Blacks are genetically better at sport. So it is only fair they are genetically stupider than other races.

This simple construction forms the basis of the vast tranche of pseudoscience and nonsense that surrounds the racist IQ movement.

The key tract is "The Bell Curve", which tries to explain away the more obvious holes in the theory. When you point out that, say, black African girls perform better at school than white boys in the United Kingdom, "Bell Curve" racists start weaseling about how blacks have fewer "genius" level IQs, and that the racist theory works if you look at "distribution" of very high and very low IQs.

Clue: actually it doesn't. Cross national comparisons can destroy just about anything even high-class, Bellcurve-type racists have to say. According to the "Bell Curve", Jews have very high genius levels...yet Israel has yet to wow the world with the high levels of productivity or scientific achievement that one would expect were this actually true.

Surely we could expect great things from such a great concentration of genisues? But Israel has fewer Nobel Laureates than South Africa (though almost as many for "Peace", curiously). This is nothing new, either. Judea was not a site of great learning in antiquity, but rather a dusty backwater of the much more advanced Roman empire.

Then there's the whole sport thing. Racists get terribly excited about the fact that "blacks" run fast. They are less excited by the fact that a black coxless four has yet to win gold at the Olympics - racists don't find anything racial about the vast numbers of rowing golds that go to "whites". Surely we need some vast racial theory to explain why whites have a genetic predisposition to excel in narrow boats?

If you want to know why "blacks" do well in the 100m, ask yourself this: when was the last time you heard a white kid say he dreamt of becoming a sprinter? Or a black kid desperate to represent in the Oxbridge boat race?

There's actually only one sport where all races are equally keen to achieve: soccer. I hate to say it, but "blacks" aren't terribly good at it. The African Cup of Nations is usually won by an Arab team from North Africa, even though Arabs are a small minority of the continent's total population. And, with the honourable exceptions of Pele, Eusebio etc, most of the world's best soccer players have been white guys...

Your explanation is very good. It is opportunity plus experience that really explains this. We know that traits vary within race more than between race. Biologists have discussed this for years. Kenyans are different from Nigerians as Italians are different from Norwegians. Given the growing number of racial mutts in the world, I wonder what argument will show up fifty years from now.

except african girls don't perform better than british boys in school

other than that small problem, great point!

Someone recently posisted to me that professions tend to run "in certain families or in certain races". It is true that people often embrace (or reject) a profession because it was the parent's profession, it is also true that many professions were forbidden to people of certain races or cultures for a long time.

Why were so many Jews bankers once upon a time? Because Christians were forbidden to charge interest, and didn't want to loan money without getting somethig in return. Why were so many blacks once farmers? Because tenant farming was one of the few occupations available to the poor, and blacks tended to be strongly over-represented among the poor, especially when they went from being property to being homeless pretty much overnight. Why are there so many black athletes? Because that was once on of the best ways for a black youth to secure funding for college, especially if they came from a "separate but [un]equal" school with outdated books and labs.

People who make these blanket assumptions tend to look at results and make no attempt at considering causality. It's like the proverbial scientists who made a noise and observed that frogs jumped. They cut off the frogs' legs, made a noise, and noted that the frogs did not jump. The "logical" conclusion, therefore, was that the frogs' ears were in their legs.

Chart 1 shows quite clearly that Black African girls achieved a higher rate of GCSE passes than white males. It has been widely reported in the media, see here.

In fact, if you control for socieconomic status, black boys outperform white boys in the UK.

GreenwichJ,

Did you know there are only about two million Ashkenazi Jews in Israel, while there are 5 to 6 million in the US? (Ashkanazis are the Jewish ethnic group that rank high on IQ tests, the others don't.)

In fact there are only about 5 million Jews, of any ethnicity, in Israel. As someone who deals with scientific studies, I can assure you that Israel bats above its weight per capita in producing "science." Even taking its total population -- not just its population possesing supposedly "elevated" genetic intelligence -- into account . Not to mention Israel's many military innovations . . .

Per capita, and considering her environment, Israel is pretty darn productive country. Compared to her larger neighbors, well, that ain't even a comparision.

