Like all intelligence tests so far conceived, the Wonderlic has its problems--cultural problems. It does not and cannot account for an individual's learning environment, culture, childhood, education, intellectual encouragement and many similar factors. What chance does a high IQ person--regardless of race--have to develop his or her intelligence while growing up in the ghetto?
What we really need, if we're to judge the ability for abstract thought, the ability to learn, quickness of thought, creativity and imagination, and other aspects of intelligence is a direct physiological test of the grey matter itself, the intelligence equivalent of an electrocardiogram. No such test exists.
As a result, people who score poorly on the standard tests, such as the Wonderlic, are often smarter than their scores indicate, sometimes a LOT smarter. Sometimes see this expressed when coaches say a player "really knows the game," or some variation. They're talking about the application of innate intelligence.
Recent years have given us a terrific example of how wrong intelligence tests could be. One athlete, for instance, scored 88 on an IQ test, which is maybe 100 points less than Einstein. And yet during his athletic career, it became clear that he was one of his sport's smartest practitioners. His name is Mohammad Ali.
It is still possible, unfortunately, to connect intelligence with race, but that raises more questions than it answers. What if someone is half black, half white? What if someone has an Asian genetic background, but appears Caucasian?
It's awfully hard to categorize people by race when race itself is hard, if not possible to determine. How many white southerners, for instance, have no African-American genes? And vice-versa? At what point do some genes predominate and others take a recessive role?
At any rate, for all that we know about the workings of the brain, in the physiological sense, all normally developed human beings fall in the same range of innate intelligence, regardless of apparent race.
So yes, we can make a pretty good guess about the Wonderlic, but it will tell us a lot less than we think it does. It's really a measure of exposure to mainstream culture and mainstream opportunities.
