Ethnic IQ and The Case for Diversity

Most of the posters to this topic on Slate and in The Fray still don’t seem to get the big picture. They don’t seem to have enough knowledge of history and anthropology to put the theories under discussion to the test of time. They still don’t seem to understand the implications of the science of large numbers very well. Their data cannot properly be called anecdotal, but it is horizontal, so they justify their conclusions by looking at things as they stand today. If their theories are sound they should stand throughout all of the historical and anthropological record.

The areas from which the highest IQ scores seem to originate, not coincidentally but as a consequence, I believe, come from the areas where civilization first flourished, i.e. where conditions permitted the growth of cities and consequently nation states, from Sumerian to American, (the former called themselves ‘the black-headed people’ by the way, wonder why. The question is; which is cause and which is effect? That most of these cities have subsequently vanished or diminished seems to have caused no diminution of the IQ levels of their descendants, or successors. The facile explanation, and apparently the going one on Slate, is that cities developed wherever the smartest people were to be found; but the anthropological explanation turns that around and suggests that the smartest people are to be found where cities develop and not vice versa. That the unifying thesis of this essay.

The latter idea seems most reasonable when we consider the comparative facilities cities seem to offer for nurturing and stimulating the infant from womb to tomb, but the more compelling statistical explanation for this deals with the diversity, such as it is, of human genetics. Let’s use an analogy that could only be acted out in cyberspace through the power of the computer. Suppose we’re faced with the problem of randomly selecting the correct combination of a digital combination lock (called progress) from an alphabet soup of characters thrown on the floor (called the world). Success in our analogy is being compared to a single discovery of some unknown genius that has powered another paradigm shift in the advancement of mankind.

To make it more complex and therefore more realistic lets pretend we need ten different Chinese alphanumeric characters to be selected from the set of characters in the Chinese alphabet. We pick, say, one hundred of the characters, place them on the table (called a city) and attempt to make combinations/permutations, each 10 characters long. Then it dawns on us that several of the 100 characters are the same, and of course more than 2,900 possible characters aren’t even being considered yet. Eventually, we come to the realization that the more characters we place on our table top the more chances we have of encountering success (called progress). And that is the simple math behind the case for diversity.

What has this to do with the bell curve and sets of combinations or permutations? Well the more variables (genotypes in our case) you place in any population under analysis the longer will be the tails of any bell curve showing dispersal patterns of our measurements. That is, genetic diversity should tend to yield more geniuses and more dysfunctionals at opposite ends of the spectrum of results. But many dysfunctions can be cured and many more will spontaneously abort or otherwise fail to survive. We don’t want to cure genius, I hope, because it is genius which cures dysfunction. So the overall balance of results weighs heavily on the side of good.

There will always be those who attempt to keep score on the comparative achievements of these civilizations as though they were football teams. That would be difficult with the ancient Sumerians because no one really seems to know what the ethnicity of the Sumerians was or who their descendents are. By now their genes have been dispersed all over the world. As far as football is concerned, yes, I do suck some vicarious emotional satisfaction out of the fact that the Patriots seem to be opening a football dynasty, but tell me, apart from the emotional boost, what really have I got to do with their success, or what does their success really have to do with me? Very little but they do get my vote, and that’s the comparable measure of my contribution, literally, because the real contributors to the success of the New York Yankees, the recent Red Sox, and the recent Patriots are the energies of the cities of New York and Boston respectively; financial dynamics, nurturing, educational, and so on. Also, the diversity of the city itself means that an eclectic mix of players all get enormous job satisfaction and motivation from living where there are many people like themselves. So that is the syndrome of all cities and cities are the heart of every civilization.

This brings us back to the bell curve and to expected dispersal patterns of IQ scores. The most significant and lasting thing cities give rise to, is the bringing together, through commerce and settlement, of large numbers of diverse groups of people. In spite of the trepidations of the conservative minded, the one thing that America has had going for it in the past and well into the future is that same diversity, notably in the eastern megalopolis. Just think, Italy, Rome, the home of the Renaissance that restarted the present burgeoning of Western Culture was the one European city with the greatest diversity of people, in Europe. This was true not only because of the practice of bringing captive enemy soldiers to the city to be enslaved, and eventually freed, more often than not, but because of successive incursions, some peaceful, of barbarians from the North. “What tributaries follow him to Rome to grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?” (Julius Caesar).

The problem with small communities, such as most of the communities in Sub-Saharan Africa is that if there are geniuses in Sub-Saharan Africa, and no one has denied that, except for a few abusive bigots, it’s very apparent they have used their insight on problems not useful to the rest of the world. Small communities don’t have the kinds of problems or facilities that challenge the kinds of genius we admire and reward these days. A genius is a person capable of finding the solution to a problem that no one ever imagined could exist in the first place. It is their discoveries and inventions that power the progress of mankind, but there is little market for the services of genius in a small community.

