because it's like it's bound read. It's bounded in some sense. Yeah. It's not everything. It's just a space.

It's a space and it leaves a lot of stuff out. Yeah, exactly. But regardless of what you call it, even if you call it intelligence or G or whatever, if you use the test in a different way at a different altitude, let's say, it can change the world very dramatically and not just in a bad way. Like if the IQ test has sort of like a heroic moment in American history, this is it. it sort of like stepped up and saved a lot of the people that it was designed to hurt. Interesting. Okay. Tell me more. Tell me more. Okay. So it's the early 1970s. And the stories about this guy named Herb Needleman.

He was, Needleman was... He was a pediatrician in Philadelphia. About six feet tall, brown hair, blue eyes. He was this intense, kind of arrogant guy, very sure of himself. That's Lydia Denworth. I'm a science writer. She wrote a book about Herb. He was really engaging. Apparently, when he'd been a teacher, students really liked hanging out with him because...

At that point, he was fighting the Vietnam War stuff. He'd gone to Vietnam and started a nonprofit where he would bring injured kids back to the U.S. for treatment. Wow. So he was kind of this like... Students liked hanging out with him and hearing his sort of crazy stories. Anyway, when Needleman was training to be a pediatrician... I was referred a child who was very sick little girl. That's Herb.

Needleman talking to more of a gun on the NPR show Tech Nation. Needleman actually passed away a few years ago, and they were nice enough to let us use clips from their interview. In any case, this little girl shows up. A little three-year-old girl, a Hispanic girl, from the local neighborhood, was a poor neighborhood where the hospital was located. And this little girl was really in terrible shape. She was lethargic.

Couldn't talk. It was acute lead poisoning. Lead poisoning. Somebody else made a diagnosis. And I knew what to do because I'd have. had a couple lectures on it. It was known that lead could make you sick, but it was thought... The conventional wisdom was...

That it could only make you sick at really high doses. When I started, the conventional wisdom was that 60 micrograms per decilator was a toxic dose. For comparison, today, the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, have what's called a reference level, which is that anything over five micrograms per decilator is cause for alarm. And in fact, we know now that there is... no safe level of lead in anybody's body, but especially in children. And keep in mind, this is an era when lead was all over. Everywhere.

Almost all the houses were painted with white lead. This exciting new kind of beauty. Lead paint was the standard. Instant paint. The reason lead was put in paint was that... You simply roll on... It made the paint go on the wall more smoothly. There's never been anything like it.

It's sticky, it's bright. Bold, shimmering. And also when paint chips off and you... get a big piece of it. Lead paint is actually quite sweet. It's sweet. Really? Yeah. So little kids, it tastes good. Sweet and crunchy. They eat it. So Herb is there in Philadelphia, sees this kid with acute lead poisoning. After her, he sees another. And then another, and another. He knows high levels of lead are toxic. But he starts to wonder, what about low levels? Well, I decided I would pursue it. The question was how.

So people knew that lead in the body went into bones, and it mimics calcium in the body. So it would be anywhere in the body that calcium would be found. So the tissue you want to look at is bone, but you can't do that. You can't stick needles in kids' bones. You certainly can't go cutting out pieces of their bone. He knew he couldn't get bone. And then one day sitting there in his office at this community health clinic in North Philadelphia, He looked at children playing in this school yard of this elementary school.

And he thought, teeth, teeth are the answer. So he partners up with the dentist, and he has the dentist ask the parents to bring in their kids baby teeth. Right away the parents are like, well, we've got a little bit of a tooth fairy problem here. You know, the kids are not just going to give away their teeth. I'm not going to fund your research study with my tooth fairy money. So Herb, like... Needleman went out. And he got all these silver dollars.

I was the tooth fairy. Tooth fairy. So he gets the dentist to bribe the kids to give him the teeth. He then tested the teeth. Measure the tooth lead levels. Then brings in a bunch of the kids, gives him a series of tests. Extensive battery of neuropsychologic tests. Including IQ tests.

