Largely free (taxpayer-funded) at all levels but if you want to go into the best schools you better bring in your A-game because entrance requirements it to sit series of 4 hour long tests graded anonymously. You don't have to pretend to be a native American competitive rower who plays the trombone, but you need to know how to calculate Fourier series by hand.
Your second statement is incorrect.
Having a racial bias would mean that IQ tests are incorrect (having significantly different errors) for certain samples/groups. But no one is saying that.
Imagine a test to measure the resistance of various materials. Is the test biased because it shows that concrete is stronger than rotten wood? No, it just measures the resistance of different materials. If the measurement error (not the measurement itself) was significantly different for different materials then yes you could say the test is biased.
You are just saying that SES affects intelligence, which is most likely true and immediately prompts the question of what affects SES.
A large percentage of the population seems to believe that IQ and similar cognitive ability tests are something like a credit score, having no purpose but to direct society to the high scorers so that they can be showered with opportunity, while denying the same to low scorers. And it's true that tests like the SAT can have a big impact on the opportunities we get in life. But they can also be used in a more win-win way, to match people to opportunities they're ready for. And for that, you need an honest assessment of where the person is actually at, separate from how they got there.
A poor kid may score worse than they would have scored if they weren't poor, but if we want to know whether they're ready for MIT or a course above their grade level, it might do them a disservice to confound our perceptions of their actual current level with our personal indignation over socioeconomic inequalities and our hopes in the potential they'd realize if those inequalities were eliminated.
They were not just researching "how to rain nuclear fire on the US" but also how to send the first satellite into space, send a probe on Venus, put the first man in orbit, etc.
If culture flowed from genetics, then we would not expect to see the very large cultural shifts that history documents time and again in rather short periods of time.
Elizabethan England was incredibly bawdy by all accounts. And yet the same country a few centuries later was Victorian England, one of the most sexually uptight societies on record. Genetics didn't change that much, how did that happen?
Germany from the mid-1800s through WW 2 was one of the most warlike societies imaginable. Germany since has turned into a country of peaceniks with no interest in invading anyone, and who are unable to even cough up what they promised for self-defense. How did that happen?
The truth is that while factors from genetics to parasites like toxoplasma can impact culture, culture changes far too rapidly to be dismissed as simply an outcome of genetics.
I think it is more likely that culture drives genetics. If you have a group whose culture favors intermarriage, where marriage is encouraged and even arranged between families with intellectual success, and which enables the resulting couples to have many children, that would tend to drive the genetics of the group.
No. That there are differences in thinking speed is verifiable.
We can also verify that differences in thinking speed between individuals has a large component due to genetics, and also another large component due to environment. Everything from diet to the quality of parental interactions in early childhood.
What we can't determine is to whether genetics contributes to the differences in thinking speed between groups of people. We can identify important environmental factors like culture and racism. We can show that environmental facts matter. For example children of mixed race couples have a higher average IQ if they have white mothers. But nobody has found a way to measure what difference genetics might or might not make.
Largely free (taxpayer-funded) at all levels but if you want to go into the best schools you better bring in your A-game because entrance requirements it to sit series of 4 hour long tests graded anonymously. You don't have to pretend to be a native American competitive rower who plays the trombone, but you need to know how to calculate Fourier series by hand.