From the New York Times:
"All Brains Are the Same Color"
Richard E. Nisbett
... During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
This Eyferth study was published in 1961 and has been relentlessly cited ever since. And yet, nobody has replicated this 46 year old analysis. It's not as if African-American soldiers stopped fathering half German children so that it can't be done anymore. It's just that nobody seems to want to do it. I wonder why.
By the way, possibly the best-known son of an African-American soldier and a German woman was Rob Pilatus, one-half of Milli Vanilli, the Grammy Award-winning singers who didn't actually sing.
A reader comments,
"I'd guess people will still be quoting [Eyferth] 200 years from now ..."
I think we have a winner in the Charles Murray Challenge!
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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31 comments:
Was the AFQT operative in those days? If so, neither the black or white soldiers were representative, thus skewing the results considerably. The same would apply now, of course.
Wait. I know this one.
Since the fathers were African-American chances are that none of the children involved were even 50% African. Combine that with the fact that soldiers IQs are tested so the fathers weren't randomly selected from the population and you have a very flawed study.
I've learned so much here at iSteve. : )
That's one most egregious of the many problems with the article.
Notice, though, that the concept of race or the usefulness of IQ or even the existence of an IQ gap was unquestioned. I would say that is tremendous progress for a topic that's been taboo since the bell curve.
From Jensen (1998) page 482 table 12.6
Mean WISC IQ of Black Interracial Children (BW) and White Children (WW) of German Mothers
WW Boys = 101
WW Girls = 93
BW Boys = 97
BW Girls = 96
With sampling error that large... you get the idea
If intelligence is passed on the X chromosome, it doesn't matter what race the father is for the sons' IQ and for only 50% of the daughters' IQ scores.
Actually it would seem the results are double- or even triple-skewed. WHICH blacks fathered children with German children?
To woo a woman isn't too difficult. But to woo a woman who views you as an enemy occupier, who doesn't even speak your language, or only just barely, can be difficult (presuming she's not prostituting herself).
Methinks that the black men who got lucky with German women and fathered children with them would be alot smarter than the average black soldier, and perhaps even smarter than the average white soldier.
Furthermore, since white women in general probably prefer white men, the cognitive burden placed on black men to attract German women would be even higher than that placed on white men.
Aside from that is the fact that women contrbute more to their child's IQ than men do.
So, first: non-random IQ selection from military scores. Second: non-random selection by German women. Third: non-equal contribution of the sexs to IQ. Yields: non-random results.
There's another complicating factor which is that lots of white American soldiers brought their German girlfriends home to America and married them (e.g., to carry on with the music them, Dee-Dee Ramone's parents). Is there a difference in average IQ between the white fathers who left their children in Germany, where Eyferth could study them, and those who brought them to America, where he couldn't? Who knows?
Anyway, if anybody was serious about this, they'd try to replicate the study, but nobody has in 4.5 decades.
Anyway, if anybody was serious about this, they'd try to replicate the study, but nobody has in 4.5 decades.
Well of course not, because if the replication fails they no longer will have Eyferth to point to. I'd guess people will still be quoting him 200 years from now, if genetic engineering doesn't interfere.
Hey, you're right, the Eyferth Study can pass the Charles Murray Challenge!
Hey, you're right, the Eyferth Study can pass the Charles Murray Challenge!
Well it does appear to qualify as fiction.
The Elsie Moore study noted in the column seems a lot more substantial than the Eyferth study. I would like to see a race realist review of this.
I laugh the same bitter laugh when I see IQ-deniers bring up this study as when I hear them say that low-IQ murderers should not be executed (if IQ is meaningless, then what's it got to do with culpability?).
These folks can't even make their Eyferth argument without conceding their opponents' major premises: that IQ measures a broadly human quality, and (with respect to citing Eyferth) is partly genetic.
After all, if IQ is purely cultural or is entirely environmental, then who cares whether offspring of some BW and WW matings, nurtured in Germany, had similar scores on an American IQ test?
Eyferth only suggests that B's and W's have similar genetic IQ's if you assume that IQ is strongly genetic and trans-cultural!
(And, of course, if you ignore all the other, better IQ studies that find B/W differences. I realize no one has specifically replicated or extended Eyferth's exact inquiry, but as others have remarked, Eyferth both very weak and lonely as evidence against the notion of a genetic component to IQ.)
>But to woo a woman who views you as an enemy occupier, who doesn't even speak your language, or only just barely, can be difficult (presuming she's not prostituting herself).<
actually the "enemy occupier" aka "new kid in town" is inherently attractive to native women. the reason is the new male is demonstrating a certain level of strength (dominance) simply by the fact that he has not been expelled or killed by native males. the females will pick up on these signals and demonstrate heightened interest in the new male i.e. "the girl can't help it".