And what he discovered, the key thing he discovered, is that if you get just a little bit more lead in your body, like for every 10 micrograms per deciliter, more lead in your blood. And that's an extremely small amount. your IQ score falls four points. So if you're exposed to just a tiny bit more lead, you get four points, quote unquote, dumber on the IQ test? Essentially, yeah.

I don't quite have a sense of scale. I mean, it's four points a lot? So the interesting thing about it is like the IQ test is set up to kind of put everybody on this bell curve where you have most everybody is in the middle, and then you've got these sort of tails where you have the people who score really high and the people who score really low.

High would be around 130, low would be down around 70. And so four points in the middle doesn't make that big of a difference. Okay. But if you think about it on a much larger scale, because what we're actually talking about is shifting an entire population down four points.

What that means is at the top, you end up with half as many people who are going to score above 130. Well, that feels like a lot. Yeah, and twice as many people scoring below 70. Wow. When we published that

in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, it had a considerable impact. It was a huge deal. It made national news when he had done it. He had shown that a long-term, low-level lead exposure

was actually connected to a kid's day-to-day experience in the classroom, right? And in life. The study led the government to ban the use of lead in house paint, put limits on the amount of lead that could be in gasoline. Not too surprisingly, the lead industries were not happy. And they tried to discredit Herb Needleman.

It was a nasty period in our lives. They accused him of scientific misconduct. There was a big fight over whether his 1979 Boston study was accurate. The long story short, they reanalyzed it multiple times. and the numbers held up. So then what happens? In the mid-80s, 1985, I arrived.

Lead had been reduced some in the environment. But then in comes Ronald Reagan. There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, except those we ourselves erect. And he decides, let's cut the industry a break. You know, let's loosen things back up again. And there was a guy at EPA named Joel Schwartz

who had been hired as an economic analyst. there. Joel Schwartz is asked by his bosses in about 1985 to calculate how much industry would save if the regulations on lead and gasoline were lessened, which was what the Reagan administration wanted to do. And he says, well, but what about the health effects? And he's told, ah, you know, this is the way it is, this is what they want. So what he does, so Joel Schwartz, it was a clever guy, he says, okay, I will do this job. I will calculate how much industry will save if they don't have to regulate lead and gasoline. And that number was about $100 million.

Okay. But then he did something else. He did the first major cost-benefit analysis that linked health effects and economics. And the really innovative thing that Joel Schwartz did was to also calculate the cost to society of leaving lead. in the gasoline. And the way he did that was that he used those four IQ points. They did an economic analysis where they were able to figure out that for each one point change in IQ, that equated to a 1% change in the wage rate. Again, on a population level, with every step down in IQ, there's a connection to how much money somebody can earn. You've got lower levels of educational

attainment and ultimately lower levels of earning. So when he did this calculus, the industries could save $100 million if they have lead. Society, if you count based on Needleman's IQ, four IQ points, the cost of society of leaving lead in gasoline was close to a billion dollars. Whoa. And that's based on lost education, lost wages, and increased health care costs. He writes this report, gives it to one of the top officials at the EPA, this guy named Joseph Cannon, who had pretty much made up his mind that he was not going to regulate the lead industry anymore.

They didn't need regulation. There was no need for more regulation. But apparently he looks at this report. And he said, you just cannot look away. You know, you cannot look away. January 1st, 1986, the EPA effectively banned lead from gasoline. And over the next few decades, the average blood lead level of Americans dropped by 90%. Wow.

And blood lead levels around the world began to fall after that. It was a pretty important effect. The thing this lead story made me realize is that these IQ tests, they measure certain thinking abilities. Whatever you want to call it, intelligence, G, problem space. And when you need to find out if, like, an environmental toxin is affecting the way kids think, having this standardized measurement of that is really powerful. And so something like the IQ tests lets you see these almost invisible, like, subtle effects on large groups of people.

