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.”
It seems like Putnam’s research observed the opposite long-term, no? I’m not an expert at all so this is just based on a cursory search, but he himself said his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society." according to this page. He’s a bit conservative for my taste though. Maybe I just a bit more progressive than you, I’ve only seen positive changes in the institutions I’m a part of when ethnic diversity is introduced, mainly my college and my friend groups in adulthood. Not a data based observation of course, just my personal feelings. I think in-person exchanges have value the same way in person interactions are still needed for someone to have a healthy ysocial life, nothing beats the real thing for me.
Regarding the performance gap between White and Black students, I think you won’t be surprised to hear I’m more liable to suspect unmeasured environmental factors (teacher bias, stereotype threats, bias in test design, ses measures, etc.) that may have been missing in the studies you’re referring to than genetics. I’m familiar with the other side of the conversation so I’m sure my opinion will sound disagreeable, but I haven’t been convinced of the genetic argument by any studies I’ve read about topic.
And further, because I feel the point wasn't made clearly enough in relation to Putnam's damage control...
His empirical results were crystal clear: in more diverse communities, people “hunker down,” trust others less (including those of their own race), volunteer less, vote less, and report weaker social ties. That’s the famous “bowling alone on steroids” result.
But because those findings were politically explosive, he tacked on a “don’t worry, diversity is still good in the long run” coda. To support that claim, he leaned heavily on other people’s work — much of it from the organizational behavior / business-school literature where “diversity” is operationalized very differently.
A few key points about that literature:
Conceptual substitution: Many of the cited “pro-diversity” studies don’t deal with racial/ethnic heterogeneity at all, but with diversity of perspectives, skills, or disciplines within teams. A group of engineers, marketers, and designers may solve a business problem better than a homogeneous team of engineers. That’s trivially true — but not the same thing as saying Somalis, Haitians, and Swedes coexisting in one polity will generate higher trust or cohesion.
Short-term, small-scale contexts: Positive “diversity effects” are often found in contrived settings (brainstorming sessions, corporate innovation teams, or lab experiments with college students). They measure output on a narrow task, not the long-term civic health of a society.
Publication bias: Within management and HR fields, there’s strong pressure to produce findings that flatter the “diversity = strength” narrative. Critical or null results are far less likely to see daylight.
Putnam himself admitted he delayed publishing his own results for years because he didn’t like what they showed. His optimistic gloss was a political fig leaf, not a finding from his own dataset.
So the “substantial benefits of diversity” rhetoric is largely a misapplication of studies about cognitive/task diversity, repackaged as if it applied to racial/ethnic diversity. In practice multiculturalism often correlates with enforced orthodoxy: the more a society is divided by ancestry, the more its elites rely on top-down narratives and authoritarian enforcement to keep the system stitched together.
Exactly what we're seeing today in England for example where people are being arrested over tweets by the thousands, English flags are being torn down and people arrested for flying them, etc... as draconian suppression of ethnic identity must be enforced to preserve the multicultural lie.
The more diversity you get, the more authoritarian the government gets to try to keep the wheels on and preserve the lie.
On Putnam: what you’re quoting is his post-hoc spin, not his findings. The actual study (E Pluribus Unum, 2007) reported that in more diverse communities, people of all races withdraw socially: they “hunker down,” show less trust, lower civic participation, and weaker social ties. Putnam openly admitted this was the short-to-medium term reality. His claim that diversity might prove beneficial in the “long run” was not a conclusion from the data — it was aspirational damage control. Nothing in his empirical results showed a reversal over time.
On anecdotes: your experience in college or friend groups is not unimportant, but it’s not generalizable. Selective institutions attract higher-performing individuals and filter out dysfunction. At a national scale, the trade-offs look very different: crime, social trust, political polarization, and wealth distribution all track strongly with diversity. What “works” in a curated campus environment does not map cleanly to a society of 330 million people.
On the achievement gap: environmental explanations have been extensively tested. Teacher bias, stereotype threat, SES, and test format have each been investigated, and the effects are either very small or vanish under replication. The gap remains across income brackets, persists in adoption studies, shows up in g-loaded tests that minimize cultural content, and remains stable over decades despite enormous changes in policy, funding, and testing design. These are not the signatures of a purely environmental gap. The genetic component is not just a claim — it’s the only explanation consistent with the full range of evidence (twin studies, transracial adoption studies, polygenic scores, cross-cultural replication).
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.
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 have written about this extensively but will give you some of the key things you need to consider...
There are a number of issues with IQ testing. That doesn't mean it's useless but unless you know this and go through them carefully you can't really read them enough to come to confident conclusions. I will skip that as it's a long talk and move on to the biggest issue.
