Letters, Oct. 15, 1979

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In terms of human suffering, give me Marcos' martial law rather than the deathly peace enjoyed by Kampucheans and Laotians and the clean mass drownings of Vietnamese leaving the incorruptible Communist state.

Ian Wolf

Melbourne, Australia

Let the Seniors Work

The pension bomb [Sept. 24] need not go off. Defusing is simple: require potentially productive people to produce. A hcalthy 70-or 75-year-old voluntarily livng on a pension financed for the most part by today's productive workers is livng on welfare. Jobs must be restructured to take seniors into account, and jobs must be available for seniors. If a person freely chooses leisure, he should not expect the productive working force to pay for it

William N. Thompsor

Kalamazoo, Mich

So our pension funds are running low, eh? I had better not plan on retiring until the day I die.

John P. McGrath

West Seneca, N. Y

Black Brains

In your story about Arthur Jensen's conclusion that blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites [Sept. 24], you say "Jensen's findings clearly have horrendous implications." This is not at all true. Although the entire black population may (if Jensen's findings are correct) have a lower average IQ than the white population, a given black person may have a higher IQ than a given white person. Thus one cannot say that all blacks are less intelligent than all whites. Jensen's findings, regardless of their validity (and it may not be worthwhile spending time to disprove them), are no excuse for racial discrimination.

Richard G. Weiss

New York City

Come on, Mr. Jensen! Quit tossing stumbling blocks and do something constructive. Give blacks a chance, a few generations of good education, healthy diets and the knowledge that the best will get commensurate employment (regardless of race), and then do your research.

Louis N. Clay

Detroit

It should not surprise any open-minded scientist that what we measure as IQ might have a genetic distribution similar to that found for other traits. The real problem lies in placing value judgments on the presence or absence of a particular trait. Who can really say which human characteristics will prove most advantageous to mankind over the evolutionary scale of time?

Steve Yeagle

Baltimore

Jensen's studies of IQ may or may not be valid; however, TIME's allusion to the Jews as being the smartest race on earth completely contradicts basic scientific knowledge. The Jews are not a race but are one of the world's myriad religions. Indeed, Judaism includes in its numbers individuals of many different races, including black, Oriental and Caucasian.

Lawrence D. Freedman, M.D.

Newport Beach, Calif.

Unfriendly Skies