And after that lead thing, there have been many, many, many studies. Like you can go on PubMed and search, like, IQ test environmental effects. And you find all of these amazing studies where people use IQ tests to look at the way Smog affects kids. thinking abilities or or like violence in the neighborhood. Wow. That's interesting. You know, it just reminds me of what the judge said in the last episode in the ruling that that essentially IQ tests are social evil masquerading as empiricism.

Mm-hmm. This is kind of the inverse. And it's, you know, basically the same test. I mean, and the thing we don't say in the lead story, which we should add or say here, is that Herb Needleman, he did the studies on. only white kids. Really? People couldn't say like, oh, the poor kids are scoring lower because they're black.

Right. He did it only on white kids. Why? He did it only on white kids because he was worried because a lot of the poor kids who were being affected by lead were black and other minority kids. And he was worried that if he took a sample of, you know, affluent white kids who had low lead exposure and he took a group of poor kids who had high lead exposure who also were black that people would say, oh, the kids, the poor kids scored lower, not because of lead

exposure, but because they're black. And black people are less intelligent than white people. Wow. So he actually segregated his sample. Yeah. So that he could avoid bias, their bias. Exactly. Wow, that's complicated. Yeah. So at the end of the day, I don't think you can say that the IQ test or even the whole idea of measuring human intelligence in this way is any one thing. Is any one thing? thing. The test isn't inherently evil in this way that a lot of people, you know, not psychologists necessarily, but regular people think about it. But it does have this power in it. And it was designed to do a certain thing, a bad thing, if you just go all the way back to the eugenic roots of it. And that's like always in there, but it's not the only thing that's in there.

Sounds like an Agents of Shield episode and a 084 or like a, like a, unknown entity that still has power after centuries. Wait, what are you talking about? What is an 084? Like, what is that? Well, 084 is an unknown phenomena within Marvel Comics. That was the metaphor psychologist. Brandon Gamble threw out in our interview.

He was talking about the IQ test, but he was referring to this Marvel Comics organization called Agents of Shield. Strategic Homeland Interagency Logistics Division. I'm a total nerd. He says every so often the heroes in that show will find this object. they call it an 084.

And 084 is this unknown phenomena. And it's an object they know is powerful, but they don't understand what kind of power it has, or how to use it. And sometimes these unknown phenomena can, you know, you don't even know what it is, but if you touch it, it takes you back in time,

it could disrupt you, it's toxic, it can even kill you. Or it could save you. It's an inanimate object by itself, but once it's activated, it becomes this extra thing. He says it's a little bit like that. With the IQ test, the science of intelligence, sort of became that the moment G walked into the room. Became this powerful thing with many different potentials that we're still struggling with. This episode was reported by Rachel Cusick and I, and produced by Rachel and I,

and Jad Abramrod, with help from Bethel-Hopte, music by Alex Overington, and fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Lee Romney, Chandri Kumunika, Moira Gunn from Technation, and Lee Rosefear. For the use of his song, All the Answers. Radio Lab's miniseries G is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Oh, one last thing. At the end of the show, we often have a listener read the credits. RadioLab is really proud to have listeners all over the world, and we would love to hear you on the show.

It's super easy. If you're interested, go to radiolab.org slash credits to record the credits and a message from one of our sponsors. That's radio lab.org slash credits. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with the third episode of G in two weeks. This is Alex Halpertor, calling from Bozeman, Montana. on my cross-country road trip. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abelamrod and is produced by Soren Wheeler.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel-Haptur Tracy Hunt, Nora Keller, Matt Kielte, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwan, Lachin, Latif Nosser, Melissa O'Donnell, Sarah Carey, Arienne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shemia O'Lealy, Audrey Quinn, W. Harry Fortuna, Ruth, Imani Leonard and Neil DeShittner.

Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. That's a cool job.