To put it in a slogan, it is the difference between being born without legs and being born short. SSAs are not born without legs at a greater rate than others, but they are shorter on average.
Have you read https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-of-african-hunters (the title "The Intelligence of African Hunters, and the Ignorance of Popular Hereditarians" states the thesis). On Twitter the author has even quoted Galton on how clever the Bushmen are! You're also familiar with the conundrum of GSCEs in Britain (minimal black-white gap) https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/solving-the-gcse-mystery . If the GSCEs were an accurate measure of IQ gaps in Britain, wouldn't African immigrants have to be mathematically impossibly unrepresentative of their home populations if African mean IQ was really 70? Even if we throw the GSCEs out, the black white gap in Britain seems noticeably smaller than in the US. And of course African and Caribbean immigrants regularly outperform native blacks in the States. Have you written about any of this?
To answer your last question, my guess is that the citizens from Africa and the Caribbean who are immigrants in the first place are probably more intelligent on average. Can't speak for the UK, but the US culturally incentivizes the 'high achieving' immigrant quite a bit. Think doctors, engineers, etc.
One must always bear in mind that degrees from Africa are not remotely the same as degrees from the US or UK for example. High achieving for them is not the same as high achieving for us.
For example their 7th grade reading proficiency is actually only around a 2nd grade level for Whites.
Their degrees also tend to be vaslty less merit based, achieved in much shorter time, to much lower standards, etc.
That said, yes, the highly elite selected recent immagrants do tend to outperform "native" African Americans (and there are some that can even match or exceed the performance of higher end White students at higher levels of education where the selection pressure is much higher, at least from what I saw from a cursory look at the data.) The problem appears to be that even the elite for their populations are still average for ours (if we're talking about the immigration process itself being an elite selection process, rather than picking the most elite of those elites, to further create a rarified ultra-elite subset), and the truly elite are orders of magnitude more rare than for Whites. Couple that with regression to the mean and without extreme long term reproductive isolation you're still going to have those immigrants fade back into the Black gene pool with no noticeable effect.
It's an interesting topic. One a lot of "racists" unfortunately seem unaware of, believing all Blacks to be equally "retarded". But one that hereditarians do seem more aware of. The fact that high IQ Blacks do exist, they just tend to be hundreds of times more rare than in an otherwise equivalent White population.
I suppose I’m more optimistic about the direction things will go in a more global society. I don’t have data here, I’ve just anecdotally seen some really talented immigrants in research, art, and just in my day to day life. I perceive the value they add as being based moreso around the original perspectives they can contribute than an attempt to “exceed” Americans in an intelligence-off. They’re given more wiggle room to do this than a lot of African-Americans because their family’s culture presumably values education and fulfilling academic/creative potential (given that they immigrate for academic opportunities), instead of simply surviving or pursuing shallower goals.
Also: *”only around a 2nd grade level for the -average American student-“ I think you meant to say? Segregation still exists to an extent in the US education system because of how large the gaps between wealthy and poor education quality can be, but generally most kids in the US get a good education, not just the white ones.
First, the supposed benefits of “diversity” don’t withstand empirical scrutiny. Robert Putnam’s own work on social capital — despite his attempts at optimistic spin in the conclusion — shows that diversity consistently erodes trust, cooperation, and civic engagement. The claim that this will somehow reverse itself over time has no historical basis; if anything, history shows the opposite. His “damage control” was an act of faith, not a conclusion rooted in his findings.
Second, the idea that we need large-scale immigration to access “different perspectives” is a false dichotomy. In the internet age, collaboration across borders is already instantaneous. You can share research, art, and ideas globally without having to dilute national cohesion, strain institutions, or destabilize demographics.
Finally, about the education point: I did mean White 2nd graders. Studies of literacy benchmarks consistently show that Black students lag substantially behind White students, often by several grade levels, even when controlling for socioeconomic variables. This reflects the persistence of cognitive gaps rooted in both genetics and heritability. These aren’t small differences that can be hand-waved away by pointing to anecdotal “talented immigrants.”
This sounds suspiciously like Jared Diamond's objectively false assertions about the intellectual superiority of Papua New Guineans over that of Whites. Subjective opinions vs more objective measures.
Galton was a pioneer, but quoting him on Bushmen cleverness is no different than Diamond praising New Guineans—it’s anecdotal impression, not a rigorous psychometric study. Early travelers often marveled at the situational ingenuity of hunter-gatherers, but that’s a very different thing than high general intelligence (g) as measured by standardized, g-loaded tasks. Modern data don’t vindicate Galton’s or Diamond’s anecdotes; they vindicate Lynn, Rindermann, and the large psychometric literature.