Some of the problems humanity faces, as a group, are intellectual, some are physical, and if we look at the need for progress as a problem itself, then we also need synthetic (creative) thinkers as well as the enterprising adventure types. That’s the exact mix of talents that created our American civilization; the intellectuals convinced the adventurer Columbus the earth was round, and he set sail using a technology that had been honed by generations of synthetic thinking (creative) inventors, funded by profit-seeking merchants. He himself was funded by royals hoping for a miracle to replenish coffers impoverished by generations devoted to beating back the Moors after six hundred years of occupation. Ferdinand of Spain whose wife lobbied for Columbus (yeah, her jewels, but who gave them to her?) funded Columbus in the same year that he won his final great victory against the Moors, at Granada. By then the Moors had been intermingling their genes with the Spaniards for 600 years. That’s longer than the USA has even existed. (What started the intercourse between Spain and England or how Spanish got into the English genes, pun intended, is another story, ah that Henry! There were Moors in merry England, well respected at that time, as evidenced by Shakespeare’s Othello. The legend of inferiority wasn’t needed yet.)

I should address most bigots of all races but Caucasians are the case in point. The trouble most Caucasian bigots have with diversity is that they fail to realize the multiplicity of tribes that came together to form the Caucasian genotype, just as we fail to realize the number of strains, some feral (wild), that go into the making of a single purebred German Shepherd dog, for example. This misunderstanding of nature causes bigots to traditionally and intuitively favor an opposite strategy from those used by breeders who created superior strains of dogs or wheat, or orchids for that matter.

The truth is that modern eugenicists have it all wrong. In plant and animal husbandry successful strains are bred only for one or two simple traits, that’s the only thing that justifies freezing the design. Even then there is a lot of mixing going on to get the right proportions and combinations of traits, but even then every veterinarian knows that a host of other problems crop up that result from freezing the design of an animal, problems like dysplasia for example. Human beings face a multiplicity of problems going into the future, many of them unknown, we cannot afford to freeze the design. Malignant melanoma or deadly skin cancer for the whites and sickle cell anemia and multiple myeloma for the blacks are but a few problems providing statistical evidence that even large groups can be affected by this syndrome of inbreeding.

But the above are only medical problems. There are others looming on our horizon. When the earth reverses its polarity will the plates rupture and throw lethal amounts of magma and noxious fumes into the air? How near will be the next near miss from outer space? Will international politics and the selfish interests of a few demagogues plunge the earth into the deadly miasma of a nuclear holocaust? Will the hole in the ozone layer get so large as to cause mankind to die like bugs in an UV ray bug zapper? Will some crazy geneticist alter a virus that triggers the next pandemic? Will global warming inundate the major cities and seaports of the world?

Problems versus progress are two concepts charged with infinitely more unknowns than the few knowns we presently hold. Our best chance of survival as a species is to maximize the number of statistical chances we have of solving the global problems that have already begun to beset us. “Do the times make the man or does the man make the times” you ask. The answer of course is both. Some men make progress when they discover new lands or new products that propel mankind forward. Civilization is the driving force behind that, and the driving force behind civilization is diversity, our observations seem to indicate. Civilization regresses when problems arise for which mankind has not progressed far enough to overcome. Sometimes problems present themselves which propel otherwise humble men to come forward and present their solutions. American history is chock full of such characters.

A humble man named Martin Luther centuries ago changed the course of world history by laying 95 charges against the Catholic Church which dominated the world of his time. “A single monk!” howled the outraged Potentate Leo X, but that’s all it took to set the wheels of the Protestant Reformation in motion. Without the Reformation, the shapes of the English and American models of democracy would have been radically different from what we enjoy today and it is likely that the Catholic hegemony itself might never have changed. In which case Spanish might already have been the language spoken between these shores to this day.

History doesn’t provide details of the mixture of races that produced that single monk, Martin Luther. Centuries later, however, there was another humble clergyman with, providentially, the same name, Martin Luther … King, this time. He was, providentially again, a product of the same Protestant church the monk helped to found, with generous helpings of the African diaspora and some admixture of white genes. This man saved the kind of world we live in today. Without his input American civilization was hell bent on a course for the same kind of ethnic strife that has destroyed the economies of nations all over the world to this day. Without his intercession, the American economy would have been similarly impacted and the command economy of the Russian communists would have continued on its course of Eurasian domination. What horrors would have come out of that course boggles the imagination with visions of ethnic cleansing and urban terrorism.

Speaking before the United States’ Congress, historian Winston Churchill once said “There is a purpose being worked out here below," words echoed by MLK a few decades later. As a student of history I too got chills when I realized that Columbus arrived in Spain within months of Spain’s ousting the Moors who were there for 600 years, as though someone was calling the shots in a seamless ordered sequence of events. I got the same chills when I realized the full import of Martin Luther King’s contribution to the defeat of Communism and its import to the world, and compared them to the two models that guided him in his great sacrifice, Martin Luther whose protests started the same Protestant church he served and Mahatma Gandhi who taught us the efficacy of peaceful resistance, which he himself learned in Protestant England. The pieces of their enormous contributions all dovetail together through time like a work of art to shape the better aspects of the world we live in today.

There are two potent forces at work in human affairs today, one is integrative the other is destructive or disintegrative. It appears many of us still have not come to a realization that most of mankind’s progress has come as a result of the former initiatives rather than the latter. The contributions of civilizations throughout history have clearly established that over time it is the coming together of diverse peoples that creates the dynamic and the genetic resources from which come great things. (Go Pats!)