May 12, 2012

The Urge to Purge: IQ and the Wealth of Nations

The Urge to Purge appears to be superseding the Urge to Ignore.

From Foreign Policy:
Dumb and Dumber 
Are development experts becoming racists? 
BY CHARLES KENNY | APRIL 30, 2012 
Columnist John Derbyshire's recent effluvia on the subject of things your white kid should know about black people was met with suitable disdain and a rapid expulsion from the web pages of the National Review. Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould, among others.

Off to a good start there! Invoking the supreme authority of the late Stephen Jay Gould is a surefire way to persuade anybody familiar with the field of psychometrics that you know what you are talking about.
Sadly, Derbyshire-like prattishness on the intellectual inferiority of dark-skinned races and its impact on social and economic outcomes in the United States has a historied international equivalent. In fact, if anything, the academic consensus on why some countries are rich and others are poor is tacking closer to the shoals of genetic determinism than it has been since the days of high empire. Derbyshire's deserved disgrace is a needed reminder to throw brickbats at his partners in malodor who work in global development. 
... Development economists over the past 50 years have eschewed genetic explanations for the wealth and poverty of nations, favoring factors from lack of investment to lack of health care and education to wrong policies to poor government institutions. But the mainstream is moving back in the direction of "deep causes" of development. These involve determinants such as the relative technological advance of regions some centuries (even millennia) ago or levels of ethnic diversity that have long historical roots. And Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg have gone even further back, arguing that "genetic distance" -- or the time since populations shared a common ancestor -- has a considerable role to play in the inequality of incomes worldwide. They estimate that variation in genetic distance may account for about 20 percent of the variation in income across countries. 
Spolaore and Wacziarg take pains to avoid suggesting that one line of genetic inheritance is superior to another, preferring instead an interpretation that argues genetic distance is related to cultural differences -- and thus a more complex diffusion of ideas: "the results are consistent with the view that the diffusion of technology, institutions and norms of behavior conducive to higher incomes, is affected by differences in vertically transmitted characteristics associated with genealogical relatedness.… these differences may stem in substantial part from cultural (rather than purely genetic) transmission of characteristics across generations," they write. 
But where Spolaore and Wacziarg are careful enough to step away from interpretations based on the superiority of certain allele types, more foolhardy scholars have been happy to jump in. Take the book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen titled IQ and the Wealth of Nations. It suggests that the average IQ in Africa is around 70 points, compared with much higher averages in East Asia and the West. Based on their data, the authors suggest that higher average IQ scores are the cause of progress in measures of development, including income, literacy, life expectancy, and democratization. Lynn and Vanhanen even argue that IQ was correlated with incomes as far back as 1820 -- a neat trick given that the IQ test wasn't invented until a century later. 
As that surprising finding might suggest, most of Lynn and Vanhanen's data is, in fact, made up. Of the 185 countries in their study, actual IQ estimates are available for only 81. The rest are "estimated" from neighboring countries.

Lynn and Vanhanen can do their analyses based either on "only" 81 countries or using estimates of neighboring countries. In either case, they get virtually identical correlation coefficients, suggesting the robustness of their approach.
But even where there is data, it would be a stretch to call it high quality. A test of only 50 children ages 13 to 16 in Colombia and another of only 48 children ages 10 to 14 in Equatorial Guinea, for example, make it into their "nationally representative" dataset.

The correlations look slightly stronger if you throw out Equatorial Guinea. Anyway, all this data has been updated by Rindermann.
Psychologist Jelte Wicherts at the University of Amsterdam and colleagues trawled through Lynn and Vanhanen's data on Africa. They found once again that few of the recorded tests even attempted to be nationally representative (looking at "Zulus in primary schools near Durban" for example), that the data set excluded a number of studies that pointed to higher average IQs, and that some studies included dated as far back as 1948 and involved as few as 17 people. 
Wicherts and his colleagues also point out that there is considerable evidence the tests Lynn and Vanhanen use to make their case "lack validity in test-takers without formal schooling." It is, surely, hard to take a multiple-choice test when you don't know how to read. Not surprisingly, IQ test results in Africa are weakly aligned to other measures of intelligence that don't require written test-taking.

Right. As I pointed out in my VDARE.com review in 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen's finding of an average IQ of 70 in black Africa is strong evidence in favor of the nurture position that a better environment can raise IQs, because African Americans, who appear to be about 4/5th black, score 15 points higher. (Lynn subsequently adopted the logic of my critique.) So, Wicherts' finding that if you only count the IQ tests that he likes, on which black Africans average around 80 or a little higher, then that strengthens the hereditarian view. (This is much too subtle for Kenny to grasp, of course.)

On the other hand, there are reasons of predictive validity for including test scores where black Africans simply failed to grasp the point of using abstract logic to solve puzzles (typically, culture-free nonverbal ones, not "regatta" questions as Kenny implies). Long ago, Thomas Sowell recounted an anecdote where two 17-year-old African youths were asked a standard IQ test question. They wittily ridiculed the impracticality and absurdity of this highly abstract question, displaying quickness of mind in social cognition. On the other hand, as Sowell noted, if by the age of 17, your culture hasn't introduced you to abstract thought yet, you probably aren't going to pick it up very well as an adult, and you are probably not going to be highly productive in economic roles that demand that kind of nerdier thinking. Thus, the high correlation between low IQ scores in Africa and low per capita GDPs in Africa, even if some of low scores are due to lack of acculturation in modern thinking.

My guess is that the spread of cheap smartphones in Africa will stimulate the kind of black box logical thinking that IQ tests measure and which the modern economy rewards. As I pointed out in my review of James Flynn's 2007 book, the fascinating question is why IQ tests still possess so much predictive power more than a century after being invented.

Moreover, there are still some low-hanging fruits where 3rd World countries would benefit from public health programs that succeeded in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th Century in boosting IQ directly or or in boosting mental energy. Fortifying salt with iodine eliminated the medical syndrome cretinism. while fortifying wheat with iron also eliminated an IQ-sapping medical condition. The Rockefeller Foundation's war on hookwarm greatly benefited the physical and economic energy of Southerners by ridding them of a parasite.

Kiwanis International is the leading charity in salt iodization in poor countries. As you can see, these are not fashionable causes, but Bjorn Lomborg has long identified them as high bang for the buck development projects, as I pointed out in a 2004 VDARE.com essay.

I've been writing about the need for more micronutrient fortification to boost Third World IQ scores for over eight years, but practically nobody else will touch the subject because the topic of low average IQ scores in much of the Third World is off-limits.
Wicherts also points out international evidence that average IQs can rise dramatically over time -- by as much as 20 points in the Netherlands between 1952 and 1982, for example. In fact, Africa's current estimated "average IQ" is about the same as Britain's in 1948. The phenomenon of rising average IQ scores over time is known as the "Flynn effect," named after political scientist Jim Flynn, who popularized the result. It suggests that factors such as improved nutrition, health care, and schooling may all improve IQ test performance. Of course, Africa is currently behind richer regions on such factors, though it is rapidly catching up. Indeed, the Flynn effect may have added as much as 26 points to estimates of Kenyan IQ over a recent 14-year period. That's more than the gap between reported IQs in Africa and the United States estimated by Wicherts and colleagues based on samples from 1948 to 2006. In short, all of the evidence suggests lower levels of development cause lower test scores -- not the other way around.

But lower test scores also lead to lower development. For example, Singapore and Lagos are at the same latitude and altitude, but the high-IQ Chinese of Singapore have rid themselves of many IQ and energy sapping tropical maladies through well-conceived and well-executed public health programs. No doubt, the people of Lagos would benefit cognitively from better health, too, but it's hard to get the cycle started.

From Heiner Rindermann's new paper on whether IQ causes wealth or vice-versa:
Rindermann, H. (2012). 
Intellectual classes, technological progress and economic development: The rise of cognitive capitalism. 
Personality and Individual Differences, 53(2), 108-113. 
Abstract: 
Cognitive ability theory claims that peoples’ competences are decisive for economic wealth. For a large number of countries Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) have published data on mean intelligence levels and compared them to wealth and productivity indicators. The correlation between intelligence and wealth was supported by studies done by different authors using different countries and controls. Based on their pioneering research two research questions were developed: Does intelligence lead to wealth or does wealth lead to intelligence or are other determinants involved? If a nation’s intelligence increases wealth, how does intelligence achieve this? To answer them we need longitudinal studies and theoretical attempts, investigating cognitive ability effects at the levels of individuals, institutions and societies and examining factors which lie between intelligence and growth. Two studies, using a cross-lagged panel design or latent variables and measuring economic liberty, shares of intellectual classes and indicators of scientific-technological accomplishment, show that cognitive ability leads to higher wealth and that for this process the achievement of high ability groups is important, stimulating growth through scientific-technological progress and by influencing the quality of economic institutions. In modernity, wealth depends on cognitive resources enabling the evolution of cognitive capitalism.

Yes, it seems logical, as Kenny argues, that countries with high average IQs would suffer more from diminishing marginal returns. Yet, despite all the handwaving about the Flynn Effect, nobody has yet come up with much large-scale evidence for convergence.

One possibility is that the value of a strong back on the global market is in decline faster than the value of a high IQ.

Convergence is what everybody assumes will happen, but what actually seems to be happening is that East Asians have begun to pull away from the rest of the world. When I plotted Lynn's IQ data for the whole 20th Century in 2004, the main trend visible was rising East Asian scores relative to everybody else. The unreleased 2009 PISA scores from Chinese and Indian regions appear to show even poor, rural Chinese districts scoring in the same ballpark as European countries, while Indian states are scoring very badly, barely above SubSaharan levels. On the American SAT test, Asians (including, this time, South Asians) have been pulling away from everybody else over the last decade.

This is not to say that convergence won't happen at some point, but that there is remarkably little evidence for it so far.
There is a simple explanation for why the IQs of the offspring of colonists appear higher than those of the first descendants of the colonized. It's because the colonizers acted much as Thomas Carlyle's writing suggested they would -- as overlords with little or no interest in providing public services like a decent education or health care to a native population viewed with disdain. This left local populations malnourished, in poor health, and ill-educated -- if they were lucky enough to be in school at all. 
The good news is that decolonization began a process of leveling the playing field, with rapidly climbing and converging indicators of health and education worldwide. Thanks to the Flynn effect, IQs are doubtless on a path of convergence as well, and the poisonous idiocy of genetic explanations for wealth and poverty will soon lose what little empirical support they might appear to have today.

So that's why such longtime running dog lackeys of imperialism as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai have always had such abysmal test scores relative to uncolonized places such as Addis Ababa, Afghanistan, and the New Guinea highlands, where local intellects have been free to let their genius shine forth. The boot of colonialism lay heavily across the cognitive windpipe of urban East Asia!

As a closing thought, I just wanted to point out the air of thuggishness that is growing among mainstream pundits (highly noticeable in Kenny's choice of language), as they move from feeling they can safely ignore inconvenient facts to their growing fear and rage at the bearers of unwanted truths.

247 comments:

  1. It's interesting that he did this as his last column.

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  2. They're really patting themselves on the back for purging Derb, aren't they? Gotta really grind in the heel, too; you can tell they want to make certain that no decent publication dares ever employ him again for any purpose. Someone ought to ask them why they allowed him to spread his dangerous ideas for so many years without opposition, since nothing he said this time was anything new.

    So the writer acknowledges that people who have actually been working in global development for several decades -- and who he admits have been properly "educated" about all the acceptable causes of slow development, like colonization or lack of resources, and who actually believe those reasons -- are coming around to more deterministic causes. Yet it never occurs to him that maybe, just maybe, that's because there's at least a little bit of truth to that? Does he think the kind of idealists who go to work for the UN in third world development want to come to the conclusion that some groups are simply more capable than others? Good grief, they'd rather pull their own fingernails out than make such a statement. If they're even considering such a concept, it's because they've explored all the other possibilities and failed, and they see no other choices.

    It's always fun to see someone brush aside IQ with a standard statement like "the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked", and then make grand claims about the Flynn Effect, which supposedly has a measurable effect on exactly that linear scale they claim is so meaningless. If it's so meaningless, why does he care whether it can be raised?

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  3. "In fact, Africa's current estimated 'average IQ' is about the same as Britain's in 1948."

    I've heard this a few times before, yet cannot find data on Britain's pre-1950 average IQ. The charge seems to run counter to those early Stanford-Binet scales, which put the average IQ at 90-109.

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  4. So, Wicherts' finding that if you only count the IQ tests that he likes, on which black Africans average around 80 or a little higher, then that strengthens the hereditarian view.