>Furthermore, since white women in general probably prefer white men ...<
not really. white women (same as all women) prefer high status men. white women will theoretically defect in mass numbers to males of any other race if the new males significantly outperformed the white males in status competition. it just so happens (law of selection) that white men are able to achieve relatively high status levels and therefore they are able to retain white women as mates. but make no mistake white women (like all women) are up for grabs to the highest achieving males.
as steve sailer discussed years ago, the latin elite makes room for (coopts) the high achieving dark-skinned alpha males by allowing them to mate with (to win) light-skinned women. another way to put this is that light-skinned women are the trophy wives of alpha males worldwide.
what is interesting is the fluctuating nature of the status competition. the interracial marriage numbers in the usa tell us that asian males are having difficulty retaining their females even though asian males are able to achieve above-average financial status. it is likely that asia itself is highly monoracial exactly because of the asian male inability to coexist with males of other races without losing asian females to alien males. asian males are ultimately forced into group action (race war) to maintain their high status in the eyes of the asian female.
by the way it seems this dynamic might partly explain the small number of jews in asia and the reason a jewish "culture of critique" has not emerged in china and japan. the males of asia are highly intolerant of rival males. their marriage prospects are directly impacted. conversely white societies make better host societies for jews because white males, as a group, are not so easily dispossessed of their wives.
on the other end of the scale the african male has never been overly concerned with losing african females to competing alien males. partly because non-african males are not very interested in african females and partly because african males are most interested in "trading up" and are very adept at seducing non-african females and therefore they don't suffer a mass castration effect or mass sexual humilation. it doesn't matter that african males are not adept at getting outgroup females to actually marry, because african males do not, as a group, put a high value on marriage. sex and bastard children are reward enough.
What the MSM never seem to understand: You can hype all these flawed studies in order to get gov. policies in line with the multicult. But the average Joe has had his experiences with blacks and it isn’t pretty. So the avg. Joe is going to vote with his feet in the opposite direction that the MSM want him to go. You cannnot force people to do things against their will for all eternity. At some stage the system is simply going to give.
Guys, you don't seem to appreciate this the "right" way. You see, you don't understand what an adrenaline rush this liberal gets from writing the headline "All Brains Are the Same Color". After all, they are: they're all some goey gray. (See, it's also a verifiable fact.) And saying such a thing also gives the hit that they can "look beyond" irrelevant and "superstitious" things like the "color" of one's brain. You just don't get it, you one-toothed gun-toting nativists, do ya?
JD
actually the "enemy occupier" aka "new kid in town" is inherently attractive to native women.
That presumes that German women looked upon black men as being there due to any inherent strength of their own. In WW2, nearly all of the fighting was done by white men. Nearly all of the US military officers in occupied Germany were white. Blacks, clearly, were just along for the ride.
white women (same as all women) prefer high status men. white women will theoretically defect in mass numbers to males of any other race if the new males significantly outperformed the white males in status competition.
Status isn't everything. And status is self-determined. To a certain type of woman owning a motorcycle and a leather jacket is a higher status than being a doctor or engineer.
Or maybe women just don't try to compete for men they know they can't win. The receptionist in my office is young, white, fat, and not too pretty. Her boyfriend is Hispanic and she claims she's not attracted to white men. My suspicion is that she feels she can't compete for any decent white men so she doesn't even bother.
it just so happens (law of selection) that white men are able to achieve relatively high status levels and therefore they are able to retain white women as mates.
The truth is that we haven't seen any mass defection of white women to black or Asian men. Broadly speaking, like tends to attract like.
And the status war goes both ways. It's not just women looking for high status men. Men also want intelligent women, too. If there were a huge gap, men wouldn't bother. I am unattracted to black women, and that's not just physical. When I was single I never even bothered with black women (not that there were many to consider); Hispanic women - slightly; Asian women - definitely, though still not to the same degree as white women.
Being on the same frequency was important, and that was easier to do with white women. It wasn't all status.
it is likely that asia itself is highly monoracial exactly because of the asian male inability to coexist with males of other races without losing asian females to alien males.
Asia never had the racial guilt-trip imposed upon it the way whites were due to colonialization, the Holocaust, and interracial slavery, so it was free to pursue the same policy we would pursue if the cultural Marxists hadn't imposed that guilt trip on us. And besides, because of the lower quality of life, there was never any pressure from would-be immigrants the way there was in the West.
How is it decided which murderers are of low IQ and shouldn't be executed? If you'd just been convicted of murder and were given an IQ test to see if you're smart enough for lethal injection, how would you perform?
actually the "enemy occupier" aka "new kid in town" is inherently attractive to native women. the reason is the new male is demonstrating a certain level of strength (dominance) simply by the fact that he has not been expelled or killed by native males. the females will pick up on these signals and demonstrate heightened interest in the new male i.e. "the girl can't help it".