On the GCSEs: George Francis is right that if they were a clean IQ proxy, the gaps would be “mathematically impossible” given African baseline means. But the issue is that GCSEs aren’t cleanly g-loaded IQ tests. They’re educational attainment exams, heavily shaped by environment, school quality, immigrant selectivity, and grading policies. Two key points:
Immigrant selectivity. African and Caribbean migrants to the UK are a highly non-random subset of their home populations. For example, Nigerian immigrants disproportionately come from the Igbo and Yoruba middle/upper classes, who already test higher than the ~70 African mean Lynn reported. The “impossible” problem disappears once you model selectivity and within-Africa variation.
Test vs. attainment. The U.S. NAEP or SAT—much more psychometrically rigorous—show the same ~1 SD gap as traditional IQ tests. The GCSE, by contrast, has a narrower gap partly because of grade inflation, coursework weighting, and less g-loading. Rindermann (2007, 2018) notes the lower predictive validity of school-leaving exams compared to IQ tests.
So the smaller Black–White gap in Britain isn’t evidence that African IQ is “really” 85–90 instead of 70. It reflects (a) selective migration, (b) differences in subgroup performance (e.g., East Africans vs. West Africans vs. Caribbeans), and (c) exam structure. The U.S. data on Black immigrants confirms this—first-generation African kids often outperform native Black peers, but they still converge toward the broader gap across generations once environmental advantages equalize.
That’s why hereditarians don’t rely on Galton’s anecdotes or GCSEs alone—they rely on the convergent validity of g-loaded tests across decades, cultures, and measures.
The list is pretty comprehensive. And as you might guess, there are no important contributions from Sub-Saharan Africa. There are important contributions from Ancient Egypt. But the people in North Africa are more closely related to Europeans than to Southern Africans.
Broadly generalizing, when we go back in history we can see that "high culture" with its scientific accomplishments always arose in fertile river valleys where populations got very dense and stratified (after good ships were invented near the Mediterranean, its coastal areas without fertile river valleys could also become "civilized" because of the efficient over-the-sea business activity). Sub-Saharan Africa did not have such hyper-fertile areas, nor did Siberia, Australia, Amazon, or any other badlands. Africa's populations became dense much later in different circumstances. Therefore I think the lack of scientific accomplishments, especially before the 20th century, is not a good indicator of people's innate abilities (either nature- or nurture-based). Of course, it also doesn't indicate any lack of innate differences, just wanted to say it's a pretty weak indicator of anything.
I've actually converged on thr same idea: seasonality. Seasonality seems to be key for an environment that will select for intelligence above all else. Having to plan into the distant future to thrive is a marvelous selection pressure for intellect.
Richard Lynn mentioned in his book about dysgenics that the American black population is more dysgenic than the American white population. Does anyone know its cause? Lynn hypothesized that it's due to (1) race differences in IQ distributions by sex with black women potentially lacking the IQ mean and SD disadvantage that white women have as adults with respect to men of their own race as well as (2) the prevalence of American black men in jail. Can intranational studies on race differences in dysgenics help us understand the international differences in dysgenic trends?
I would think that (2) would result in eugenic selection over time. Incarceration tends to select for some combination of low intelligence and aggression.. and prisoners don't have the same "reproductive opportunities" as those on the outside. I would think the internecine gang warfare in would have similar selection effects as well.
"You can think of it as throwing 6 standard dice. The expected sum is 21, but it is possible to get only 6, or get as much as 36."
Emil, I have long wondered what if the intellect is not an additive but a combinative resultant of the intellect-related genes. In other words, what if we are not rolling dice, but playing a game of poker. Just as an example, because I'm Hungarian, we Ashkenazi Jews are full of figure decks, we Hungarians are the normal deck of cards, and our Gypsies hardly have any figure cards... So the task is to discover the rules of our beautiful game of "Intellect"...
After a second read of your comment I am not sure I understand what you are referring to. If a gene is additive it usually means that a heterozygotic speciment will have a measurable trait at the midpoint between the two homozygotic cases. Or maybe that there are no significant gene-gene interactions. Your game of poker analogy refers to what variants at what frequency are available in a population. To me the two issues seem orthogonal.
Or did you refer to the probability of positive gene-gene interaction in certain populations? If that happened we would see outbreeding depression. Is there any credible observation of that?