    Why does it strengthen the heredetarian view? Because the IQ difference between African-Americans and Africans is decreased?

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  5. Lynn's samples for sub-Saharan Africa were indeed unrepresentative, and an estimated average IQ of 70 is too low. Wicherts, on the other hand, has been reluctant to include samples with malnourished, unhealthy children, but they are an important part of the reality of sub-Saharan Africa; his estimated average IQ of 82 for the region is too high. As Jason Malloy has maintained, an average IQ of 75 for the region is closer to the truth. (An IQ test standardization for the whole of Kenya also found 75 or 76 to be the average.) However, since African-Americans are about 17-20% white on average, the difference in average IQ between sub-Saharan Africans and African-Americans who are 100% black is only about 7 points. It is therefore ironic that Lynn -- the arch-hereditarian-- puts too much weight on nutrition and health factors in explaining IQ.
    As for the Flynn effect, it is increasingly evident that it involves acquired knowledge rather than general mental ability (or 'g', see the survey of the research by Nijenhuis and colleagues).

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  6. Maybe why Singapore is the most successful South-East Asian nation is because the majority of its population are Chineses who are not native of the region.

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  7. Lefties attribute under-achievement to lack of political power and discrimination. Some counterexamples:

    The Chinese minority is officially discriminated against by the Malay majority in Malaysia. Yet it still outperforms the majority educationally, financially, on IQ tests. Politically Malaysia is run by Malays.

    The Caribbean nations of Trinidad and Guyana are populated by blacks and East Indians who were brought in by the British to work sugar cane. The Brits have left long ago. As a race-realist might expect, Indians outperform blacks economically in these countries. But why would a leftist expect that? How would he explain it?

    Fiji is another example of a country where the race-realist world-view is affirmed by facts on the ground without the participation of whites, who in the liberal world-view are omnipotent to do evil.

    Of course they'll say that the Brits must have unfairly preferred Indians over blacks or the Chinese over the Malays and that the effects of that must have lingered for two generations after they left, but here lefty arguments are forced to come out onto thinner and thinner ice. How long do lefties expect these effects to last? What is their half-life? Why haven't the reverse effects of Malay discrimination against the Chinese kicked in yet? When should we expect them to kick in? The Malays have already been officially discriminating against the Chinese longer than some African countries were occupied by Europeans.

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  8. re: "Lynn and Vanhanen even argue that IQ was correlated with incomes as far back as 1820 -- a neat trick given that the IQ test wasn't invented until a century later." CHARLES KENNY

    For us non-psychologists, please explain how Lynn and Vanhanen use IQ before it was invented.

    Dan Kurt

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  9. "Lynn and Vanhanen can do their analyses based either on "only" 81 countries or using estimates of neighboring countries. In either case, they get virtually identical correlation coefficients, suggesting the robustness of their approach."

    If the estimates are obtained from the 81 countries, why *wouldn't* the correlation coefficients be identical???

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  10. You mentioned that East Asians seems to be pulling away from the rest of the world. Are Indigenous European IQ scores stable, decreasing or increasing? It's hard to measure average European IQ scores because many of them have high amounts of foreigners in them now.

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  11. The Internet has allowed dissident ideas to spread somewhat. The mechanics of print and TV, especially the latter, made them easy to become centralized, controlled by the powers that be. The Internet, with its low barriers to entry for content creation and dissemination, is hard for these powers to control.

    To the extent that any conservative ideas have benefited from this technological change, it's mostly been Lynn's stuff, hasn't it? Jensen is a bigger, more important scientist. Race-denial is just one of many, many facets of leftism and the IQ stuff is just one of many facets of race-denial.

    I think that Lynn's stuff, and IQ stuff in general, has disproportionately caught on because 1) it's easy to understand - just look at a table 2) it's flattering to exactly the sort of people who can influence the spread of ideas the most.

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  12. "...throw brickbats at his partners in malodor..."

    PAGING GEORGE ORWELL!

    "...a neat trick, given that the test wasn't invented until a century later..."

    And how could anyone suggest that primitive man could be said to possess the trait known today as "height", given that feet or meters weren't even in use in those days?

    "...the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth..."

    I've been saying the same thing about the thoroughly-discredited concept of "weight" for years. How could a person possibly reduce the concept of a person's size to a single meaningful number, informed as it is by so many varied biological and cultural causes? Any why, pray tell, does this debunked concept so often seem to favor whites, particularly white women, over People Of Color?

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  13. Simon in London5/12/12, 3:35 PM

    "The good news is that decolonization began a process of leveling the playing field, with rapidly climbing and converging indicators of health and education worldwide. Thanks to the Flynn effect, IQs are doubtless on a path of convergence as well, and the poisonous idiocy of genetic explanations for wealth and poverty will soon lose what little empirical support they might appear to have today."

    Wow. I don't think I've ever seen a paragraph so exquisitely crafted to be so wrong in every particular.

    The increased viciousness in treatment of hatefacts and those who utter them is noticeable. There may be several reasons - the culture in general seems to be getting more brutish and totalitarian - but the increasing disconnect between the official narrative and the vast range and rapidly increasing weight of scientific evidence seems to be the main cause.

    In the old days they burned people at the stake. Currently they ruin careers. There is violence and threats of imprisonment.

    Will science necessarily win out in the long run? Historically that has tended to be the case in the West, but there's no law of nature that says the truth will prevail. And I don't think this is stuff our future Chinese overlords will care much about, either - they're probably more likely to take an instrumental approach and adopt whatever narrative seems politically most useful.

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  14. "In fact, Africa's current estimated 'average IQ' is about the same as Britain's in 1948."

    The UK achieved nuclear weapons around that time (1952).

    Here is the the African space program today...

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9573163.stm

    Pretty much the same, right?

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  15. "Moreover, there are still some low-hanging fruits where 3rd World countries would benefit from public health programs that succeeded in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th Century in boosting IQ directly or or in boosting mental energy. Fortifying salt with iodine eliminated the medical syndrome cretinism. while fortifying wheat with iron also eliminated an IQ-sapping medical condition. The Rockefeller Foundation's war on hookwarm greatly benefited the physical and economic energy of Southerners by ridding them of a parasite."
    But in order to get this ball rolling as you say, you need that initial IQ capability. Of course it probably also helped that many tropical maladies did not exist in the temperate/sub-arctic areas where our ancestors evolved, making the question of why people below a certain line are getting sick more obvious to observers.

    "For us non-psychologists, please explain how Lynn and Vanhanen use IQ before it was invented."
    I would imagine by using other tests as proxies for IQ that did exist back then.

    "In fact, Africa's current estimated 'average IQ' is about the same as Britain's in 1948."
    This has to be false if IQ is correlated with income. Medieval British incomes were higher than parts of Africa today, even with Africa having the technology and atleast quasi-security advantage that the British did not back then.

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  16. Charles Kenny has a vested interest in charities, businesses, and governments wasting money on losing propositions in corrupt and badly managed regions made up of the illiterate and innumerate many would charitably call basket cases. The Center for Global Development (aka Center for Debt Forgiveness and Relief), where he is Senior Fellow, is a principal vehicle for western wealth extraction.

    Charles Kenny is a middle-brow 20th century author, who writes for a middle-brow 20th century magazine, proposing a first century idea, (Christian charity) wrapped in 20th century bankrupt social science.

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  17. Is a guy like this aware that genomic sequencing is going to tell the tale? That it's just a matter of time?

    Then, what'll he do?

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  18. I don't understand how someone who writes about this kind of stuff hasn't thought just a tad, I mean just a_ teeny_ tiny_ tad, about natural selection and in doing so found problems with his "reasoning."

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  19. @steve - "...as they move from feeling they can safely ignore inconvenient facts to their growing fear and rage at the bearers of unwanted truths."

    good news! they're starting to run scared. the trick now is to keep the pressure up.

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  20. there's a strong correlation between regular inbreeding and low iq in populations. it's not the whole explanation for low iqs, but it's likely a contributing factor in some populations.

    inbreeding depression is no doubt part of the problem, but i've had an idea (perhaps someone else has already thought of this before) that another issue with inbreeding is that, since it leads to clannishness, lower iq individuals might succeed better reproductively speaking in inbred societies since they can ride along on the coat-tails of their smarter relations.

    take this example from egypt for instance [pg. 151]:

    "'Zaghlul,' for example, is the rich peasant head of one of the leading extended families in El-Diblah. A short, wiry 55-year-old fellah, whose dress and mannerisms are almost indistinguishable from those of other peasants in the village, Zaghlul now owns about 25 feddans of land. Much of this land is planted in sugar cane, a crop that he uses to supply his own cane press that produces black molasses for local sale. As the owner of 25 feddans of land, and the proprietor of one of the few 'manufacturing' enterprises in the village, Zaghlul is able to dispense a wide number of agricultural and non-agricultrual work opportunities to favored members of his extended family. Many of the poorer members of his extended family live in a mud-brick settlement surrounding Zaghlul's modern two-story, red-brick house. In the evenings a steady stream of these poor people come to Zaghlul's house, seeking brokerage and intercessionary services (for example, help in securing agricultural inputs and medical services from the government)...."

    in a more outbred, individual-based society, there isn't such a ready opportunity for lower-iq individuals to tap into the resources of their smarter relations, so they (and their low-iq genes) should be more likely to be weeded out of the gene pool.

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  21. My first introduction to Gould was when I took this class back in college (same professor and class, different school)

    http://my.harvard.edu/course/colgsas-4938

    The first book we read for the class was The Mismeasure of Man. As you probably guessed, we didn't touch The Bell Curve except to the extent it was discussed in Gould's book.

    The best part is that when I took the class it was an elective in the honors college. So you had a roomful of honors students, all white and Asian (maybe one Hispanic, no blacks), sitting around saying things like "Why of course there's no such thing as IQ." It was hilarious.

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  22. Amb. Henry Mwabwetumba of Cote d'Ivoire5/12/12, 5:57 PM

    Yes, this Kenny fellow is on to something here in regards to the malodorous matter. More decolonization is urgently needed; If only I could get my Paypal button working...

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  23. But in order to get this ball rolling as you say, you need that initial IQ capability. Of course it probably also helped that many tropical maladies did not exist in the temperate/sub-arctic areas where our ancestors evolved, making the question of why people below a certain line are getting sick more obvious to observers.

    Getting a disease like malaria blows, it blows so bad that a number of areas where malaria used to be widespeard, like Italy, the American South, and Denmark, fixed it. Whooping cough, typhus, smallpox, getting any of those would be rough too.

    Europeans no more got lucky not having many diseases than they got so lucky having a continent with roads, railroads, and buildings.

    If Africans or Indians were bright, they'd fix their problems. Though personality and temperament matter. If blacks were more conscientious and prosocial, they'd get higher scores on IQ tests, and they'd do better in the real world.

    As for Kenny's urge to purge, is Tatu Vanhannen influential in the development community?

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  24. "Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Maybe why Singapore is the most successful South-East Asian nation is because the majority of its population are Chineses who are not native of the region."

    - Partly, but a big factor seems to be colonization by the British and at the core, following a Western style (at least the west before liberalization of the 60s) system of gov't. Its probably at the root of why Hong Kong and Singapore are more successful than the motherland (China).

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  25. "Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence ... has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould."

    Shame. He still doesn't know that Gould has been discredited, by Lewis, Rushton, and Lynn.

    "Rindermann, H. (2012). Intellectual classes, technological progress and economic development: The rise of cognitive capitalism."
    I have not yet read the paper, but Gottfredson and Turkheimer (in his flawed study) suggest that environment is somewhat "heritable".

    “Environments” are genetic too

    Why uninterpretable? Partly because both environments and genes affect cognitive development, as Sternberg and Grigorenko’s preface points out, but also because “environments” themselves tend to be moderately heritable. People’s genetic proclivities often affect their exposure to different physical and social environments, in particular, the experiences they seek out and construct (Scarr, 1996). Summarizing research on the heritability of environments, one textbook (Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & Rutter, 1997, pp. 203-204) reports that “genetic research consistently shows that family environment, peer groups, social support, and life events often show as much genetic influence as do measures of personality,” which is about 50%, on the average.

    How Illusions are Maintained

    “It would be naïve . . . to interpret SES strictly as an environmental variable. Most variables traditionally thought of as markers of environmental quality also reflect genetic variability . . . . Children reared in low-SES households, therefore, may differ from more affluent children both environmentally and genetically. . . and the models we employed in this study do not allow us to determine which aspect of SES is responsible for the interactions we observed.”

