--Reinhold Niebuhr
For those that pay attention to professional sports in the U.S., there is a general hierarchy where Black people are the most athletic, then Whites, then Asians. In the universities, there is still a hierarchy, only in reverse. If you look at the admission based on SAT scores and GPA for the United States, especially California, East Asians face the strictest admission criteria(highest minimum SAT score and highest GPA), then Whites, then Blacks. I am simplifying this, as there are other races and ethnic groups which are left out of the picture, but the pattern is what is important.
This is highly disturbing to some of us and we would be tempted to dismiss our lying eyes. Richard Lynn, a professor of Psychology at Ulster University, was wondering about the same thing. He went out and compiled IQ test for different group of people around the globe and indeed confirmed that the pattern that we see at the universities are real. In fact, the following map of the IQ scores of the world population are compiled based on the data that he collected.
Over the decades since this findings first came out, the mountains of data that came out have only confirmed the pattern. While unable to deny the existence of the data, people still argue over what it means. The The blank slate people believed IQ is malleable, that we all start off the same but ended up different only because of our circumstances. Many people became rich and famous advocating this position. At the end, their argument did not stand up to water and some of them, such as the famous Stephen Jay Gould, have been found to be down right frauds. The hereditarians argue that while environment does play a part, it was genetics that explain the majority of the IQ differences among the different races and indeed difference between individuals. This is not a popular position since our society believe that everyone should be able to do anything. People who advocated this position have been attacked and in many cases their careers ruined, often by people who are not even familiar with their work. At the end, like Galileo, it was the ones that are excommunicated by the church of of the political correct that turned out to hold the truth. Blogger Steve Sailer was one of the early ones to advocate this position outside of the esoteric field of Psychrometrics. Jayman, another blogger who is Black, also has a very good write up on this topic. My favorite one came from Greg Cochran.
I was once a liberal, so I can understand the impulse to invalidate the hereditarian explanation, or even the data itself. Before you go down that path, please keep the following in mind.
1. The data set collected was very extensive. As time goes on, new data that came up have only conform to this picture. Example of these more recent data include world ranking of TIMSS scores and PISA score broken out by country. The data is also multifaceted. For example, people have examined brain size and found that the average brain size of the world wide population correlating to the IQ data from Richard Lynn.
2. There is a strong correlation across time, within each ethnic group and between different ethnic groups. Over decades of data that were collected, the picture did not change much. Within each ethnic group, there is a strong correlation. For example, the Chinese could be found all over the world, regardless of the environment, from third world Africa to United States, the Chinese score similarly across these very different environments. The hierarchy of the different ethnic groups also remain remarkably constant. The staff that worked on the PISA tests has an ongoing game. After scores came out each year, someone would separate the score from the countries. The rest of the staff will try to guess which score goes with which country. Due to the remarkable consistent hierarchy order, they were all able to guess which score belong to which country. What is more, since we are now able to establish genetic relatedness of different groups based on DNA, we can see that people who are genetically related scored similarly in the IQ tests. For example, the North Africans and South Asians form a genetic cluster. They also score in the same range.
3. Since we now know a lot more about genetics, the findings from genetics and other information strongly suggest a very large genetic component to the difference in IQ. For example, large part of the mutation for those of us that came out of Africa also happened to the genes that are related to the brain. Indeed, we may soon be able to pin point the exact alleles (variation of the same gene) that are responsible for IQs in all of us. The fact that different groups have different brain size (on average) also suggest a strong genetic component to IQ.
Since the work of Richard Lynn has been around for decades, many people have come forward with the blank slate arguments and even try to refute the data. I will leave you to look through the writings of my fellow hereditarians to see how they refute these arguments. Here I want to present one of the argument for the hereditarian side.
When a specie split into breeds (races) or even two or more species, it was driven by environmental pressure. All attributes of the animal change due to the environmental pressure, this includes intelligence. Intelligence is very costly. Our brains, for example, while only 2% of the body weight, consumes 20% of the resting calories. Large brain in babies cause women to have wide hips, which is sub-optimal for walking. We take longer to mature than most other animals, lengthening the reproductive cycles. Due to the exorbitant cost of the brain, nature allow just enough of it for the animal to function and no more. It would be nice for a bird to have the same intelligence of a cat, which preys on them. Unfortunately, a bird would not be able to fly with a brain the size of the cat and would be eaten anyways. We humans, spanning the entire globe, encountered vastly different environments. All aspects of our body change to adapt to the different environments. To expect our brains to end up exactly the same defies logic and common sense. It reflects our social values more than the reality of evolution. Just look at dogs, after a few hundred years of different environmental pressure (created by us), from a very small number of breeds, they evolved into dizzying array of bodies, capabilities, temperaments and of course, intelligence. Any dog owner/trainer can tell you that a German Shepard is likely to be more intelligent than a Bulldog.
IQ varies from individual to individual and between different races. Large volumes of data have been compiled and all the signs point to genetics as by far the biggest contributor to these differences.
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