The GWAS studies (and polygenic risk scores) on intelligence tend to find basically no non-additive common variants. There seems to be some evolutionary reasons for it. There certainly are a few non-additive variants - otherwise there would be no inbreeding depression, but they tend to be rare and have large effects (usually something is just messed up - like a faulty protein encoding that causes a recessive disorder) and go extinct (usually) or get fixated if it is advantageous (rarely).
Razib had an interesting interview with James Lee on this topic, you might be interested in that:
I don’t know guys, if you’re so smart how come you have the absolute worst economic disparity, homelessness, depression, resource guzzling, war-machine dependent, genocide-enabling, 3rd world country-oppressing, child-poisoning, health destroying system imaginable? It’s like seeing Harvard educated economists proud of Reaganomics. I mean, sure, bravo 👏🏻, but…
Working with large groups of blacks would debase you of any notions of them being of equal intelligence. I have managed many fine black people, but most are not the sharpest knives in the drawer and you would have to assign them tasks that they were well suited for or expect to be disappointed on a regular basis.
I have read with great interest James Thompson's essay, "The 7 Tribes of Intellect", and I know that it is based on the work of Linda Gottfredson, a researcher with whom I am slightly less familiar.
What I want to know is this: Has anyone come up with a better or more detailed breakdown of the types of tasks that people within a certain IQ range can do (or not do), the types of entertainment they like, the types of issues they engage or struggle than the one Thompson presents?
No one has written a book on this subject, right? No one has written a book about the kinds of tasks that people on the different continents and subcontinents grapple with on a day-to-day basis either, right?
To put it in a slogan, it is the difference between being born without legs and being born short. SSAs are not born without legs at a greater rate than others, but they are shorter on average.
Have you read https://traditionsofconflict.substack.com/p/the-intelligence-of-african-hunters (the title "The Intelligence of African Hunters, and the Ignorance of Popular Hereditarians" states the thesis). On Twitter the author has even quoted Galton on how clever the Bushmen are! You're also familiar with the conundrum of GSCEs in Britain (minimal black-white gap) https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/solving-the-gcse-mystery . If the GSCEs were an accurate measure of IQ gaps in Britain, wouldn't African immigrants have to be mathematically impossibly unrepresentative of their home populations if African mean IQ was really 70? Even if we throw the GSCEs out, the black white gap in Britain seems noticeably smaller than in the US. And of course African and Caribbean immigrants regularly outperform native blacks in the States. Have you written about any of this?
To answer your last question, my guess is that the citizens from Africa and the Caribbean who are immigrants in the first place are probably more intelligent on average. Can't speak for the UK, but the US culturally incentivizes the 'high achieving' immigrant quite a bit. Think doctors, engineers, etc.
One must always bear in mind that degrees from Africa are not remotely the same as degrees from the US or UK for example. High achieving for them is not the same as high achieving for us.
For example their 7th grade reading proficiency is actually only around a 2nd grade level for Whites.
Their degrees also tend to be vaslty less merit based, achieved in much shorter time, to much lower standards, etc.
That said, yes, the highly elite selected recent immagrants do tend to outperform "native" African Americans (and there are some that can even match or exceed the performance of higher end White students at higher levels of education where the selection pressure is much higher, at least from what I saw from a cursory look at the data.) The problem appears to be that even the elite for their populations are still average for ours (if we're talking about the immigration process itself being an elite selection process, rather than picking the most elite of those elites, to further create a rarified ultra-elite subset), and the truly elite are orders of magnitude more rare than for Whites. Couple that with regression to the mean and without extreme long term reproductive isolation you're still going to have those immigrants fade back into the Black gene pool with no noticeable effect.
It's an interesting topic. One a lot of "racists" unfortunately seem unaware of, believing all Blacks to be equally "retarded". But one that hereditarians do seem more aware of. The fact that high IQ Blacks do exist, they just tend to be hundreds of times more rare than in an otherwise equivalent White population.
I suppose I’m more optimistic about the direction things will go in a more global society. I don’t have data here, I’ve just anecdotally seen some really talented immigrants in research, art, and just in my day to day life. I perceive the value they add as being based moreso around the original perspectives they can contribute than an attempt to “exceed” Americans in an intelligence-off. They’re given more wiggle room to do this than a lot of African-Americans because their family’s culture presumably values education and fulfilling academic/creative potential (given that they immigrate for academic opportunities), instead of simply surviving or pursuing shallower goals.