    As Prof. Michael Levin explained in the March 1994 issue of AR, “One of the ways [high IQ] genes produce high IQs is by producing high-quality environments, which in turn stimulate the development of children raised in them.”

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  26. There was question of why national IQs have not converged- say btwn say England and Egypt. If demographic trends continue, rest assured they will.

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  27. "Effluvia".

    He must have reached for his thesaurus.

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  28. I love the 'debunked by Gould' line. It's almost as good as fulminating about having to defend 'hard won scientfic gains' of the Last Century.

    The last thing most people want to believe is that those square fellows with their pipes and whiskers were right.

    Gilbert Pinfold.

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  29. The leftists like Charles Kenny are capable of ignoring obvious facts to an absolutely amazing degree. It's like they always see what they want to see, regardless what's actually in front of them. E.g., elsewhere Kenny wrote: "[communism] wasn’t an obviously inferior economic system". Really?

    Same with IQ/HBD. You can cite all the data in the world and Kennys among us will blissfully ignore all of it all the time.

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  30. "tacking closer to the shoals","brickbats","malodor"
    - Kenny obviously hates black people. And his ilk think "regatta" is discriminatory - hypocrites.

    Is he deliberately embellishing his writing to exclude the populations he is advocating for? - "step back dummies, let the White Guy show you how to make a case.". I'd understand the verbosity if he were trying to impress a jury, but it comes across as phony to the iSteve audience. I think he knew the article might land here and he wanted to do his best to impress.

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  31. "
    Will science necessarily win out in the long run?"

    I'm seriously trying to wrap my head around these methods. Say I am testing the correlation of size and environmental conditions in a particular organism. I sample size and record environmental data at 81 locations. Then I add 150 or so more locations but I don't find any organsims there, or run out of travel funds perhaps. So, I estimate the size of the organism at those locations using a proxy - the environmental conditions. Then I draw a lot of conclusions about the correlation between environmental conditions. wtf?


    "For us non-psychologists, please explain how Lynn and Vanhanen use IQ before it was invented."
    I would imagine by using other tests as proxies for IQ that did exist back then."

    Other tests in the 1820's? Name one.

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  32. "about the correlation between environmental conditions."

    Sorry, correlation between environmental conditions and size.

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  33. The reality of HBD will be censored, hidden, obscured, denied, explained away, and viciously suppressed until such time as there is a scientific solution to the problem; at which point it will suddenly become a 'human right' that low-IQ people be 'repaired' at the expense of the 'unfairly advantaged' high IQ wealth creators, who will be made to feel guilty for a problem that they didn't create.

    Anon.

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  34. I hope after the coming apocalypse, the dark skinned races care enough to help Whitey develop his speed and aggressiveness to survive in the post technical, post agrarian world.

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  35. Pretty amazing. It's clear that this Kenny fellow doesn't bother reading the New York Times or he never would have cited Stephen Jay Gould as an authority on intelligence matters.

    But I can't understand why he didn't cite Trofim Lysenko as well. I guess someone with Kenny's education found that name just too difficult to spell...

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  36. "I've been writing about the need for more micronutrient fortification to boost Third World IQ scores for over eight years, but practically nobody else will touch the subject because the topic of low average IQ scores in much of the Third World is off-limits."


    So why not say, "You know what would be beneficial for overall health? Micronutrient Fortification!"

    Thus making things more palatable for certain currents of the mainstream. I'm fairly sure there are correlations between I.Q. and health, so you're basically saying the same thing.

    A little sugar to help the iodine go down.

    Sometimes it's just best to do what you can to help other people, rather trying to convert people to the "truth."

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  37. Flynn found the children of pre-WWII middle class Asian-American immigrants (Chinese and Japanese) had a mean IQ of 98.5, but their socioeconomic attainment exceeded what IQ alone would predict. Their grand children, however, have a mean of 103.

    Flynn concluded it was because the children of AAs attained a considerable level of wealth and education, allowing them to expose their grandchildren to a more intellectually rigorous home environment(ie Tiger Mom).

    It's hard to be a completely effective Tiger Mom when you yourself aren't particularly educated or worldly, which previous generations of Asians were not. You can push them hard, but you're somewhat limited. Once your children utilize the school system and professional economy to become more sophisticated to the ways of the modern world, they can give the grandkids the complete Amy Chua Experience.

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  38. As commenters at FP point out, Kenny linked to the NYT article on Gould's misrepresentation while citing Gould as an authority!

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  39. I thank Steve Sailer for calling out this hit piece.

    Personally, I don't care anymore about justifying racial differences with peer-reviewed studies; human history is way, way enough. You simply have to observe the history of civilizations to understand that achievement is directly linked to genes, and not geography or luck, which have always been overcome by ingenious races.

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  40. No offence, but people who focus on IQ instead of looking at achievement have a very twisted, guilty and unnatural view of the world.

    There weren't IQ tests in the Middle Ages, but I can tell simply by knowing what they achieved that the Christian slaves of the Ottomans were smarter than their Ottomans masters.

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  41. I believe there are racial differences in intelligence. I also believe this does not justify oppression.

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  42. You killed Kenny, you bastards5/12/12, 9:17 PM

    Steve, I have been following this discussion for years but have never really received a satisfactory answer to the following question: how is it that the Flynn Effect does not represent a secular increase in g when the increase in IQ has occurred on the most g loaded IQ subtests?

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  43. "The best part is that when I took the class it was an elective in the honors college. So you had a roomful of honors students, all white and Asian (maybe one Hispanic, no blacks), sitting around saying things like "Why of course there's no such thing as IQ." It was hilarious."

    What do you expect from a bunch of liberal Jews? I took the 3Jew "Thinking about Thinking" (by Nozick, Gould, Dershowitz) and got the same liberal crap.

    One very nice favor that they did for me was putting Rushton's articles on r/K strategies and the Asian-White-Black hierarchy right there in the class materials. Right there in the bound notes for the class!! When I moved to New York City and started hanging out with all the rich high-achiever lawyer/banker liberal Jews it was always a treat to pull out my bound Harvard class notes, personally selected by Nozick, Gould and Dershowitz, with their names right there on the cover, and flip over to Rushton's research.

    What? Are they going to call me a racist for reading, talking about, and showing them my liberal-Jew-selected-Harvard-college-reading?

    So thank you, Dersh, if you are reading this. You will always be a champion of Human Biodiversity to me! I wish I still had those Thinking about Thinking class notes.

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  44. I have not yet read the paper, but Gottfredson and Turkheimer (in his flawed study) suggest that environment is somewhat "heritable".

    Damn, I love the internet. Imagine my surprise when I clicked the link on the Turkheimer study and was taken to a comment that I wrote sex years ago.

    The internet never forgets.

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  45. "You can cite all the data in the world and Kennys among us will blissfully ignore all of it all the time."

    And ignoring is a sign of stupidity.

    The man is stupid. Can we not say it? He is stupid.

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  46. *the fascinating question is why IQ tests still possess so much predictive power more than a century after being invented.*

    I don't find this so fascinating.

    What's fascinating to me is how in many ways IQ fails to predict the most important things. The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible.

    France, on the other hand, which I have seen put as low as 94, but more typically at 97, is a country producing many geniuses.

    I have seen Poland, another intellectual lightweight, put at 106, while Israel, at 94, with about 2 million Ashkenazim of 103, is a technological powerhouse and an incredible source of innovation.

    I need hardly point out the East Asian countries, who have high IQs but are uniformly intellectual lightweights.

    In light of facts like these, what is striking is just how little IQ says about some of the most important aspects of cognitive performance across countries. Oh, IQ has some level of predictive power for sure, but while some find that fact immensely impressive, the ways in which IQ fails seem so much more important to me, perhaps because IQ has been receiving such incredible emphasis lately that I feel someone has to point out how inadequate it is in so many highly significant ways - perhaps even the most significant ways (what is more significant than genius and top level performance in general, which IQ utterly fails to predict?)

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  47. "It's always fun to see someone brush aside IQ with a standard statement like "the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked", and then make grand claims about the Flynn Effect, which supposedly has a measurable effect on exactly that linear scale they claim is so meaningless. If it's so meaningless, why does he care whether it can be raised?"

    "Worth" in what sense? In God's eyes, he is correct. But Worth in a complex industrial society, the one we live in now, is very closely linked to IQ. But that might not always be the case. It really doesn't take incredible imagination to picture a world where intelligence won't be the be all and end all. Imagine a plague, seems archaic, but there are more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria, and bacteria put in more hours evolving, than bio researchers put in figuring them out, and imagine another world war, possibly nuclear and chemical, where there are not only direct violent deaths, but also refugees and famine. Who will be most fit to survive? Will it be those who have lived hygienic lives and have presumed to have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or those who have a high tolerance for premature death, violence, disgust, homelessness, injustice and who have always lived for the day? Dark skin and callouses or white skin and body fat - I guess it depends on whether you're camped out in Bolivia or Canada. High IQ and conscientious people might balk at bringing children into such a horrible world, undeveloped people have been doing it since the beginning of time. The future is a long time, you never know which traits to foster.

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  48. Wikipedia's entry on 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations' no longer includes the IQ estimates given in the book. On previous wiki entries you could see the ranking of nations by IQ.

    Here is the last version to carry those scores. It is from November 24, 2011.

    Some commissar edited the page later that day to specifically remove those scores.

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  49. "Other tests in the 1820's? Name one." - I do not know of any, but that would be the only way to do it, though you'd have to accept some axiomatic correlation or the whole thing wouldn't work.

    "If Africans or Indians were bright, they'd fix their problems" - I mentioned as much, but the given example of the hookworm is a tropical/sub-tropical disease. Its lifecycle/vector was spotted in Switzerland, among the Italian workers brought in to work on the Gotthard Rail Tunnel. All other possible factors for where the disease could have come from were inadvertantly controlled for in this situation, which made the disease vector much easier to figure out.

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  50. Simon in London5/13/12, 12:08 AM

    You killed Kenny, you bastards said...
    "Steve, I have been following this discussion for years but have never really received a satisfactory answer to the following question: how is it that the Flynn Effect does not represent a secular increase in g when the increase in IQ has occurred on the most g loaded IQ subtests?"

    The Flynn effect is found only in measures of abstract reasoning ability - "What do dogs & rabbits have in common?" - which are indeed highly correlated with g. However it is not found in other areas such as maths ability that also correlate strongly with g. An increase in g would be expected to lift all boats.

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  51. "The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible."

    Hmmm, just off the top of my head:

    Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Grieg, Soren Kierkegaard, August Strindberg, Carl Linneaus, Anders Celsius, Tycho Brahe, John Ericsson, Edvard Munch, Jean Sibelius, Hans Christian Andersen, Ingmar Bergman, Nils Bohr, Eero Saarinen...

    ...nope, no Nordic intellectual contributions whatsoever.

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  52. Steve, I have been following this discussion for years but have never really received a satisfactory answer to the following question: how is it that the Flynn Effect does not represent a secular increase in g when the increase in IQ has occurred on the most g loaded IQ subtests?

    2ed

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  53. "The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible.

    "France, on the other hand, which I have seen put as low as 94, but more typically at 97, is a country producing many geniuses."

    France has always had several times more people than all the Scandinavian countries combined, so in absolute terms it's produced more geniuses. But in per capita terms? I'm not sure of that at all. Tycho Brache and Linnaeus were freaking giants. Niels Bohr was half-Swedish. In our own lifetimes Linus Torvalds and Svante Paabo have made huge waves in intellectual circles.

    "...Poland, another intellectual lightweight..."

    This is a more well-founded observation. I don't doubt that their mean is high (Poland is a thoroughly civilized, law-abiding country), but what's their SD? That has a lot of bearing on the production of geniuses. Chopin was half-Polish. Copernicus was a German-speaking and probably ethnically-German Polish subject.

    "I need hardly point out the East Asian countries, who have high IQs but are uniformly intellectual lightweights."

    Conformism is often proffered as an explanation for that. I don't doubt that mean IQ is a useful measure, but other things matter too. The levels of innate and learned conformism, which are hard to measure, SD of IQ, probably other things too.

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  54. Whenever you read such an article that has its opening paragraph packed with lies, half-truths, smears, pontifications and bombast - with very ittle actual documented evidence to support the belligerant pomposity, you can be absolutely certain that you are dealing with an aggrieved lefty on the warpath who knows that he's been rumbled, so he relies one a lot of childish name-calling instead.

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  55. OK, I forgot Marie Curie, who was Polish.