Indeed, the modern English language itself has been theorized to have first emerged after the Norman Conquest to help facilitate communication between pretty Saxon girls and their new Norman French overlords. I wouldn't be surprised if the first phrase in English that didn't sound like something from Beowulf was some variation of "we go PX now, big boy?"
rob: So, if you get a low IQ score on the test, it's proof that you're smart enough to be executed (because you clearly are acting in your own best interests, a sign of intelligence). And if you get a high IQ score, well, you're clearly smart enough to be executed.
Many years ago, my father worked in a mental institution that housed the criminally insane. Apparently, there really were people who were under a death sentence, but who couldn't be executed so long as they were crazy (that would be inhumane). So these guys would go absolutely bugsh-t crazy during the couple days a month when someone from the court or prosecutor or whomever was sent by to see if they were recovered enough to die yet.
On the other hand, I know of a case some years ago where there was a guy on death row who pretty clearly hadn't understood the meaning of the confession he recorded. The *prison guards* were convinced he was innocent and had been railroaded. (This basically never happens.) I don't know whether he eventually was executed or not, but it sure seems like the relevance of the low IQ is in determining whether the guy was tricked into confessing to something he didn't do, not deciding whether he's smart enough to really grasp that he's about to be strapped to a bed and injected with poison.
Hey Anonymous:
What's this about intelligence passed on the X chromosome????
I'm interested!!
My neighbor is a retired black engineer and former serviceman, and he has a kid in Germany. He owns several houses in the neighborhood and is always trying to buy out the poorly-behaved black family on the street. He exemplifies the black upper-middle class. I wonder whether his child was in the study?
My wife's grandmother was a German war bride, from Bavaria originally. People in her family look like the current pope.
The Army used the AGCT back then. Mensa accepts a score of 136 on this test, so it qualifies as an IQ test.
In 1946 the Army set a minimum score of 100 for black enlistees, compared with 70 for whites, in order to limit the total number of blacks in the military to their goal of around 10% (blacks were applying at a much higher rate than whites). Some lower scoring blacks got in through the draft, or through having been recruited prior to this policy.
Some interesting news on James Watson:
http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3239366.ece
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/watsons-black-dna-ultimate-irony/?hp
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3022190.ece
Malcolm Gladwell on IQ. I expect Steve to jump at this like there was no tomorrow:)
francis_k, Asian women like white men because white men are socialized to do the dishes once in a while, and if you marry a white man, you'll only have to take care of one set of parents cause white people don't expect their children to take care of them when they're old. White American women like Asian-American men, who were socialized as Americans, just fine.
You see, you don't understand what an adrenaline rush this liberal gets from writing the headline "All Brains Are the Same Color". After all, they are: they're all some goey gray. (See, it's also a verifiable fact.)
-anon
Actually, brains are not all the same color.
nathaniel:
This is a good example of the difference between discrimination and affirmative action in effect. The blacks selected by those criteria were probably a very select bunch. (Somehow, I'm thinking of Easy Rawlins here.) When blacks were being discriminated against in recruitment, they were probably much smarter and better on average than the white soldiers. When the Army uses IQ standards to ensure that everyone admitted is up to snuff, blacks and whites do fine in the same organization. And, universities with affirmative action programs get the opposite effect--the admissions program ensures that blacks will average less smart and prepared than whites, and dropout rates, graduation rates, and distribution of majors all show this effect. How could anyone have predicted such a thing, if they were a liberal arts major and couldn't do math?
"actually the "enemy occupier" aka "new kid in town" is inherently attractive to native women..."
I have to extend my congratulations here Frank; you wrote a thousand words of intellectual, eloquent, interesting and well-pondered claptrap. This is a skill that will be in high demand in the upcoming years.
Maybe when the world begins it's imitation of 1984 you will be hired as a writer by the Ministry of Truth!
Broadly speaking, like tends to attract like.
Mark and others need to check the interracial marriage statistics and perhaps visit modelminority.com to gain a better understanding of what the Asian male is experiencing in western societies. It's not pretty. Both the Asian male and the African female are lacking for marriage partners in the modern, multiracial sexual meritocracy. That is the inconvenient truth.
"It's not as if African-American soldiers stopped fathering half German children so that it can't be done anymore. It's just that nobody seems to want to do it. I wonder why."
Well the doubters are free to try to repeat the study also so maybe it is not as simple as you suggest.
I've read the Fagan article that Nisbett talks about. Basically, they do 5 experiments with fairly small sample sizes each (from about 250 to 100 people), and they show that when you just test people on random words, the standard racial differences in scores hold, but when you take really weird words that probably none of the subjects have heard of and drill them on what they mean, and then give a test on those same words, racial mean differences in word knowledge go away.
To me,however, it seems that the subsequent IQ test is purely a memory test (which I understand is only loosely associated with g), since they have been more or less given the answers beforehand. I'd be more impressed if this result were replicated with math questions.
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