Also: *”only around a 2nd grade level for the -average American student-“ I think you meant to say? Segregation still exists to an extent in the US education system because of how large the gaps between wealthy and poor education quality can be, but generally most kids in the US get a good education, not just the white ones.
First, the supposed benefits of “diversity” don’t withstand empirical scrutiny. Robert Putnam’s own work on social capital — despite his attempts at optimistic spin in the conclusion — shows that diversity consistently erodes trust, cooperation, and civic engagement. The claim that this will somehow reverse itself over time has no historical basis; if anything, history shows the opposite. His “damage control” was an act of faith, not a conclusion rooted in his findings.
Second, the idea that we need large-scale immigration to access “different perspectives” is a false dichotomy. In the internet age, collaboration across borders is already instantaneous. You can share research, art, and ideas globally without having to dilute national cohesion, strain institutions, or destabilize demographics.
Finally, about the education point: I did mean White 2nd graders. Studies of literacy benchmarks consistently show that Black students lag substantially behind White students, often by several grade levels, even when controlling for socioeconomic variables. This reflects the persistence of cognitive gaps rooted in both genetics and heritability. These aren’t small differences that can be hand-waved away by pointing to anecdotal “talented immigrants.”
This sounds suspiciously like Jared Diamond's objectively false assertions about the intellectual superiority of Papua New Guineans over that of Whites. Subjective opinions vs more objective measures.
Well, I never thought I’d hear Francis Galton accused of Diamondism.
Galton was a pioneer, but quoting him on Bushmen cleverness is no different than Diamond praising New Guineans—it’s anecdotal impression, not a rigorous psychometric study. Early travelers often marveled at the situational ingenuity of hunter-gatherers, but that’s a very different thing than high general intelligence (g) as measured by standardized, g-loaded tasks. Modern data don’t vindicate Galton’s or Diamond’s anecdotes; they vindicate Lynn, Rindermann, and the large psychometric literature.
On the GCSEs: George Francis is right that if they were a clean IQ proxy, the gaps would be “mathematically impossible” given African baseline means. But the issue is that GCSEs aren’t cleanly g-loaded IQ tests. They’re educational attainment exams, heavily shaped by environment, school quality, immigrant selectivity, and grading policies. Two key points:
Immigrant selectivity. African and Caribbean migrants to the UK are a highly non-random subset of their home populations. For example, Nigerian immigrants disproportionately come from the Igbo and Yoruba middle/upper classes, who already test higher than the ~70 African mean Lynn reported. The “impossible” problem disappears once you model selectivity and within-Africa variation.
Test vs. attainment. The U.S. NAEP or SAT—much more psychometrically rigorous—show the same ~1 SD gap as traditional IQ tests. The GCSE, by contrast, has a narrower gap partly because of grade inflation, coursework weighting, and less g-loading. Rindermann (2007, 2018) notes the lower predictive validity of school-leaving exams compared to IQ tests.
So the smaller Black–White gap in Britain isn’t evidence that African IQ is “really” 85–90 instead of 70. It reflects (a) selective migration, (b) differences in subgroup performance (e.g., East Africans vs. West Africans vs. Caribbeans), and (c) exam structure. The U.S. data on Black immigrants confirms this—first-generation African kids often outperform native Black peers, but they still converge toward the broader gap across generations once environmental advantages equalize.
That’s why hereditarians don’t rely on Galton’s anecdotes or GCSEs alone—they rely on the convergent validity of g-loaded tests across decades, cultures, and measures.
Charles Murray posted the data for his "Human Accomplishments" book. Here is the post with a link to the Excel spreadsheet that one can download.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/data-tools-3-the-full-inventory-of-scientific-events-from-human-accomplishment/
The list is pretty comprehensive. And as you might guess, there are no important contributions from Sub-Saharan Africa. There are important contributions from Ancient Egypt. But the people in North Africa are more closely related to Europeans than to Southern Africans.
Broadly generalizing, when we go back in history we can see that "high culture" with its scientific accomplishments always arose in fertile river valleys where populations got very dense and stratified (after good ships were invented near the Mediterranean, its coastal areas without fertile river valleys could also become "civilized" because of the efficient over-the-sea business activity). Sub-Saharan Africa did not have such hyper-fertile areas, nor did Siberia, Australia, Amazon, or any other badlands. Africa's populations became dense much later in different circumstances. Therefore I think the lack of scientific accomplishments, especially before the 20th century, is not a good indicator of people's innate abilities (either nature- or nurture-based). Of course, it also doesn't indicate any lack of innate differences, just wanted to say it's a pretty weak indicator of anything.