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  56. Stephen Jay Gould who has been pretty much sanctified by humanities and social science types in academia, proved 30 years ago that biological anthropology isn't scientific and so don't bother arguing the science of it because it is socially constructed. You see Gould was the Charles Darwin of the 20th century, just consult his own readings where he says so, except he doesn't possess Darwin's evil racist Victorian world view which was pseudo-scientific, just consult Gould again on that point. Any clue that Gould was considered not only unreprensentative of the views of evolutionary biologists, but in many other realms of biology as well is apparently never discovered by these knuckle heads, who only read Gould or his Boston area fellow travelers such as Lewontin, Kamin, and Hubbard. Now go read The Mismeasure of Man and The Dialectial Biologist, for these are the foundation of all knowledge about biology, and only the rubes in Peoria would dare doubt it.

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  57. "African IQ is the same as England's in 1948".

    I utterly, utterly refute this.

    Perhaps parochial Americans don't know this but in 1948 Britain had just defeated Germany in a major war, a war that involved such innovations as radar, code-breaking computers, advanced air craft and air craft engines, battleships, submarines, anti- submarines, tanks, machine guns, advanced explosives, etc and an enorous and highy confounded logistics chain that was ALL domestically produced - from the first lump of coal and iron ore down to the screw threads with a tolerance of a 1/1000th inch, all of it was designed, made, planned , built etc by British scientists, engineers, craftsmen and workers working alone.
    Never mind the mass production and workmanship, consider the tax, distribution and financial network needed to support that production, and also consider that Britain was effectively under a blockade at the time.
    - I wonder if there is a single screw making factory in the whole of sub saharan Africa, less the old South Africa?
    That modern Britain has been stripped of most of its industry by bad economists and bad politicians is another story.

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  58. Lynn and Vanhanen even argue that IQ was correlated with incomes as far back as 1820 -- a neat trick given that the IQ test wasn't invented until a century later.

    Jaded as I am, I was nonetheless gobsmacked by the stupidity of Kenny's argument. There were no practical effects caused by variations in intelligence before the IQ concept and related tests appeared? Is this a Berkeleyean tree-falls-in-forest concept? The earth orbited the sun for billions of years before people figured out that it did. People had blood types A, B, or O before those tests appeared. This is stupid on steroids.

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  59. "the fascinating question is why IQ tests still possess so much predictive power more than a century after being invented": a shrewd observation Mr S. Has any other result from Social Science lasted so well? (Apart from Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, obviously.)

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  60. Are Indigenous European IQ scores stable, decreasing or increasing? It's hard to measure average European IQ scores because many of them have high amounts of foreigners in them now.

    I believe improvement is the trend in East and South East Europe (but from a lower level than the West European average), while Western Europe is relatively stable.

    Similarly, in East Asia, I'm not sure whether Japan or Taiwan are rising.

    Of course, I think the rising trends are most evident in PISA and in the SAT, which is not exactly an IQ test, but actual education, although there are some correlations with IQ.

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  61. What's fascinating to me is how in many ways IQ fails to predict the most important things.

    I think IQ does a very good job as a measure of the ability to function in a modern civilization.


    The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible.


    What are you talking about? Check this out:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country

    France, on the other hand, which I have seen put as low as 94, but more typically at 97, is a country producing many geniuses.

    You fail to take into account two things: the fact that France has a population three times bigger than the Nordic countries put together and the diversity of the French population.


    I have seen Poland, another intellectual lightweight, put at 106, while Israel, at 94, with about 2 million Ashkenazim of 103, is a technological powerhouse and an incredible source of innovation.


    According to which source does Poland have an average IQ of 106? All the sources that I've found on the Internet put Poland's average IQ at 99 or 97.

    I need hardly point out the East Asian countries, who have high IQs but are uniformly intellectual lightweights.

    Somebody already pointed out conformist culture. Another factor influencing high achievement besides average is standard deviation. The standard deviation of raw scores on IQ tests is lower in East Asia than in Europe. The East Asian SD is smaller than that in Europe.

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  62. If high IQ translates into environmental degradation, deforestation, extinction of Animals. I think it is pretty dumb.

    In such a case, why should low IQ beings be penalized for the sins of high IQ beings?

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  63. Abwehr said...

    "I thank Steve Sailer for calling out this hit piece."

    Did you leave out a consonant?

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  64. Americans often don't know that in whole scand live around 20m people. Now recalculate genius per capita..

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  65. "The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible."

    This is kind of hilarious.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita

    Science Nobels:

    Denmark - 5:th
    Sweden - 6:th
    Norway - 8:th
    Finland - 22:nd

    All Nobels:

    Iceland - 4:th (for one Nobelist :P)
    Sweden - 5:th
    Denmark - 6:th
    Norway - 8:th
    Finland - 21:st

    Keep in mind that Sweden has about the population of New York City.

    And yes, Sweden gets a certain home field advantage because it is the home of the Nobel price. But I´m not sure that observation jives well with your statement.

    /Loket

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  66. Simon in London5/13/12, 3:11 AM

    I think Poland's unfortunate history may account for a lack of high-end intellectual contributions despite high IQ.

    Lots of areas do underperform their population IQ, but this can change dramatically in a short time - eg the Scottish Enlightenment which followed close on the heels of the final defeat of the Jacobites, or South Korea's development after the end of the Korean War.

    IME among European populations Poland fits this profile, as does the South-Eastern United States.

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  67. On a scale where the white IQ is set at 100 (the scale Lynn prefers to use), Lynn reports that black Africans average IQ 67.  However on a scale where the entire American population is set at 100, white IQ rises to about 102 and black Africa's IQ rises to 69.  The latter figure is than rounded up which is why we hear the black African IQ reported as 70.  However Lynn himself (and many journals) typically report the black African IQ as 67 perhaps because it's better to use a scale where an IQ of 100 is defined as the white average, not the American average.  The reason for this is that American demographics are constantly changing (immigration) so using the American norms will cause everyone's IQ to drift spuriously higher over time, but using the white norms (whether from America or Western Europe) provides a more stable reference point.

    Of course even white norms themselves are constantly changing because of the Flynn Effect, but the Flynn Effect reflects an environmental effect that hits everyone equally and is controlled for by updating norms, not a genetic demographic shift that is moving America in a particular direction, so using the white population as the reference group keeps the IQ's of all races stable over time, while using America as a reference group would cause the white mean to be 100 in 1940, 102 in 1995, 104 in 2020 etc.  What is really needed is an intelligence metric that's absolute, not defined as the average of a particular group.

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  68.  Those who say an IQ of 67 (white norms, about 70 on total U.S. norms) for black Africa is too low are probably wrong.  While getting a representative sample is difficult, if anything the samples even Lynn used probably overestimated black Africa's IQ because scores would disproportionately come from those attending school or work and those in urban areas (all of which screens for IQ especially in countries where school attendance is not universal).  Keep in mind that even the Caucasoid Roma in Europe only averaged around IQ 70 in a very careful study, so an average IQ of 67 does not sound low for "pure" blacks living in the third world.  Also when you consider how poorly even whites were scoring on tests before the industrial revolution, it makes sense that black Africans today would score even lower still given their genetics and given that even modern Africa is more disadvantaged than pre-industrial America.

    African Americans average IQ 85 which is 18 points higher than the black African mean of 67.  But since African Americans are about 20% white and whites average 100, removing white admixture gives an IQ of about 81 (similar to  Lynn's calculation) which is 14 points higher than black Africa.  Thus superior environment in America added 14 points to black IQ.  This analysis is a little simplistic because it ignores native American admixture, selective migration (did the smartest blacks evade slavery?), and hybrid vigor (perhaps white admixture added more than 4 IQ points if race mixing itself boosts IQ) but these other factors probably cancel each other out.

    What is it about America's environment that added 14 points to black Africa's IQ?  Lynn's brilliant answer is nutrition. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, blacks in America are several inches taller than their counterparts in west Africa.  I think it's logical to think nutrition also added 1 SD to IQ.  As Lynn brilliantly observed, nutrition also explains the Flynn Effect.  White Americans today perform about 1 SD higher on intelligence tests than they did in WWI and are also several inches taller.  It also solves the mystery of how Indian Americans can be so smart when India's IQ is only 81.  Just as first world nutrition increases "pure" black IQ by 14 points raising it from 67 to 81, it would raise India's IQ by the same 14 points, taking it from from 81 to 95.  With a mean genetic potential of IQ 95, and a population of 1.2 billion, India has enormous genetic talent at the top, and largely children of the best and brightest are the ones being born in America (where good nutrition allows them to reach their genetic potential).         
              

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  69. Yawn, as an emigrated white South African this all sounds to yesterday. We had to lose our country because morons like Kenny, who do not want to see the truth, had enough political power to make an example of us.
    wtf

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  70. Somebody already pointed out conformist culture. Another factor influencing high achievement besides average is standard deviation. The standard deviation of raw scores on IQ tests is lower in East Asia than in Europe. The East Asian SD is smaller than that in Europe.

    I doubt that's true. I've never seen any consistent data showing any race has a smaller SD than any other race. Why would they?

    The reason why East Asians seem less creative than whites despite higher IQ is probably their conformity (as you mention) and probably a lack of primitive traits that are related to creativity like psychosis and psychoticism.

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  71. "But Worth in a complex industrial society, the one we live in now, is very closely linked to IQ. But that might not always be the case...imagine another world war, possibly nuclear and chemical, where there are not only direct violent deaths, but also refugees and famine. Who will be most fit to survive?...High IQ and conscientious people might balk at bringing children into such a horrible world, undeveloped people have been doing it since the beginning of time. The future is a long time, you never know which traits to foster. [emphasis added]

    Just fyi, the "but they got the territory with all the good roads" fallacy is lurking in plain sight in your verbiage.

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  72. Yawn, as an emigrated white South African this all sounds to yesterday. We had to lose our country because morons like Kenny, who do not want to see the truth, had enough political power to make an example of us.

    Would that it were "all so yesterday". They're still at it, hammer and tongs.

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  73. You really have to GO there to appreciate how stupid third worlders are and realize how grotesquely large the investment would have to be to change even the simplest behaviors.

    For example, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in India wander around, drop trou wherever and just poop right there on the ground. It is called "open defecation". Look it up. And not just the country. In the city, too. Fundamentals of human hygiene, and yet with all their intelligence it is a 100-year struggle to get just a single outhouse in each village.

    I don't know whether it is IQ or culture, but this truly is bone-deep pigheaded behavior that keeps them poor and diseased. It is no wonder they are escaping by the boatload to go live in (and live off of) more civilized countries.

    The best thing we can do is pull the H-1B visas from all the Indian and African and Haitian escapees and send them home to help their own people.

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  74. Anon: "jibe" (not "jive") = to be aligned with

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  75. Rural China rocking the PISA

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17585201

    The irrelevance of a civilization is inversely proportional to the amount of clamour it generates about it's achievements. The sharp increase in western, especially American narratives, about how it "won" is strong evidence that the decline is true.

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  76. Simon in London5/13/12, 6:49 AM

    Catperson:
    "Just as first world nutrition increases "pure" black IQ by 14 points raising it from 67 to 81, it would raise India's IQ by the same 14 points, taking it from from 81 to 95. With a mean genetic potential of IQ 95"

    I can't see any reason to think that the environmental difference between the USA/First World & India is the same as the environmental difference between the USA and sub-Saharan Africa (14 points). It's likely to be significantly less - say it's 9 points, that would put median Indian IQ at 90, similar to Mestizos in the USA.

    In any case, somebody once pointed out to me that you can't really take a Western environment as indicative of 'genetic potential IQ', because it is artificial -it is dependent on different (here, white) people with a different IQ to sustain it. You can only meaningfully take the best environment sustainable by people with that genetic IQ.

    Or to put it another way, African-Americans are likely to show elevated IQ scores, because a 100% African-American (or African) society probably could not sustain the environment that produces current African-American IQ scores.

    I'm not personally sure if this is right - if it's mostly about adequate nutrition, Africans may be able to reach their genetic potential IQ with relatively little continuing outside assistance. But I can see why Watson was gloomy about the prospects for Africa, inasmuch as Africa is unlikely ever to reach current Western levels - and nor are large swathes of the rest of the world.

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  77. Perhaps parochial Americans don't know this but in 1948 Britain had just defeated Germany in a major war, a war that involved such innovations as radar, code-breaking computers, advanced air craft and air craft engines, battleships, submarines, anti- submarines, tanks, machine guns, advanced explosives, etc and an enorous and highy confounded logistics chain that was ALL domestically produced - from the first lump of coal and iron ore down to the screw threads with a tolerance of a 1/1000th inch, all of it was designed, made, planned , built etc by British scientists, engineers, craftsmen and workers working alone.

