Majorityrights Central > Category: IQ and Heredity

On August 31st the Guardian ran an article full of fulsome praise about the Science Museum’s new director, Prof Chris Rapley, CBE:-

When he takes over as director of the Science Museum on Monday, friends of Dr Rapley say we can expect ... [a] bold approach to communicating science.  They describe an exceptionally driven man who is “totally fearless” and a risk taker with a “curious energy”.  Unlike many scientists who hide behind safe technical language and guarded caveats, Dr Rapley is not afraid to put his head above the parapet.  He talks in plain language and is prepared to lay the ramifications of the science on the line to public and politicians alike.

... His new boss at the Science Museum, Martin Earwicker, is also full of praise. “He’s someone who is very good at public debate on key scientific issues. He’s not afraid to express his opinions to get debate going. He’s a good communicator of science, very passionate about it, a good frontman and a good public leader,” he said.

Well, this fine straight-talker’s first test wasn’t long in coming:-

Fury at DNA pioneer’s theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners

Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”

One of the world’s most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that “equal powers of reason” were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when “testing” suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

... Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

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La Griffe could have told them.  So, doubtless, could messers Rushton and Jensen.

From the Independent:-

White students do ‘better’

Black and Chinese students are less likely to get top university degrees than their white contemporaries, a government report has found.

The study suggested that ethnic minority undergraduates faced “a considerable cost” as a result because students who get first-class degrees increasingly command higher salaries.

... The gap was widest for black Caribbean, black African and Chinese students.  The analysis took account of factors such as gender, prior academic performance, subject studied and deprivation levels.

The study sample was huge: 65,000.  One would, of course, expect that as a fraction of their respective populations Chinese participation in higher education would surpass whites.  But one would also expect that Gauss would get ‘em in the end, and the best degrees will go where the right-hand curve is longest.

However, this being a government study I doubt that Jews were eliminated from the “white” contingent.  Also, South Asians weren’t mentioned at all - perhaps because on average Pakistani students could be expected to weight SA results downward, and the distribution was, therefore, unremarkably general.

I must admit to being puzzled by the report’s finding that women out-perform men, though.  That is calling Gauss a thorough-going liar, so what’s at work here?

There is data on IQ by State for the United States from 1965.  Supporting the belief of many, the correlation is indeed negative between IQ and rural population (1990 census), r=-.24 N=47, and is almost significant at p=1/21.  However, if one excludes the States with the highest number of blacks per capita, (basically the Confederacy), the correlation reverses to r=.25 N=36, and isn’t quite as significant at p=1/14 (which is to be expected when you reduce N).  As might be expected, the correlation between IQ and blacks per capita is very and significantly negative, r=-.58, N=47 and p=1/85,844.  The 5 highest IQ States as of 1965 were, in order, Montana, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Idaho, Nevada.  Nevada would have been significantly more rural in 1965 as Las Vegas is among the fastest growing areas of the US, so I suspect 1965 census data would yield a more significant and higher correlation between rural white population and IQ.

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The top State-wide ecological correlations* with IQ are rather fascinating**.  Make of them what you will but here are the thoughts that occur to me.

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I have certainly heard a lot of liberals claim that if we just give a lot of foreign aid to the Third world, then no one would have a reason to immigrate to America.  Marcus Epstein has an interesting article debunking this concept.  He gives a number of reasons why this policy will not work, but ignores perhaps the most important one: IQ.

At the end he says “Cultural, historical, and other factors that cannot be changed anytime soon will probably mean that some countries are always going to be poorer than other countries”  Perhaps he meant to include IQ in “other”.  In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhannen look at the IQ’s of the countries where post-1965 immigrants, and the trend is clear: low IQ immigrants flood into High IQ countries.  Low IQ countries can never be close to as prosperous as high IQ countries, and immigrants from every failed society will always want to come to prosperous countries.  No amount of foreign aid, humanitarian intervention or government reform will change that.

Having little IQ myself, of course, I tend these days to leave the subject to those MR bloggers better informed about it than I.  However, this story caught my interest and concerns something - IVF treatment - about which I do know a little.

Children whose mothers underwent a new form of IVF treatment introduced in the 1990s appear to be brighter than those conceived naturally, it was claimed today.

There had been fears that the procedure, known as Intra-Cellular Sperm Injection (ICSI), may increase the risk of slow development and behavioural problems.

But a new study suggests that, far from being disadvantaged, ICSI children develop higher IQs than children born as a result of natural conception.

The reason is thought to be psychological rather than biological.

... Those in the ICSI group had an average IQ level of 112, compared with 107 for the children not conceived through IVF.

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