A recent Nature Neuroscience paper demonstrated that poor children have smaller brains than affluent children:
Neuroscientists who studied the brain scans of nearly 1,100 children and young adults nationwide from ages 3 to 20 found that the surface area of the cerebral cortex was linked to family income. They discovered that the brains of children in families that earned less than $25,000 a year had surface areas 6 percent smaller than those whose families earned $150,000 or more. The poor children also scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests.
The region of the brain in question handles language, memory, spatial skills and reasoning, all important to success in school and beyond.
So, what did the study’s authors conclude?
“We’ve known for so long that poverty and lack of access to resources to enrich the developmental environment are related to poor school performance, poor test scores and fewer educational opportunities,” Sowell said. “But now we can really tie it to a physical thing in the brain. We realized that this is a big deal.”
Really? Yes, these are their two hypotheses for why:
One is that poor families lack access to material goods that aid healthy development, such as good nutrition and higher-quality health care. The other is that poor families tend to live more chaotic lives, and that stress could inhibit healthy brain development.
Amazingly, journalist Lyndsey Layton interviewed James Thompson and accurately shared his thoughts — and Charles Murray’s:
“People who have less ability and marry people with less ability have children who, on balance, on average, have less ability,” he said. Thompson noted that there is a genetic component to intelligence that Noble and Sowell failed to consider.
“It makes my jaw drop that we’ve known for years intelligence is inheritable and scientists are beginning to track down exactly how it happens,” Thompson said. “The well-known genetic hypothesis has not even had a chance to enter the door in this discussion.”
[...]
“It is confidently known that brain size is correlated with IQ, IQ measured in childhood is correlated with income as an adult, and parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ,” Murray wrote in an e-mail. “I would be astonished if children’s brain size were NOT correlated with parental income. How could it be otherwise?”
What percentage of these poor were those disenfranchised tribal undocumented shoppers, illegal aliens, etc.? Growing up with the poor whites didn’t keep us out of ROTC and fighter pilot, nuclear power school, etc. What a load of garbage. All they did here was confirm the facts we already knew: the dindu nuffins and such score way down the IQ scale.