In my genetic population if someone measures really low on the IQ test it's very likely it's not just low intelligence. It becomes a signal for some kind of defect. This might be brain damage or some major condition. This is why roughly 70 and below is associated with mental retardation or clinical conditions. It is disproportionately at this level in my population that this indicates a medical condition such as Downs Syndrome or one of the many other conditions in which someone does not properly develop.
These conditions are also associated with broader dysfunction not directly picked up on the IQ test but strongly indirectly implied when the IQ is so low. When you start to hit 70 the further you go the more there is a broader cognitive impairment. It is increasingly rarer that a low IQ is all there is.
In other populations where it seems like typical intelligence is just lower there is an element of lesser ability but it can be misleading. Someone in the tribe with an IQ of 70 might be perfectly normal albeit not very good at a number of intellectual tasks. It is likely that the low IQ is the only problem for the typical member of the tribe.
This creates a confusion. In that tribe someone with Down's Syndrome might have an IQ of 40. This would still be much worse than for someone of our tribe. This makes it hard to believe when you walk among a tribe with a mean IQ of 70 to believe it. When walking around this tribe it's not the same as walking around the clinic for people of my tribe with an IQ of 70. In one case you're walking through the Down's Syndrome ward and the other you might as well be walking down the street.
(1) Figure 2, the Jensen one, is misdrawn. The lower hump should be part of the unshaded distribution, rather than a separate distribution-- a single line, rather than two lines. What he is saying is that the density is bimodal.
(2) A helpful diagram would show the black adn white densities, but both of them bimodal. This could be real data, or just a theoretical density representing the idea you're explaining. Then shade the ordinary left tails differently from the "autism, etc." left tails to show that a bigger proportion of the white low scores are "autism, etc.".
(3) Another diagram could do this with the height of the bell curves proportional to size of the white and the black populations, so the white one is much taller. This could show the absolute numbers of white-black and ordinary-autism-etc. IQs below 70.
(3)My guess is that blacks have as many or more "truly retarded" people as whites, but that the "truly retarded" causes don't push them down any further, so the black and white truly retarded mean IQs would be the same. E.g., my hypothesis is that chromosome abnormality pushes you down to 60 whether you would have been 80 or 120 without it.
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.”
It seems like Putnam’s research observed the opposite long-term, no? I’m not an expert at all so this is just based on a cursory search, but he himself said his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society." according to this page. He’s a bit conservative for my taste though. Maybe I just a bit more progressive than you, I’ve only seen positive changes in the institutions I’m a part of when ethnic diversity is introduced, mainly my college and my friend groups in adulthood. Not a data based observation of course, just my personal feelings. I think in-person exchanges have value the same way in person interactions are still needed for someone to have a healthy ysocial life, nothing beats the real thing for me.
Regarding the performance gap between White and Black students, I think you won’t be surprised to hear I’m more liable to suspect unmeasured environmental factors (teacher bias, stereotype threats, bias in test design, ses measures, etc.) that may have been missing in the studies you’re referring to than genetics. I’m familiar with the other side of the conversation so I’m sure my opinion will sound disagreeable, but I haven’t been convinced of the genetic argument by any studies I’ve read about topic.
And further, because I feel the point wasn't made clearly enough in relation to Putnam's damage control...
His empirical results were crystal clear: in more diverse communities, people “hunker down,” trust others less (including those of their own race), volunteer less, vote less, and report weaker social ties. That’s the famous “bowling alone on steroids” result.
But because those findings were politically explosive, he tacked on a “don’t worry, diversity is still good in the long run” coda. To support that claim, he leaned heavily on other people’s work — much of it from the organizational behavior / business-school literature where “diversity” is operationalized very differently.
A few key points about that literature:
Conceptual substitution: Many of the cited “pro-diversity” studies don’t deal with racial/ethnic heterogeneity at all, but with diversity of perspectives, skills, or disciplines within teams. A group of engineers, marketers, and designers may solve a business problem better than a homogeneous team of engineers. That’s trivially true — but not the same thing as saying Somalis, Haitians, and Swedes coexisting in one polity will generate higher trust or cohesion.
Short-term, small-scale contexts: Positive “diversity effects” are often found in contrived settings (brainstorming sessions, corporate innovation teams, or lab experiments with college students). They measure output on a narrow task, not the long-term civic health of a society.
Publication bias: Within management and HR fields, there’s strong pressure to produce findings that flatter the “diversity = strength” narrative. Critical or null results are far less likely to see daylight.
Putnam himself admitted he delayed publishing his own results for years because he didn’t like what they showed. His optimistic gloss was a political fig leaf, not a finding from his own dataset.
So the “substantial benefits of diversity” rhetoric is largely a misapplication of studies about cognitive/task diversity, repackaged as if it applied to racial/ethnic diversity. In practice multiculturalism often correlates with enforced orthodoxy: the more a society is divided by ancestry, the more its elites rely on top-down narratives and authoritarian enforcement to keep the system stitched together.