I rarely comment on blogs, but this is pretty glaring, demographically obtuse oversight for a "checked" comment.

Genetic mutations across hundreds of thousands of years have produced the various races we all see on this planet. Despite very nearly complete isolation from others, peoples in Africa, PNG, Australia and other very remote areas appear to have nearly identical mental capacities while having various physical traits that are quite unique. Your argument boils down to a simple timeline and a very specific genetic presumption. The timeline starts when all humans were of the same race. Lets say that was 200,000 years ago. Up until that time, the evolution of humans focused mainly upon the size of the brain and its ability to reason, communicate and think. What folks like you are saying is that since that divergence, all the humans on the planet did evolve physically but never once did any race select for intelligence or create a lineage that increased or decreased the starting mental capacity of that first starting point.

In other words, we went on a raging mutation that resulted in our big brains and then stopped. I buy into this argument though because it does appear that most of us have the same capacities of all others in a general population. I just find it interesting that we never discuss it in the terms above....

"Cross national comparisons can destroy just about anything even high-class...According to the "Bell Curve", Jews have very high genius levels...yet Israel has yet to wow the world with the high levels of productivity or scientific achievement that one would expect were this actually true."

1. Note that it is the Ashkenazi Jews who average 2/3 of a std deviation above the white mean. You need to ask what proportion of the Israeli population they comprise for your observation to make any sense.

In terms of the significance of averaging 2/3 of a std dev above the euro average, the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of geniuses. When a group's average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the genius rate is 2.3%.

Though Jews make up less than 3% of the U.S. population, they have won more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes awarded to American scientists since 1950, account for 20% of this country's chief executives and make up 22% of Ivy League students.

G. Cochran, J. Hardy, H. Harpending, Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5), pp. 659–693 (2006).

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2. Note that the general intelligence factor or 'g' is strongly predictive of academic performance. See the recent paper headed by Ian Deary:

"Deary took the analysis a step further however and did a little latent variable modeling. As the IQ test had three components/subtests (verbal, nonverbal, quantitative), he correlated a latent g factor with a latent academic factor using the following subtests: English, English Literature, Math, Science, Geography, French (n=12519). The correlation between the latent factors was .81. That is: 66% of the variance in latent (general) academic achievement can be explained by latent cognitive ability---measured 5 years previously.

Take home message: While general cognitive ability and academic achievement are not isomorphic, the former is necessary for the latter, while the converse is not necessarily true. Spearman suggested this more than a century ago, and, to quote the last sentence in Deary's work,

These data establish the validity of g for this important life outcome.

Ian J. Deary, Steve Strand, Pauline Smith and Cres Fernandes: Intelligence and educational achievement

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3. This is the case internationally:

"International cognitive ability and achievement comparisons stem from different research traditions. But analyses at the interindividual data level show that they share a common positive manifold. Correlations of national ability means are even higher to very high (within student assessment studies, r = .60-.98; between different student assessment studies [PISA-sum with TIMSS-sum] r = .82-.83; student assessment sum with intelligence tests, r = .85-.86). Results of factor analyses indicate a strong g-factor of differences between nations (variance explained by the first unrotated factor: 94-95%)."

The g-factor of international cognitive ability comparisons: the homogeneity of results in PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and IQ-tests across nations

Heiner Rindermann * <link>

4. At a macro level this is very important to economic performance:

"In longitudinal analyses with various samples of nations, education and cognitive abilities appear to be more important as developmental factors for GDP than economic freedom. Education and intelligence are also more relevant to economic welfare than vice versa, but at the national level the influence of economic wealth on cognitive development is still substantial."

"Relevance of education and intelligence at the national level for the economic welfare of people"

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5. Transracial adoption studies show that adoptees adopted children reached adult IQs that were equal to their biological peers and which had no correlation with their adoptive families:

"Contrary to "culture" theory, the ethnic academic gaps are almost identical for transracially adopted children, and to the extent they are different they go in the opposite direction predicted by culture theory. The gap between whites and Asians fluctuated from 19 to .09 in the NAEP data while the gap in the adoption data is from 1/3 to 3 times larger. This is consistent with the Sue and Okazaki paper above which showed that contrary to popular anecdotes, the values that lead to higher academic grades are actually found more often in white homes. In other words Asian-Americans perform highly despite their Asian home cultural environment not because of it."