    Nothing brings out the best in white people quite like finding ways to kill other white people.

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  78. "Israel, at 94, with about 2 million Ashkenazim of 103, is a technological powerhouse and an incredible source of innovation."

    The smart guy white Jews (aka "Ashkenazi") who took over Palestine stuck all their dumb Arab Jews (aka "Misrachi") in ghettoes (aka "development towns") and gave them a steady diet of shop class (aka "Special Education") while the smart guy Jews went to college. The smart guy Jews have an even bigger problem with the black Jews (Ethiopians) who are about as dumb as any other group of Africans. [They had to import Arab Jews from all the surrounding countries when they realized damn few white Jews wanted to move to the desert after WWII.]

    For almost sixty years the smart guy white Jews have been trying to turn Israel into one big happy Jewish family, but race, culture and stupid have made it very, very difficult.

    Imagine Manhattan (105 IQ), Detroit (80) and South-Central (90) all crammed into Arizona with the Manhattanites trying desperately to pretend they are all one big happy family.

    Israel would be a good test case for the IQ-to-wealth, or wealth-to-IQ given the huge disparities in IQ and culture between the Ashkenazim, the Mizrachim, and the Ethiopians, combined with the sudden removal and transplantation of large test populations into an alien (European) environment.

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  79. "Just fyi, the "but they got the territory with all the good roads" fallacy is lurking in plain sight in your verbiage."

    I see your point. White Americans presumed that Indians would be naturals for Olympic archery competitions, but they stunk.

    I have no doubts that the Whites and Asians would flourish on a desert island, but I think they've lost the ability to deal with life boat ethics. We are much too squeamish about dealing with hostile populations, we invite them in, a dangerous proposition when a calamity comes, and harmony is needed for recovery.

    Russia won't accept the discomfort of populating itself. Japan grows old, instead of venturing out and occupying. I'm not sure it is really a fallacy, the dark skinned people survive one miserable generation after another.

    We freely offer Christian charity, but we refuse to demand conversion from the savages. If we don't really believe the message entirely, we should just let nature take its course and stop being shamed by guys like Kenny. We should also keep our micronutrients for ourselves.

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  80. For those of you going on about the Scand countries in response to my previous point, a few points. First, the list offered by one commenter contained multiple Jews (Bohr, Strindberg), many minor, inconsequential figures (Hans German Andersen?), and mostly starts from the late 19th century. Where were all the Scand geniuses in the previous centuries when the other European countries were doing massive work?

    Such a list would be dwarfed - both in sheer numbers and in importance - by any comparable list in the same time period from England, France, and Germany.

    Also, the Faroe Islands, Saint Lucia, and Timor-Este have MORE Nobels per capita than the United States and Germany.

    Let no one call Timor-Este an intellectual lightweight anymore! I stand corrected!

    The Nordic countries have a combined population of 25 million today, which puts them at about half of England, and a bit under half of France. Assuming these proportions were fairly constant for the past few centuries, does anyone seriously think the Scand countries made a contribution to European intellectual life roughly half that of England or France? Puu-leeze. The Scand countries were fence-sitters in the great European intellectual ferment - subtract the Scands from European intellectual history, and you would barely notice.

    And there is no clear relationship between population numbers and fertility in genius - ancient Athens was tiny, as was Elizabethan England, China is massive - which kind plays into my point. Population numbers + IQ fail to predict some of the most interesting things.

    For Poland at 106, see this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-381057/European-IQ-map-proves-Brits-brainy.html

    I have been to Poland, and it is a fairly civilized place, but has a serious hooligan problem (I was attacked on the streets of Krakow by white thugs. I remember being surprised that I was being attacked by whites. I am white also, btw), so I would hardly rank Poland amongst the more civilized of the European nations.

    As for France being very populous, true, but then the link between population numbers and intellectual fertility is far from clear, even if you add IQ, as I pointed out. England was for most of her history much smaller than France, yet managed to make contributions as numerous and as great. So did Italy, for a time, and parts of Germany. So the Scands really have no excuse.

    No reliable studies have shown differences in SD between population groups. The only place it has been found is between genders. The idea that it explains things is wishful thinking. Specifically that Asians have lower SDs - that has never been found to be the case.

    If one wishes to explain Asian underperformance as a function of conformism, which is pure sepculation, how come the West did it's best work when it was much more conformist than today and even had to fight a repressive Church? Further, the principle of parsimony requires us to explain Asian - and anyone's - intellectual underperformance as a function of their cognitive profile without bringing in extraneous factors like personality, unless we know the explanatory power of intelligence alone has been utterly exhausted, which would mean we know everything there is to know about it and that it is comprehensively captured by IQ. Does anyone really think that is the case?

    Which is - in a nutshell - my point. IQ is interesting and somehwat predictive, but it is silly to think that it says even close to everything about human intelligence, or even that it captures the most important dimensions of human intelligence. The statistics of human performance - across centuries and countries - simply do not correlate to IQ in that way.

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  81. @Markku said...
    "Another factor influencing high achievement besides average is standard deviation. The standard deviation of raw scores on IQ tests is lower in East Asia than in Europe. The East Asian SD is smaller than that in Europe."

    Please Markku post a reference for this difference in SD between Whites and East Asians. It is something I have suspected that explains why in my academic life ( nine years in an Ivy studying science, three years plus Ivy teaching at graduate level and research ), and thirty five years in two corporations I have NOT seen the existence of super bright Asians as I have the super bright White males. I am not saying that the Asians are not bright as a group in my experience as they surely are. I encountered many, many bright ones and can believe that their mean IQ is higher than whites by some level. However the really super bright individuals that I have encountered seem always to have been white males. The only explanation that makes sense to me would be a larger SD in white males compared to North Asians.

    A case in point was a male in college who NEVER studied. He read novels and constantly was chasing skirts. He was a B+ to A- student without effort and was in many Honors classes. He did well in math, science and history courses but did terribly in foreign language courses which were required. He took the GREs in the early 1960s and scored an astounding 800 verbal, 800 math and 960 on his ( I think ) chemistry exam. This white male was the brightest person I can remember. I have met similar individuals and they alway were white males including professors and fellow students ( including one who was a year ahead of me who won a Nobel Prize ) as well as a very rare individual I encountered in my corporate career.

    I would love to read a reference on SD differences in IQ and race.

    Dan Kurt

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  82. Florida resident5/13/12, 10:31 AM

    Dear Mr. Sailer !

    Thank you for your article.

    This is a good occasion to mention the 1999 book by Charles Murray “Income Inequality and IQ”,
    http://www.mega.nu/ampp/murray_income_iq.pdf
    (free download), or about $10.00 on Amazon. This short brochure was published 5 years after the 1994 publication of “The Bell Curve”.

    The technical (in terms of sociology science) idea behind this thin brochure is
    ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.

    To exclude the influence of un-equal family conditions (educational, socio-economic, marital status, genes of parents), Murray took a sub-sample of National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). Instead of about 13,000 of all subjects of NLSY, he selected only those (3,800 individuals, who comprised 2,800 unique pairs), who had siblings in the same NLSY. While IQ of children correlates with IQ of parents, there is quite noticeable variance of IQ between siblings. It is the correlation of this variable IQ with the life outcomes, which was established unambiguously in that brochure.
    Moreover, the last (#6) chapter of the brochure is entitled “The Utopian Sample”.
    Murray: everybody blames family poverty for bad life outcomes of children. Suppose we live in Utopia, where we managed to eliminate poverty. Murray managed to do it in his study by selection of (about 3,000 strong) sub-sample of NLSY participants, who grew up in intact, well-to-do, educated families. He have shown that IQ is still the main determining factor even for this ”Utopian Sample”.

    If the Economics Nobel Prize Committee would ask me, I would nominate Murray for that Prize for only that brochure. Alas, they did not ask.

    This is actually a duplicate of my comment from elsewhere.
    But, as John Galsworthy said:
    "A platitude must be stated with force and clarity."

    Your respectfully, F.r.

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  83. ""But Worth in a complex industrial society, the one we live in now, is very closely linked to IQ. But that might not always be the case...imagine another world war, possibly nuclear and chemical, where there are not only direct violent deaths, but also refugees and famine. Who will be most fit to survive?...High IQ and conscientious people might balk at bringing children into such a horrible world, undeveloped people have been doing it since the beginning of time. The future is a long time, you never know which traits to foster. [emphasis added]

    Just fyi, the "but they got the territory with all the good roads" fallacy is lurking in plain sight in your verbiage."

    I attempted a lame defense in a previous post, maybe Komment Kontrol will squash it, if it has some standards.

    High IQ and conscientious people ARE balking at having children in this comfortable world; what if things get worse? Suicide seems like the next step. The populations teetering on the edge of survival just seem to keep pumping them out.

    Why is intelligence failing us?

    Sorry about the verbiage; i must have been subconsciously aping Kenny's style.

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  84. Anonymous said...
    "The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible."


    I've heard that before and it shows the ignorance of which "we" in the HBD camp, are always being accused. Being in a government organization that deals with technologcal programs, I know that Scandinavia has been in the forefront most of the 20th century, but they are not camp celebrities about it, unlike the silly Goulds and Gladwells.
    The real innovators do. They don't gab.

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  85. You simply have to observe the history of civilizations to understand that achievement is directly linked to genes, and not geography or luck, which have always been overcome by ingenious races."


    Perhaps, but they will always cite the Mayan civilization. Aren't American Indians usually in the IQ85 range? Mayans had higher mathematics and built complex structures. Now without getting into alien visitor territory, they must have invented such things themselves, right? Even if they didn't invent them, they maintained a branch of endeavor requiring extremely abstract thinking, for a few centuries and the Spanish conquistadores did destroy Mayan libraries, though I don't know of what they consisted.
    There are other examples like that--I don't mean the fantasy sub-Saharan African civilizations, but those in India (more higher mathematics back in the mists of time.) On the reverse, it is true that much of Europe was less developed than the middle east for a while, though again, if you go back further than mainstream history permits, you will see structures like Stonehenge and the pyramids in southereastern Balkans that tell of a highly developed culture of which we now know nothing. The first universities in Spain were built by Muslis, or so they say.
    It's not quite so straightforward as that, history; and it's not really as long as all that either, when you consider that the ancient Hindus identified ages as extending for hundreds of thousands of years -- each -- one leading into the other. You may have heard that we are currently in the "kali yuga" or dark age of humankind. That explains a lot.

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  86. "Anonymous said...

    "African IQ is the same as England's in 1948".

    I utterly, utterly refute this....."

    I agree with your point. The notion that sub-saharan Africans today are as smart as were the British of 1948 is laughable.

    However, you should learn the difference between "dispute" and "refute". Refute is becoming one of the most misused words in the English language today.

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  87. "Anonymous Anonymous said...

    ""The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible.""

    Hmmm, just off the top of my head:

    Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Grieg, Soren Kierkegaard, August Strindberg, Carl Linneaus, Anders Celsius, Tycho Brahe, John Ericsson, Edvard Munch, Jean Sibelius, Hans Christian Andersen, Ingmar Bergman, Nils Bohr, Eero Saarinen...

    ...nope, no Nordic intellectual contributions whatsoever."

    Also: Hannes Alfven, Hugo Alfven, Roald Amundsen, Carl Nielsen, Hans Christian Oersted, Anders Angstrom, Lars Onsager, Aage Bohr, Hans Christian Gram, Niels Abel, Sophus Lie, Svante Arrhenius, Alfred Nobel, Gustav de Laval, Oskar Klein,........and many others.

    Yeah. Negligible.

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  88. "The Scand countries, for instance, are pretty high IQ, yet in terms of intellectual contribution are utterly negligible."

    Other's beat me to a response, maybe I can elaborate though. Original poster, are you repeating something you learned in school? Maybe history is no longer being taught. (If not, anti-western/white agitprop gets old, why waste everyone's time?) This just seems like a wierd remark, is this thinking common?

    For instance, the Nobel prize is named after Nobel, a Scandinavian guy, and given out by the King of Sweden.

    Does the name Gustavus Adolphus mean anything to you?

    Instead of going on at length, two quotes:

    "He led his nation to military supremacy during the Thirty Years War, helping to determine the political as well as the religious balance of power in Europe. He is thereby regarded as one of the greatest military commanders of all time."

    "Within only a few years of his accession Sweden had become the largest nation in Europe after Russia and Spain. Some have called him the "father of modern warfare", or the first great modern general."

    If you are unfamiliar with the Thirty Years war, it more-or-less established the outlines of modern Europe and the concept of the nation-state.

