Every truly scientific proposition offers some clear empirical conditions under which it would be falsified; otherwise, it would have to be shelved under the mystical field of unfalsifiable pseudoscience. For the racial genetic hypothesis (the proposition that test score differences between blacks and whites are in part rooted in racial genetic differences), Professor Richard Lynn provided this scientific veneer by challenging opponents to find a single society where blacks do not appear to be clearly less intelligent than whites on any societal metric of intelligence. He gave further reasoning for this bold universal condition:
“If only environmental factors were responsible for the different IQs of different populations, we should expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans. The failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor.” Richard Lynn.
Well, it seems that God truly does have a sense of humor. It turns out that we did not need to look further than Richard Lynn’s own multiracial home of Britain to find the falsification that he proposed for the racial genetic hypothesis.
Although some hereditarians had already noticed some troubling signs (for their hypothesis) that the black African kids in the UK appeared to be at worst only about 8 IQ points below white children (instead of at least 20 to 30 points expected by racial IQ hereditarians), my humble contribution to the debate was to note that Africans were almost always lumped together into the ‘black African’ group when doing such comparisons. This concealed the real picture of how certain nationalities that were migrating from English-speaking African countries to the UK were actually already outperforming the British whites. On the face of it, it does not seem useful to lump English-exposed Nigerian or Ghanaian immigrant children, for example, with children of Somali refugees fleeing much worse humanitarian emergencies in Africa, especially without any prior exposure to the English language.
Murray Doesn’t Know This?
I was therefore surprised to recently notice on Twitter that Charles Murray, the author of the infamous ‘Bell Curve’ book, apparently does not know about this ‘troublesome’ performance of black African school children in the UK. In his tweet claiming confirmation of the traditional white-black gap in UK schools, he too makes the mistake of looking only at the combined “black” group, which not only lumps together all the different African nationalities, but even throws in the blacks from the Caribbeans, who have much lower scores than black Africans. Furthermore, he seems to be convinced that if we ever looked at mean test scores instead of things like “pass rates”, we would notice an even bigger gap between black and white children in favor of the latter, a gap that should theoretically be even bigger than the black-white test score gap in the US (since blacks in America, having more white genes in them, are said to have an IQ of 85 whereas the blacker people of sub-Saharan Africa have IQ 70).
UNZ Review
6 comments:
I can't get the orange "Chanda" link to work.
Corrected link:
http://www.unz.com/article/a-troublesome-intelligence/
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I do not consider IQ tests to be accurate measures of intelligence. In my opinion, intelligence is not a monolithic thing that can be quantified like the volume of water in a bucket. Rather, intelligence is a nebulous thing that occurs is various forms.
Person ‘A’ might be very good at mathematics. He uses his mind and body to solve math challenges. Person ‘B’ might be very good at sports. He uses his mind and body to solve sports challenges. Both persons are intelligent in different ways. Therefore any claim that Person ‘A’ is more intelligent than Person ‘B’ is questionable.
Also, IQ tests seem racist to me. They were devised by white people to “prove” that white-style intelligence was “superior” to other forms of intelligence.
Thanks, Konrad, I've fixed it.
I’d like to see an IQ test designed by bushmen or aborigines.
"I’d like to see an IQ test designed by bushmen or aborigines."
Their IQ test might be to drop you in the middle of the wilderness and measure how well you survive like they survive.
My point is that I am suspicious of standardized tests of intelligence. I am suspicious of claims that one kind of test is the definitive and only legitimate test.
Here is a reply to Chisala's contentions:
https://vdare.com/articles/race-denier-chanda-chisala-doesn-t-deserve-his-15-seconds-of-twitter-fame?scroll_to_paragraph=5
In short- conclusions about African intelligence drawn from a highly self-selected and atypical group, such as (predominantly) West African immigrants to Britain, are tendentious. Especially so when IQ figures themselves are not used but dubious proxies, such as grading in the notoriously easy General Certificate of Education, where furthermore Chisala does not distinguish between tougher tests such as Maths and pushovers such as art and sociology. Black kids may be disproportionately entered for soft subjects to inflate the school's ranking.
Towards adulthood, controlling their own cognitive backgrounds more and more, black-non-black IQ gaps widen. The genetic component (which herediatarians never argue is absolute, only around 50/50) remains constant; the early-environmental stimulus of 'hothousing' fades. Hence the disappointing outcomes for so many black adults who before puberty were scoring for IQ closer to orientals, whites and Jews. "Blood will out."
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