Exactly what we're seeing today in England for example where people are being arrested over tweets by the thousands, English flags are being torn down and people arrested for flying them, etc... as draconian suppression of ethnic identity must be enforced to preserve the multicultural lie.
The more diversity you get, the more authoritarian the government gets to try to keep the wheels on and preserve the lie.
On Putnam: what you’re quoting is his post-hoc spin, not his findings. The actual study (E Pluribus Unum, 2007) reported that in more diverse communities, people of all races withdraw socially: they “hunker down,” show less trust, lower civic participation, and weaker social ties. Putnam openly admitted this was the short-to-medium term reality. His claim that diversity might prove beneficial in the “long run” was not a conclusion from the data — it was aspirational damage control. Nothing in his empirical results showed a reversal over time.
On anecdotes: your experience in college or friend groups is not unimportant, but it’s not generalizable. Selective institutions attract higher-performing individuals and filter out dysfunction. At a national scale, the trade-offs look very different: crime, social trust, political polarization, and wealth distribution all track strongly with diversity. What “works” in a curated campus environment does not map cleanly to a society of 330 million people.
On the achievement gap: environmental explanations have been extensively tested. Teacher bias, stereotype threat, SES, and test format have each been investigated, and the effects are either very small or vanish under replication. The gap remains across income brackets, persists in adoption studies, shows up in g-loaded tests that minimize cultural content, and remains stable over decades despite enormous changes in policy, funding, and testing design. These are not the signatures of a purely environmental gap. The genetic component is not just a claim — it’s the only explanation consistent with the full range of evidence (twin studies, transracial adoption studies, polygenic scores, cross-cultural replication).
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.
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/
Black college-educated women have extremely low fertility rates for one.
Maybe they're as dumb so using birth control is difficult for them.
"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.
So, academics really do think blacks are dumb, huh?
We do know that dysgenics is much worse in African countries...
Not really. Almost no studies from there.
Okay now explain their violent behaviour in Western Europe and North America.
I have written about this extensively but will give you some of the key things you need to consider...
There are a number of issues with IQ testing. That doesn't mean it's useless but unless you know this and go through them carefully you can't really read them enough to come to confident conclusions. I will skip that as it's a long talk and move on to the biggest issue.
In my genetic population if someone measures really low on the IQ test it's very likely it's not just low intelligence. It becomes a signal for some kind of defect. This might be brain damage or some major condition. This is why roughly 70 and below is associated with mental retardation or clinical conditions. It is disproportionately at this level in my population that this indicates a medical condition such as Downs Syndrome or one of the many other conditions in which someone does not properly develop.
These conditions are also associated with broader dysfunction not directly picked up on the IQ test but strongly indirectly implied when the IQ is so low. When you start to hit 70 the further you go the more there is a broader cognitive impairment. It is increasingly rarer that a low IQ is all there is.
In other populations where it seems like typical intelligence is just lower there is an element of lesser ability but it can be misleading. Someone in the tribe with an IQ of 70 might be perfectly normal albeit not very good at a number of intellectual tasks. It is likely that the low IQ is the only problem for the typical member of the tribe.
This creates a confusion. In that tribe someone with Down's Syndrome might have an IQ of 40. This would still be much worse than for someone of our tribe. This makes it hard to believe when you walk among a tribe with a mean IQ of 70 to believe it. When walking around this tribe it's not the same as walking around the clinic for people of my tribe with an IQ of 70. In one case you're walking through the Down's Syndrome ward and the other you might as well be walking down the street.
You can't get blood from a turnip.
Wouldn't it fit the prevailing Darwinian dogma/framework exactly?
Bro, you are fucking insane and racist. Omg, shit is not this serious. Fuck off. Please!
Oh golly, i gotta read watch more statquest and finish my quantitiative genetics book- I don’t understand very much.
Very good article.
(1) Figure 2, the Jensen one, is misdrawn. The lower hump should be part of the unshaded distribution, rather than a separate distribution-- a single line, rather than two lines. What he is saying is that the density is bimodal.
(2) A helpful diagram would show the black adn white densities, but both of them bimodal. This could be real data, or just a theoretical density representing the idea you're explaining. Then shade the ordinary left tails differently from the "autism, etc." left tails to show that a bigger proportion of the white low scores are "autism, etc.".
(3) Another diagram could do this with the height of the bell curves proportional to size of the white and the black populations, so the white one is much taller. This could show the absolute numbers of white-black and ordinary-autism-etc. IQs below 70.
(3)My guess is that blacks have as many or more "truly retarded" people as whites, but that the "truly retarded" causes don't push them down any further, so the black and white truly retarded mean IQs would be the same. E.g., my hypothesis is that chromosome abnormality pushes you down to 60 whether you would have been 80 or 120 without it.