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6. The fact that there are some differences is not surprising when you consider new evidence of recent evolutionary change (see 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accerelated Human Evolution' for a summary). For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There’s a new version of a gene (DBA1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia.

Also, here is a brief comment on gene alleles associated with cognition:

"Regardless of whether these SNPs are ultimately found to be associated with intelligence (and even if they are, they are almost certainly going to be of very small effect), the fact that they are known to be expressed in the brain and that prevelance rates for all of them - with the possible exception of rs363039 - cluster to one degree or another along traditional racial lines illustrates that the forces of genetic drift and selection did not stop at the neck."

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1. Note that it is the Ashkenazi Jews who average 2/3 of a std deviation above the white mean. You need to ask what proportion of the Israeli population they comprise for your observation to make any sense.

In terms of the significance of averaging 2/3 of a std dev above the euro average, the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of geniuses. When a group's average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the genius rate is 2.3%.

You make a few statistical mistakes in your post. First, the standard deviation for IQ tests is 15, and from what I recall, the Ashkenazi Jew mean was 107, so your 2/3 number is out the window. It looks like you are assuming the standard dev is 10?

Second, there is no guarantee that the size of the standard deviation of a sub-group would be the same as the entire sample space. In fact it is highly unlikely unless the sub-group is randomly sampled. The smaller and more specific the sub-group, the more likely the new standard deviation of that group will be smaller than the original population. Thus you're estimate of 2.3% "geniuses" is probably off.

And let's not forget that IQ doesn't measure "intelligence." The word intelligence isn't even well-defined. First, define an explicit objective function for what you are trying to measure, then you can start the discussion as to what group is best at it.

I only bother to point these flaws out because for someone trying so hard to prove his group's intellectual capacity, you sure do make a lot of obvious statistical errors.

1. Read the paper I posted above by Cochran & Harpending. The high Ashkenazi Jewish average has been documented over the past 100 years across the world.

"And let's not forget that IQ doesn't measure "intelligence." The word intelligence isn't even well-defined. First, define an explicit objective function for what you are trying to measure, then you can start the discussion as to what group is best at it."

2. You could say the same about gravity. The existence of competing definitions do not negate the existence of a phenomena or the possibility of measuring it. What matters is construct validation (see page 35 Gottfredson, L. S. (2009). Logical fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing. In R. Phelps (Ed.), Correcting fallacies about educational and psychological testing (pp. 11-65). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. <link> .

3. IQ derives almost all of its validity because it is a good proxy for psychometric g. Arthur Jensen reports (P. 91, The g Factor) a g loading of about 0.88 for most IQ tests. Jensen suggests that the word intelligence not be used in scientific discussions, because it lacks a scientific definition, and that we should instead focus on g, since it is unambiguously defined as the product of a hierarchical factor analysis. It happens that all categories of test items correlate with one another to at least some degree. The ultimate relationship between the various categories of cognitive activity is reflected as g, which is common to all mental abilities.

4. Psychometric g is substantially heritable (rising from 70% in young adults, to over 80% in older adults). There are some identified genes; one example is Igf2r, which is associated with high intelligence. Although there are various physiological candidates that may account for some degree of what we see as g, two are especially salient: nerve conduction velocity (NCV) and myelination. (see the recent New Scientist article on this:

"By comparing brain maps of identical twins, which share the same genes, with fraternal twins, which share about half their genes, the team calculate that myelin integrity is genetically determined in many brain areas important for intelligence. This includes the corpus callosum, which integrates signals from the left and right sides of the body, and the parietal lobes, responsible for visual and spatial reasoning and logic (see above). Myelin quality in these areas was also correlated with scores on tests of abstract reasoning and overall intelligence (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 29, p 2212)."