    Know any math? Familiar with Lie groups and Sophus Lie? How about Abelian groups and Niels Abel? Know anything about taxonomy and biology and Linnaeus? (Which reminds me, Linus Torvalds is ethnically Swedish, every heard of Linux? I'm sure he's a low-IQ idiot.) Ever measure anything in Angstroms? Ever heard of temperature in Celsius? Use Erickson cell phone systems or Bluetooth connections, like for wireless keyboards? There's this guy Oersted that discovered that current creates magnetic fields, kind of important, and invented the thought experiment, does a Dane count?

    We could mention Swedish Americans, like that guy Ericsson that designed the Monitor or that guy Kelly Johnson that designed the P-38 (and U-2, and SR-71, and ... "That damned Swede can actually see air"). Which reminds me that Ken Olson was "Scand". If you don't recognize the name, well, maybe there is a problem here.

    Maybe the problem here is a confusion of attention, fashion, marketing, and branding, "mind-share" as it where, for being what matters, and not actual intellectual achievement. Fiction over fact. A lot of that going around these days. Perhaps engineering and hard sciences achievement is no longer intellectually accessible to our chattering and so-called elite classes, or maybe rich do-good women think it's all somehow grimy, or maybe we've just been subject to a century of "don't see the naked emperor" agit-prop. (Hum, I wonder if some envious women in the US are just looking for ways to put down blondes?)

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  89. "
    Perhaps parochial Americans don't know this but in 1948 Britain had just defeated Germany in a major war, a war that involved such innovations as radar, code-breaking computers, advanced air craft and air craft engines, battleships, submarines, anti- submarines, tanks, machine guns, advanced explosives, etc and an enorous and highy confounded logistics chain that was ALL domestically produced - from the first lump of coal and iron ore down to the screw threads with a tolerance of a 1/1000th inch, all of it was designed, made, planned , built etc by British scientists, engineers, craftsmen and workers working alone."

    Interesting point. We see both in the US and the UK during WWII the best and brightest along with common laborers working harmoniously toward a grand purpose in the national interest and achieving incredible technological and industrial goals. So why did either great nation require mass immigration when they already consisted of great people?

    I would say for the US that mass immigration occurred in two phases. First the influx of skilled European socialists who subverted the loyalty of the intellectual class. This set the stage for opening the flood gates to third world cheap labor. Then the great ingress of culturally and genetically dissimilar peoples who even after two or three generations still feel no loyalty to the US, not to mention the hugely expensive social problems they have created.

    Maybe what is happening in this country is indeed Hitlers revenge. The people we strove mightily to save have set us up for self destruction.

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  90. I can't see any reason to think that the environmental difference between the USA/First World & India is the same as the environmental difference between the USA and sub-Saharan Africa (14 points). It's likely to be significantly less - say it's 9 points, that would put median Indian IQ at 90, similar to Mestizos in the USA.

    Actually malnutrition is reportedly much much worse in South Asia than sub-Saharan Africa, so my 14 point bonus was conservative. 60% of South Asia is said to
    be stunted and the average man in India is about 2 SD shorter than American men, though that might be partly genetic.


    Another source of data is South Africa where Indian IQ is 86, coloured (I.e. Mulatto) IQ is 83. A 3 point gap. Since pure mulattoes have an IQ of about 91 in America, Indians have the genetic potential to have an IQ of 91 + 3. So multiple methods conerge on Indians having mid 90s genetic IQ

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  91. I can't see any reason to think that the environmental difference between the USA/First World & India is the same as the environmental difference between the USA and sub-Saharan Africa (14 points). It's likely to be significantly less - say it's 9 points, that would put median Indian IQ at 90, similar to Mestizos in the USA.

    Actually malnutrition is reportedly much much worse in South Asia than sub-Saharan Africa, so my 14 point bonus was conservative. 60% of South Asia is said to
    be stunted and the average man in India is about 2 SD shorter than American men, though that might be partly genetic.


    Another source of data is South Africa where Indian IQ is 86, coloured (I.e. Mulatto) IQ is 83. A 3 point gap. Since pure mulattoes have an IQ of about 91 in America, Indians have the genetic potential to have an IQ of 91 + 3. So multiple methods conerge on Indians having mid 90s genetic IQ

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  92. Henry Canaday5/13/12, 12:56 PM

    You can always find a half-bright gas-bag to slander an opinion he does not understand. The question is why Foreign Policy ran Kenny’s article as written.

    The magazine seems to be chiefly concerned with democratizing the Arab world. Problem: 1) democratization seems to require a level of economic development beyond living on extortionate oil prices; 2) real economic development seems to be difficult with average IQs in the mid-80s range, as reported for Arab nations; 3) unlike the case for Sub-Saharan Africa, oil wealth means that much of the Arab world has long had the resources for adequate nutrition and education; 4) the implication, a strong genetic influence on IQ, poses problems for FP’s agenda.

    Derbyshire stepped on more than just philosophers’ shoes.

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  93. "CJ said...

    Lynn and Vanhanen even argue that IQ was correlated with incomes as far back as 1820 -- a neat trick given that the IQ test wasn't invented until a century later.

    Jaded as I am, I was nonetheless gobsmacked by the stupidity of Kenny's argument. There were no practical effects caused by variations in intelligence before the IQ concept and related tests appeared? "

    Again, if you are asserting a correlation (and causality) between IQ and its "practical effects" as people here are defining them (roads, technology etc) then you CANNOT use the "practical effects" as a proxy for IQ and then use those "results" to bolster your argument!

    And then when IQ DOESN'T fit your assertion (East Asia) you invent excuses- conformity, etc. Again, this is not how science is done.


    "Why is intelligence failing us?"

    Yes, why can't we do anything about the widespread destruction of the natural world, global warming, species extinction, the failing economy and the education crisis right here in the US (really, we fall apart because of immigration of supposed dark skinned and stupid people? How pathetic is that?)

    All you seem to have is some evidence that the brightest kids in a family tend to be more successful, something that the dumbest kids in the family could probably tell you anyway. No shit. But where is the evidence of predictability on a larger scale? It may be the case, but I haven't seen any evidence of it here.

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  94. "Perhaps, but they will always cite the Mayan civilization. Aren't American Indians usually in the IQ85 range? Mayans had higher mathematics and built complex structures. Now without getting into alien visitor territory, they must have invented such things themselves, right? Even if they didn't invent them, they maintained a branch of endeavor requiring extremely abstract thinking, for a few centuries and the Spanish conquistadores did destroy Mayan libraries, though I don't know of what they consisted."

    Let me help you with a bit of history, Charlotte.

    Mayans of 1400 != Mayans of 1900.

    There has been, you know, quite a lot of race mixing happening on the South-American continent between Indians (those who built these fancy pyramids), Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores, and their African slaves... hence hijo de la chinguada (~ son of the one who betrayed his race), the worst insult in Mexico.

    Besides, Mayan civilization wasn't so evolved. Impressive and interesting, but not much more than what the Ancient Egyptians already did 5,500 years B.C.

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  95. Lexus Liberal5/13/12, 1:44 PM

    Additionally since IQ is heritable to an extent many higher IQ individuals will tend to intermarry and pass off their traits to their progeny.

    Even though there is slight variation between the IQ of parents and offspring, the IQ level is still consistent across genetic bloodlines.

    This explains why Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than all other ethnic groups.

    Combined with the Flynn effect and inherited potential, its no surprise that IQ in third world countries are on average lower than developed worlds. In most cases, people worry about surviving instead of developing critical thinking. There's also numerous studies that correlate early exposure to violence to stunted intellectual development due to high levels of stress hormones that impede overall cognitive development. There is a correlation between testosterone levels and intelligence, which further shows that if one's environment is violent like most of Africa that it hinders intellectual development.

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  96. I want to second the comment that Poland is a country with a fairly high IQ that has "failed" because of its political and geographical situation rather than its people. After partition, within the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires the old Polish nobility quickly became part of the ruling elite in the 19th centuries (although not in Germany, interestingly). Many important "Russian" cultural figures are of at least partial Polish descent - Tchaikovskii, Stravinsky, Tarkovsky, Igor Sikorsky, and many others. Poles have a reputation in Eastern Europe for being quick witted and devious, implying their neighbors think they are smart. Polish Americans come in all flavors, but I have personally known three second generation Polish Americans who are absolutely brilliant.

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  97. Hey Big Bill you forgot the sephardin, but overall a good observation.

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  98. Lets see: ancient egyptians, a colored race based in north-east Africa, created the grandest of the ancient civilizations and they were conquered and ruled for a while by the even darker Nubians/Sudanese. So who had the higher IQ 4000 years ago? Them or the nordic europeans who were considered barbarians until very recently?

    Last time I checked, ALL the ancient civilizations, Egypt, Sumer and Indus Valley, were founded in hot climates by colored races. And ALL of the world's most popular religions were founded by non-whites. How do you all explain that away?

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  99. 85 IQ? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Lynn actually find an average IQ among black Americans of 82, not 85. He (or his editors) "rounded" up to be generous. Rounding down to 80 is probably more accurate.

    No this is what Lynn actually says:

    The IQs of approximately 67 of the African populations of sub-Saharan Africa shown in Table 4.1 are a function of both genetic and environmental factors. We now undertake the task of estimating the genotypic African IQ. This is the IQ that Africans would have if they were raised in the same environment as Europeans. The starting point of this analysis is the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the results of which are summarized in section 14 and which showed that a 17 IQ point difference between African Americans and Europeans is still present when they are reared in the same family environments. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the African-American-European IQ difference in the United States is wholly genetically determined. Although this study showed a 17 IQ point African-European IQ difference, it is reasonable to assume that the true African-American-European difference is 15 IQ points, as shown by the numerous studies summarized in Table 4.4, and that the 17 IQ point difference obtained in this study is a sampling error. We conclude therefore that the genotypic IQ of African Americans is 15 IQ points below that of American Europeans. A further argument for believing that the IQ of African Americans is wholly genetically determined is that it has remained constant over a period of approximately 80 years despite the great improvements in the environment of African Americans relative to that of Europeans.

    The conclusion that African Americans have a genotypic IQ of 85 does not mean that Africans in sub-Saharan Africa also have a genotypic IQ of 85. African Americans are not pure Africans but are a hybrid population with a significant amount of European ancestry. This has been estimated at 25 percent by Reed (1971) and by Chakraborty, Kamboh, Nwamko, and Ferrell (1992). We can estimate that pure Africans in Africa and in the United States have a genotypic IQ of 80 and that this IQ increases by 0.2 IQ points for every 1 percent of Caucasoid genes. Thus, the average African American will have an IQ of 85 (80 + 25 X 0.2 = 85), a figure confirmed by numerous studies summarized in Table 4.4. In the Southeastern states the percentage of European genes among African Americans is quite low. For instance in South Carolina it has been estimated at 6 percent (Workman, 1968) and in Georgia at 11 percent (Reed, 1969). These admixtures of European genes should raise their IQ by 1.2 and 2.2 IQ points, respectively, giving them an IQ of 81.2 and 82.2. This prediction has been confirmed by the study of 1,800 African Americans in five Southeastern states by Kennedy, Van der Reit, and White (1963), which found their IQ on the 1960 Stanford-Binet was 80.7.

    African Americans with 50 percent European genes will have an IQ of 90 (80 + {50 by 0.2 = 10} = 90). This is about the mean IQ of African Americans in the Northern states, where the proportion of European ancestry approaches 50 percent. African Americans with 75 percent European genes will have an IQ 15 points higher at 95 (80 + {75 x 0.2 = 15} = 95), which is very close to the IQ of 94 of the interracial children in the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. Europeans with 100 percent European genes will have an IQ at 100.

    This estimate of the genotypic African IQ as 80 means that the average IQ that Africans would obtain if the environments in which they were raised were the same as those of Europeans would be 80. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa the mean IQ of Africans is approximately 67, so it can be inferred that adverse environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa impair the African IQ by around 13 IQ points.


    I am simply reiterating Lynn's point, though I used 20% instead of 25% as the estimate for white admixture.

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  100. I am Lugash.

    You can never be too rich, too thin or too aggressive in stamping out racism.

    I am Lugash.

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  101. Perhaps parochial Americans don't know this but in 1948 Britain had just defeated Germany in a major war


    Perhaps the parochial Brits don't know this, but it was not them who defeated Germany in WWII. It was Russia and the US.

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  102. "What's fascinating to me is how in many ways IQ fails to predict the most important things."


    I think IQ does a very good job as a measure of the ability to function in a modern civilization.



    It does predict that. But it fails to predict creativity and innovation. It fails to predict which countries will be China and which will be Germany.

