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The work relating differences in intelligence scores to the “honing of spatial sensibilities” in Chinese readers sounds worthy of continued study. J. Philippe Rushton’s studies, on the other hand, sound fallacious. His claim that Chinese children adopted by U.S. parents also tend to score higher ignores the fact that such families tend overwhelmingly to be of well-above-average means. Thus, environmental factors again get in the way of a theory of racial superiority.

Karen Faulkner
Philadelphia, Pa.

Japanese kids learn the simpler hiragana and katakana characters, which represent sounds, before learning Kanji (the Chinese pictorial characters). It would be interesting to see if they fall between the East and the West kids in IQ.

Robert N. Rader
Moore Haven, Fla.