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5. It is also linked to cortical thickness:

"In healthy adults, greater intelligence is associated with larger intracranial gray matter and to a lesser extent with white matter. Variations in prefrontal and posterior temporal cortical thickness are particularly linked with intellectual ability." Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(9):2163-2171

6. The differences are seen in children's brain development:

"The researchers found that the relationship between cortex thickness and IQ varied with age, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, seat of abstract reasoning, planning, and other "executive" functions. The smartest 7-year-olds tended to start out with a relatively thinner cortex that thickened rapidly, peaking by age 11 or 12 before thinning. In their peers with average IQ, an initially thicker cortex peaked by age 8, with gradual thinning thereafter. Those in the high range showed an intermediate trajectory (see below). While the cortex was thinning in all groups by the teen years, the superior group showed the highest rates of change."

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The 2/3 of a std dev is from the 'Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence' cited above.

Charles Murray comes to a similar number here:

"But it is currently accepted that the mean is somewhere in the range of 107 to 115, with 110 being a plausible compromise."

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When a group's average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the genius rate is 2.3%.

I'll repost since you didn't get it the first time. You make the assumption that the standard deviation is still 15 when you select out a non-random sub-group. There is no guarantee of that. You don't know what the standard dev. is unless you calculate it, and it is very unlikely to still be 15 unless you renormalize.

It could be that 2.3% are "geniuses" (another poorly defined word), but your current calculation is incorrect because you make a false assumption that the standard dev. would remain 15 for your sub-group.

2. You could say the same about gravity. The existence of competing definitions do not negate the existence of a phenomena or the possibility of measuring it.

If one person says gravity is the force an object is pulled to earth, and another says gravity is the speed at which one has sex, then yes, these competing definitions in fact do negate the possibility of measuring it.

You can define a criteria such as "G" that is positively corrlated to success in school. But that doesn't mean that "G" is the same as "intelligence." The word "intelligence" is very widely defined. I can agree that "G" levels vary among differing populations and they might be due to genetic influences, but that doesn't mean "G" equates to the concept of intelligence, just because you say so.

If one person can do simple math calculations very quickly and another can more easily grasp complex concepts, which one is more intelligent? For intelligence to be measurable, one or the other would have to be deemed more intelligent. But which one? They are both individually better a specific cognitive task.

That's the problem with all these half-assed theories of racial-supremacy; they all try to over-simplify widely and poorly defined concepts such as "intelligence" so that they can choose the measure in which they will be the most successful and "objectively" prove themselves better. This is all in order to for the "researcher" to prove their self-worth through group membership.

The reason "intelligence" is hard to measure is because it is in fact a group of many loosely related concepts. You can't objectively measure intelligence because intelligence represents many concepts, some of which are contradictory to each other.

That comment is from the LA Times article on the Cochran paper. The point is simply that if you have groups with different means then you see quite large differences at the tail of the distribution. Steve Hsu makes the point here:

"On the other hand, for most phenotypes (examples: height or IQ, which are both fairly heritable, except in cases of extreme environmental deprivation), there is significant overlap between different population distributions. That is, Swedes might be taller than Vietnamese on average, but the range of heights within each group is larger than the difference in the averages. Nevertheless, at the tails of the distribution one would find very large discrepancies: for example the percentage of the Swedish population that is over 2 meters tall (6"7) might be 5 or 10 times as large as the percentage of the Vietnamese population. If two groups differed by, say, 10 points in average IQ (2/3 of a standard deviation), the respective distributions would overlap quite a bit (more in-group than between-group variation), but the fraction of people with IQ above some threshold (e.g., >140) would be radically different. It has been claimed that 20% of all Americans with IQ > 140 are Jewish, even though Jews comprise only 3% of the total population.

...The imbalance continues to increase for still higher IQ’s. New York City’s public-school system used to administer a pencil-and-paper IQ test to its entire school population. In 1954, a psychologist used those test results to identify all 28 children in the New York public-school system with measured IQ’s of 170 or higher. Of those 28, 24 were Jews.

There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.

What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster -- we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.

In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters ("races") during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance)."

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