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  103. “Anonymous said...
    The reality of HBD will be censored, hidden, obscured, denied, explained away, and viciously suppressed until such time as there is a scientific solution to the problem; at which point it will suddenly become a 'human right' that low-IQ people be 'repaired' at the expense of the 'unfairly advantaged' high IQ wealth creators, who will be made to feel guilty for a problem that they didn't create.”

    I’ve had the same thoughts, but if in order to be repaired they have to borrow genetic material from Whites or Asians will they still be Black or Hispanic? Obviously, this is a type of Affirmative Action (i.e. giving minorities a boost). Will low IQ Whites qualify for same public assistance or only traditionally aggrieved groups? There is no question that the PTB have wanted to encourage race mixing particularly between Whites and Blacks (i.e. see the great careers out of nowhere for Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Klum). Why? I am not sure. Creating a bridge between the races? Destroying racial consciousness? However, the traditional way, mating, does not seem to be working fast enough for them. While gene technology is rapidly advancing my guess is the country implodes before we reach the point that it can used to ameliorate the differences between the races. Also the Chinese are investing very heavily in this area of research and I rather doubt they will play nice once they uncover its secrets first which they are sure to given our plodding efforts in this direction.

    “Anonymous said...
    I believe there are racial differences in intelligence. I also believe this does not justify oppression.”

    Most people who read Steve’s blog feel the same way you do. However, the Left won’t permit us to treat people as individuals. Instead, if we are Whites we are herded into meetings and told how racist we are, we are discriminated against in employment opportunities in favor of diversity candidates, we are not given access to SBA loans, and our children are discriminated against in college and graduate school admissions and lectured to from cradle to the grave about how racist they are. Then we discover that Blacks and Hispanics murder and sexually assault Whites at many times the rate that Whites do, but that the main stream press refuses to report or discuss this fact.

    Do I continue to permit my children to be subject to a slow motion White genocide so that the self-esteem of Blacks and Hispanics, who have been fed a false “It’s all Whitey’s fault” explanation to explain their historically inferior performance, does not suffer? Or so that some left wing Jewish pundit in the Upper East Side can self-satisfyingly gloat that he or she is doing his or her part to “heal the world?”

    No thanks.

    Why the Left refuses to accept the idea that group averages exist and that awareness of this fact does not immediately condemn people to racism is a slight mystery and makes me suspicious of their true motives. We all know, or should, that averages are just averages with plenty of exceptions and outliers.

    "

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  104. Regarding Scandinavian & Polish achievement, and speaking as a musician, I'd just like to add a few more names:

    Franz Berwald (a greater symphonist than Mendelssohn, but still chronically underappreciated)

    Wilhelm Stenhammar (equally brilliant, and even more chronically underappreciated)

    Karol Szymanowski (a composer of staggering subtlety & sophistication)

    Vagn Holmboe (to date, the last great symphonist)

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  105. "Where were all the Scand geniuses in the previous centuries when the other European countries were doing massive work?"

    They were busy keeping themselves alive in the harsh North, but even with a population of just over a million in the early 17th century Sweden-Finland was able to become a great power in Europe. At this time England had a population of almost five million and France over 20 million. Strindberg jewish? He must have been a self-hating one then, considering his "anti-semitism".

    "subtract the Scands from European intellectual history, and you would barely notice."

    You would be hard pressed to write general surveys of the history of biology, chemistry or astronomy without including scands such as Linné, Berzelius and Tycho Brahe (doing his thang already in 16th century). Heck, we even had our own (pre-)Adam Smith if the natural sciences are not your cup of tea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius

    Scandinavia - combining brilliance with solidarity, cohesion, rule of law and freedom!

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  106. If we lived in a time when the intelligentsia insisted that IQ was *everything*, than I might sympathize with the reservations expressed by our anonymous critic of the Scandinavians & the Poles.

    But that is not the time we live in . We live in a time when the intelligentsia insist that IQ is *nothing*.

    So, in the present context, the role of IQ needs to be stressed - not minimized.

    It's all a question of balance.

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  107. Steve should look at the Orwell quote on his homepage

    Then look at China's GDP, supposed average IQ and Nobel Prize winners.

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  108. In light of facts like these, what is striking is just how little IQ says about some of the most important aspects of cognitive performance across countries.

    The most important cognitive performance across countries is GDP and national IQ correlates 0.7 with that.

    Also, I think you're source on Poland's IQ is wrong.  The appendix in this source lists all of Richard Lynn's national IQ's at Poland clocks in at 99.

    http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/hsmt/courses_reading/undergraduate/authority_of_nature/week_8/volken.pdf


      The figure might have been revised in Lynn's later work, but I wouldn't read too much into the reported IQ of a single country unless it's been repeatedly confirmed.  It's much wiser to focus on regions (i.e. Sub-Saharan africa, East Asia) because those are the average of many countries so sampling errors tend to cancel out.   

    what is more significant than genius and top level performance in general, which IQ utterly fails to predict?

    IQ predicts top level performance extremely well.  Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ of any "race" and they run the world and are dramatically overrepresented among super achievers as intellectually diverse as Nobel prize winners, media elites, presidential advisors, billionaires and chess champions.  

    IQ also predicts low level achievement. Bushmen and pygmies are the lowest IQ races and they're on the verge of extinction and the poorest most powerless race on Earth.


    Further, the principle of parsimony requires us to explain Asian - and anyone's - intellectual underperformance as a function of their cognitive profile without bringing in extraneous factors like personality, unless we know the explanatory power of intelligence alone has been utterly exhausted, which would mean we know everything there is to know about it and that it is comprehensively captured by IQ. Does anyone really think that is the case?

    The principle of parsimony (occam's razor) is not about using the fewest number of variables to explain something, it's about making the fewest number of assumptions.  You are ASSUMING that East Asians are defective in crucial aspects of intelligence unmeasured by IQ tests to such a degree that it negates the superiority they show on known abilities.  Such speculation violates Occam's razor when the East Asian creativity deficit can be well explained by KNOWN variables such as their good mental health which is known to suppress creativity:

      http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.23/01-creativity.html 

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  109. "And ALL of the world's most popular religions were founded by non-whites. How do you all explain that away?"

    All religions are based on fairy tales. Ask yourself a smarter question: who was the first to see through these fairy tales, to approach them skeptically? In case you don't know, it was the ancient Greeks.

    "Last time I checked, ALL the ancient civilizations, Egypt, Sumer and Indus Valley, were founded in hot climates by colored races."

    Yes, large subtropical river valleys were the most optimal places for pre-modern agriculture. Now consider what exactly Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Indians did with all that natural bounty. They created the sort of societies that were still to be seen in Egypt, Mesopotamia and India a couple of centuries ago, before Europeans started bringing modern technology (all of which they invented) to those places. These societies quickly stagnated at a fairly low level. This story is not dissimilar to the history of the Arab relationship with oil wealth.

    The first civilization to achieve high culture, to make real intellectual breakthroughs (realistic art, skepticism sometimes reaching the point of atheism, the proving of theorems) was the ancient Greek civilization. The Chinese and Japanese went farther than the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and the Indians, but not as far as the Greco-Roman world or post-Renaissance Europe.

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  110. "Israel, at 94, with about 2 million Ashkenazim of 103, is a technological powerhouse and an incredible source of innovation."

    While modern Israel has always been recognized as having a smart population, this meme of "Israel as technological powerhouse and source of innovation" is relatively recent. For a powerhouse, it has sure has had to be propped-up a lot (and funded) by the US. For instance, Israel would have gone under in the 73 Yom Kippur war (out of ammo) or gone nuke (with unknown consequences, including going under after using their nukes), but they were saved by US Military Airlift Command. 55,000 tons of military supplies (23K by air) from good ol' uncle and who gets called the sap? Who was the powerhouse?

    Sometime in 1974 I knew a US Army sergeant just assigned to a campus ROTC unit. Saw him get a medal at a small ceremony for his part in the airlift that saved Israel. Also saw him get razzed by the campus liberals, the normal anti-Vietnam stuff. The same in-your-face liberals sure seemed to treat Israel and the US different. Always have remembered how they could apparently turn on a dime when it suited their purpose. But of course their positions were based on higher morality!

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  111. "Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ of any "race" and they run the world..."

    Really? It's likely the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, Brazilians, and assorted others don't see it that way and if they do they don't consider it a good or settled thing.

    If "meritocratic" testing in the modern west comes to be seen as a glass-bead game (a process that everybody plays and can be gamed) and a process that is applied at an artificial level of selection (that is, there are more than sufficient number of people that could qualify) and something that ethnic old-boy networks with connections can distort, it might get dropped. Then what would we see?

    Perhaps meritocratic testing is not the universal technology/salve that will lead us to utopia. Perhaps it's just another failure in a long line of things the West has tried since the days of the Revolution and Terror. It seems such an obviously good way to choose leaders, but in practice seems to fail in that it does not identify where true loyalties lie. It lends itself to abuse by those who don't mean what they say.

    Insects and reptiles apparently evolved skin shedding (molting) to sluff off parasites. Social experiments could use something similar.

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  112. @Catperson

    This is what Wikipedia says about it -

    Ptolemy stated "We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible",[5] while phrases such as "It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer" and "A plurality is not to be posited without necessity" were commonplace in 13th-century scholastic writing.[5] The words attributed to Occam, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity), are absent in his extant works.[6] Indeed, Ockham's contribution seems to be to restrict the operation of this principle in matters pertaining to miracles and God's power: so, in the Eucharist, a plurality of miracles is possible, simply because it pleases God.[5]

    This principle is sometimes phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity").[7] To quote Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes.


    Now if you like, we can discuss it in your terms.


    You are ASSUMING that East Asians are defective in crucial aspects of intelligence unmeasured by IQ tests to such a degree that it negates the superiority they show on known abilities.

    No, that's completely wrong. I am not assuming that what IQ fails to measure negates what IQ DOES measure. I don't know where you would get THAT.

    I am merely saying that IQ does not measure everything. That needs to be proved, and until it is, it is an ASSUMPTION not warranted by Occams Razor (or indeed simple logic)

    Such speculation violates Occam's razor when the East Asian creativity deficit can be well explained by KNOWN variables such as their good mental health which is known to suppress creativity

    It is not *I* who am speculating, but YOU. I am refusing to make the unproven ASSUMPTION that IQs are comprehensive measures of human cognitive function. It is YOU are quite willing to make this unproven ASSUMPTION, thus engaging in speculation.

    Let me put it to you this way - Newton paraphrases the law of parsimony as saying we should assign the same causes to the same effects.

    *I* say that what causes medium level intellectual accomplishment is probably the same as what causes high level intellectual accomplishment.

    *You* say that what causes high level intellectual accomplishment is an additional factor.

    You are introducing more causes than are sufficient to explain the phenomena at hand, and are assigning different causes to the same effects.

    Now, you claim that it is KNOWN that lack of psychotism depresses creativity - this is absolutely false. There is a mild correlation between the two at the population level, and even this is debatable and less applicable to the hard sciences - which means that the vast majority of creative individuals have no signs of any kind of psychotism. Once againt it is you who are adopting assumptions.

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  113. Oh, and substituting assumption for variable does not materially change anything. In the absence of definitive knowledge, any factor we use to explain something is an assumption.

    And it is not about using the fewest variables, it is about using the fewest variables that are sufficient, and that explain things best. Sometimes we can explain something using fewer variables, but we can explain it better using more variables. In such a case, using more variables is not violating Occams Law.

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  114. Here is a dose of reality check:

    The Mother of Einstein:

    http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/28000000/Mother-Pauline-einstein-albert-einstein-28079293-313-315.jpg


    Karl Marx:


    http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/36330/17-100JFall-2002/NR/rdonlyres/Global/4/4CB8002C-640B-4A91-9D8B-8B8DA447B893/0/CHP_KarlMarx.jpg


    Alexander Pushkin, greatest genius of Russian literature:


    http://www.famouspeopleinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Alexander-Pushkin-6.jpg



    Alexander Dumas, most popular writer in French:

    http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NIFVJSMWKGY/TyyHQcQd9YI/AAAAAAAAAxs/OTg1DqUY2zs/s1600/dumas3.jpg


    Beethoven:


    http://www.napoleon-series.org/images/ins/scholarship98/eroica/beethoven.gif

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  115. Perhaps the parochial Brits don't know this, but it was not them who defeated Germany in WWII. It was Russia and the US.

    How about 'played a non-trivial part'?

    The essential point still stands.