I've actually converged on thr same idea: seasonality. Seasonality seems to be key for an environment that will select for intelligence above all else. Having to plan into the distant future to thrive is a marvelous selection pressure for intellect.
Richard Lynn mentioned in his book about dysgenics that the American black population is more dysgenic than the American white population. Does anyone know its cause? Lynn hypothesized that it's due to (1) race differences in IQ distributions by sex with black women potentially lacking the IQ mean and SD disadvantage that white women have as adults with respect to men of their own race as well as (2) the prevalence of American black men in jail. Can intranational studies on race differences in dysgenics help us understand the international differences in dysgenic trends?
I would think that (2) would result in eugenic selection over time. Incarceration tends to select for some combination of low intelligence and aggression.. and prisoners don't have the same "reproductive opportunities" as those on the outside. I would think the internecine gang warfare in would have similar selection effects as well.
https://www.amren.com/blog/2021/06/what-could-be-driving-dysgenics-in-the-black-population/
Maybe they're as dumb so using birth control is difficult for them.
We do know that dysgenics is much worse in African countries...
Not really. Almost no studies from there.
"You can think of it as throwing 6 standard dice. The expected sum is 21, but it is possible to get only 6, or get as much as 36."
Emil, I have long wondered what if the intellect is not an additive but a combinative resultant of the intellect-related genes. In other words, what if we are not rolling dice, but playing a game of poker. Just as an example, because I'm Hungarian, we Ashkenazi Jews are full of figure decks, we Hungarians are the normal deck of cards, and our Gypsies hardly have any figure cards... So the task is to discover the rules of our beautiful game of "Intellect"...
After a second read of your comment I am not sure I understand what you are referring to. If a gene is additive it usually means that a heterozygotic speciment will have a measurable trait at the midpoint between the two homozygotic cases. Or maybe that there are no significant gene-gene interactions. Your game of poker analogy refers to what variants at what frequency are available in a population. To me the two issues seem orthogonal.
Or did you refer to the probability of positive gene-gene interaction in certain populations? If that happened we would see outbreeding depression. Is there any credible observation of that?
The GWAS studies (and polygenic risk scores) on intelligence tend to find basically no non-additive common variants. There seems to be some evolutionary reasons for it. There certainly are a few non-additive variants - otherwise there would be no inbreeding depression, but they tend to be rare and have large effects (usually something is just messed up - like a faulty protein encoding that causes a recessive disorder) and go extinct (usually) or get fixated if it is advantageous (rarely).
Razib had an interesting interview with James Lee on this topic, you might be interested in that:
https://unsupervisedlearning.libsyn.com/james-lee-genes-and-educational-attainment
This is correct, but linear approximation is good at first.
I don’t know guys, if you’re so smart how come you have the absolute worst economic disparity, homelessness, depression, resource guzzling, war-machine dependent, genocide-enabling, 3rd world country-oppressing, child-poisoning, health destroying system imaginable? It’s like seeing Harvard educated economists proud of Reaganomics. I mean, sure, bravo 👏🏻, but…
the US is rich
Okay now explain their violent behaviour in Western Europe and North America.
So, academics really do think blacks are dumb, huh?
Working with large groups of blacks would debase you of any notions of them being of equal intelligence. I have managed many fine black people, but most are not the sharpest knives in the drawer and you would have to assign them tasks that they were well suited for or expect to be disappointed on a regular basis.
I have read with great interest James Thompson's essay, "The 7 Tribes of Intellect", and I know that it is based on the work of Linda Gottfredson, a researcher with whom I am slightly less familiar.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-7-tribes-of-intellect/
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/
What I want to know is this: Has anyone come up with a better or more detailed breakdown of the types of tasks that people within a certain IQ range can do (or not do), the types of entertainment they like, the types of issues they engage or struggle than the one Thompson presents?
No one has written a book on this subject, right? No one has written a book about the kinds of tasks that people on the different continents and subcontinents grapple with on a day-to-day basis either, right?
https://substack.com/@oddlyrelevantscripture/note/c-147419966
Scientifically based
Africans are simply natural retards, whereas Europeans are affected by mental retardation
In other words, black people are simply two standard deviations dumber.... Got it.
Eugenics. And completely inaccurate. White Supremacy Bullshit!