    1948 Britain was pretty much able to conceive, design & build a whole range of technologies without recourse to foreign inputs other than raw materials. Is this case for modern Africa? Or even China to some extent.

    eg Early computers, jet engines and thus jet fighters, bombers and airliners. Ditto for piston engined aircraft. Radar. Research into atomic weapons and power. Radio. Ships and submarines. Pharmaceuticals. Cars, trucks, tanks. Armaments generally etc etc

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  116. Anonymous 10:19 AM,
    Bohr was half-Danish and half-Jewish (mother). Strindberg was not Jewish.

    ReplyDelete
  117. And ALL of the world's most popular religions were founded by non-whites. How do you all explain that away?"

    Well there's a description of Jesus Christ in the Vatican archives (or a Semite of that era supposed to be Jesus) which goes like this: tanned complexion, hair bleached on top, darkening to a more "oriental" hue further down; good teeth, often seen to smile never to laugh; and green eyes. I've seen those olive green eyes frequently among middle eastern peoples. I don't know whether middle eastern/south Asian people are all "colored" or not. They are a mixed bag from way back. Many are definitely "colored", especially since 1000 AD, when large amounts of African sub-Saharan genes began to enter middle eastern land largely due to their extensive slave trade.
    Actually Buddha and Zoroaster were Aryans, but we don't really know what Aryans were besides a language group, in those days. The fact that Aryan was the language family that spread over Europe does suggest a connection though, with the Aryan language speakers of Asia.
    They might have been brown. Maybe not. There are "white" tribes to this day that have been in Afghanistan since ancient times, sometimes attributed to Alexander the Great's army, but unlikely since their haplotypes are not those found among Greeks.
    The founders of the Jewish religion were Semites. They ranged from white (the Bible is often quite graphic in its personal profiles) to quite dark, and as James Michener pointed out in his wonderful book "The Source", were a mixed people from early on, including blonds and red heads amongst the black heads; but to this day Arabs differentiate between white and black races, and their idea of a white man does not mean European--they were a different category I guess. It means himself, unless he is obviously mixed with African. Their idea of "white" may be different from ours.
    As far as the Egyptians and Indians go, nobody here has denied that they had advanced civilizations. Their color varied from very light to very dark. The main gripe that an HBDer would have concerning Egypt is with those who insist that the original Egyptians (the ones who actually built the civilitation) were sub-Saharan Africans. The culture was already in steep decline by the time of King Tut for instance (whose genetic profile was mostly west European for what it is worth.) After all, President Obama and his Atty General scoot around in helicopters and limosines plying a government and using a technology, more or less, that had nothing to do with their African heritage. It is all European, yet there they are.
    Anyone not from this planet might assume that black people invented helicopters and limosines, because blacks are riding around in them.
    We don't have photos of the founders of the old religions. Certainly, they were not European so if that alone is enough to call them "colored" then you're right about that, but the history of the lands where religions started is so complex I wouldn't commit myself to this if I were you.

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  118. Right. As I pointed out in my VDARE.com review in 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen's finding of an average IQ of 70 in black Africa is strong evidence in favor of the nurture position that a better environment can raise IQs, because African Americans, who appear to be about 4/5th black, score 15 points higher. (Lynn subsequently adopted the logic of my critique

    Steve, I just read your 2002 review and you did indeed make this brilliant argument before Lynn. How rude of me to constantly give Lynn credit on your blog of all places. Whooprs.

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  119. There is a lot in this thread. First I would like to say regarding the Scand Question: Living well is no small thing.

    Second, Anonymous here:
    'Most people who read Steve’s blog feel the same way you do. However, the Left won’t permit us to treat people as individuals. Instead, if we are Whites we are herded into meetings and told how racist we are, we are discriminated against in employment opportunities in favor of diversity candidates, we are not given access to SBA loans, and our children are discriminated against in college and graduate school admissions and lectured to from cradle to the grave about how racist they are. Then we discover that Blacks and Hispanics murder and sexually assault Whites at many times the rate that Whites do, but that the main stream press refuses to report or discuss this fact. "

    ...makes a nice case for why anemic HBD (or bloodless IQ determinism) is inadequate, for Whites anyhow.

    Third, I sympathise with the view that 'History is long' expressed by another Anonymous. It is a failure of the historical imagination (that I call the End of History Fallacy) that leads people to see inevitable convergence towards 'progress'. To paraphrase Steve, history may not follow the script of an extended editorial in The Economist.

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  120. Catperson said

    "The reason why East Asians seem less creative than whites despite higher IQ is probably their conformity (as you mention) and probably a lack of primitive traits that are related to creativity like psychosis and psychoticism."

    The reason that East Asians appear less creative to Catperson is that Catperson is uncultured.

    The reason that many commentators on this website like to cling to this spurious claim (along with lower IQ standard deviation amongst Eastern Asians) is because they are averse to the fact that East Asians happen to beat them on standardized tests.

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  121. The Nordic countries have a combined population of 25 million today, which puts them at about half of England, and a bit under half of France. Assuming these proportions were fairly constant for the past few centuries,

    Your assumption is way off the mark. The population of Scandinavia was about 10 percent of that of France in the 16th century, rising to about 20 percent in the 19th century. See here and here.

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  122. @ anon 5:57

    Though yours be perhaps the most bizarre of posts, I cannot help but respond.

    Pushkin was 1/8 black, Dumas 1/4. Referring to Pushkin as "the greatest genius of Russian literature" is, of course, rather disrespectful to Bely, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Tolstoy, et al. You could argue that he was the "greatest," certainly if you confine yourself to Russian poetry, but such to make such a claim as if it were a priori true is absurd.

    As for your pictures of Beethoven and Einstein's mother, I wonder what your point is. A quick search will tell you that Pauline Einstein (nee Koch) was Jewish. And Beethoven, dear God, there are many portraits showing his actual pink complexion; simply finding a picture in which he appears black (if that be indeed that which you are trying to say) does not negate his actual Flemish ethnicity. Maybe in one of Kafka's works it does, but not in reality (at least not the reality I inhabit).

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  123. "Here is a dose of reality check: ...
    The Mother of Einstein: ... Karl Marx: ..."


    I'm not sure I follow your point. They were all black Jews? It might just be that old photographs from that era all look dark.

    But this brings up an interesting point. We have these names that we commonly use to denote smart or accomplished people. Sometimes it's hard to separate them from the claims of their acolytes.

    Would Einstein be as famous as he is today if he had not been Jewish and had not been rather sympathetic to communism and socialism?
    This is starting to receive attention, for instance see the book How Einstein Ruined Physics which suggests that exaggerating Einstein's role as a "lone thinker" or "abstract genius" has had a negative effect on popular understanding of physics (perhaps the original experimental science). (Physics isn't about human brilliance or thought, its origins were in "experimental philosophy", the original idea from back in the 1600's, as elucidated by the Royal Society, was that people would "...strive earnestly... by reliance on observation and experiment and who, neither feigning nor formulating hypotheses of nature's actions, seek out the thing itself.". Hero worship or a pantheon of idols gets in the way, it's like chaff in the eyes.)

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  124. "The essential point still stands."

    As an American, I agree with the essential point (not to take anything away from American manufacturing or scientific prowess). Brits who want to make this point (and Americans as well) should familiarize themselves with the 1940 Tizard mission, toward the start of the US involvement in the war. WWII sure seems to have changed Britain, and not necessarily for the better.

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  125. I was about to feel Steve was defending an embattled position, but anonymous commentaries on the fp article all seem to pan Kenny.
    --White Male Diversity Consultant

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  126. "Anonymous said...

    Here is a dose of reality check:"

    It is no secret that Alexander Dumas had black ancestry. He himself said he did.

    As to your other contentions, they are nothing but ridiculous, unfounded afrocentric myths. So Einstein's mother and Karl Marx were black? Nonsense.

    And Beethoven? Black? A pencil sketch or litho often tends to make the subject look dark. Look at this portrait of him:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beethoven_3.jpg

    He looks rather like Gary Oldman, who indeed actually played Beethoven in a movie.

    Or this one, of the older artist:

    http://images.publicradio.org/content/2009/10/22/20091022_beethoven_portrait_33.jpg

    One would think that of all the people who met Marx or Beethoven, someone somewhere would have noted that he was black, if that were indeed the case.

    Your assertions are wrong - crackpot wrong.

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  127. Looking at the number of "significant figures" in the arts and sciences tabulated in Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment, there appears to be about six times as many significant Frenchmen as Scandinavians in absolute terms. 6x is probably a good estimate of the French/Scandinavian population ratio averaged over the last 500 years, so this would suggest that France and Scandinavia are approximately equally creative per capita.

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  128. The "reality check" clearly has an agenda, though it's not clear from which direction. It's also not entirely representative. SSA admixture in Ashkenazim is very low, on the order of 1-2% after correcting for Moorjani et al's error. There is also apparent minor East Asian admixture (~1%). The Atzmon and Behar studies, 23 and Me results for Ashkenazim, Dienekes' and Razib's data experiences, all bear out minimal sub-Saharan admixture, especially in comparison to Muslim Arab populations. An occasional non-Caucasoid trait will show up, but it doesn't indicate much in the way of ancestry content in the face of replicated data.

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  129. I forgot to mention the Beethoven issue. There is absolutely no evidence that he had recent African ancestry. The supposed genealogical link, which has never been proven, would have resulted in an African ancestory centuries before his birth. Even if true, the proportion of sub-Saharan admixture would be so tiny, less than 1% after that many generations, as to be insignificant. Again, that's if it's even true. Not all autochthonous, un-admixed Europeans, even Northern Europeans, are blond or blue-eyed.

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  130. To the Afro-centric picture-poster:

    Unlike you, I've read Dumas' and Pushkin's stuff. Dumas wrote his age's equivalent of pulp fiction. I already thought that Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After were childish when I was 13, as have millions of kids before me. Besides, he was a classic hack - shamelessly padded his stuff since he was paid by the word, employed ghosts, etc.

    Pushkin was indeed very good. Different level altogether. But if your biggest point of pride is a 1/8th share in a foreign poet you haven't read who died in 1837 - well...

    The Marx, Einstein and Beethoven stuff is comic.

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  131. I am merely saying that IQ does not measure everything. That needs to be proved, and until it is, it is an ASSUMPTION not warranted by Occams Razor (or indeed simple logic)

    No you're saying more than that.  You're saying that IQ tests are not comprehensive and parts of intelligence unmeasured by IQ tests are  crucial to creativity and that East Asians are defective in these parts of intelligence.  That's a lot of assumptions.  What are the odds of all of them being true?



    It is not *I* who am speculating, but YOU. I am refusing to make the unproven ASSUMPTION that IQs are comprehensive measures of human cognitive function. It is YOU are quite willing to make this unproven ASSUMPTION, thus engaging in speculation.


    Whether I believe IQ tests are comprehensive or not is irrelevant because unlike you, my explanation for creativity doesn't hinge on that question.  That's the point.  My explanation relies on variables that have been researched in relation to creativity and East Asians (g and psychoticism); your explanation relies on an X factor you imagine exists, that you imagine influences creativity and that you imagine East Asians suck at.  


    *I* say that what causes medium level intellectual accomplishment is probably the same as what causes high level intellectual accomplishment.

    *You* say that what causes high level intellectual accomplishment is an additional factor.

    You are introducing more causes than are sufficient to explain the phenomena at hand, and are assigning different causes to the same effects.


    This is where you're getting confused.  We're both invoking the same number of causes and we're both assigning different causes to the same effect.  The difference is the different cause I'm invoking (psychoticism) is known, has a name, and has been shown to cause the effect.  The different cause you invoke is a mysterious X factor which you ASSUME exists and you ASSUME influences creativity and you ASSUME East Asians lack. The reason you don't see your X factor as a different cause is that you're defining it as part of intelligence, however you're defining it as a part of intelligence unmeasured by IQ tests, which makes it a different cause from the parts of intelligence that ARE measured by IQ tests and which adequately predict medium level intellectual accomplishment but for high level you invoke an X factor

    Now, you claim that it is KNOWN that lack of psychotism depresses creativity - this is absolutely false. There is a mild correlation between the two at the population level,

    A mild correlation is all it takes to make East Asians less creative (on average)

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  132. I wonder what this Kenny guy thinks of Harrison Bergeron.

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  133. Ancient Egyptians - I thought the latest word was they shared DNA only found in euro populations. So the ruling class at least (those who got mummified) were likely whites in some sense. Perhaps we could say that ethnically Europe extended into North Africa/Near east in those days?

    An assumption is made that Ancient Egyptians would have looked like modern Egyptians, which could well be mistaken.

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  134. "In fact, if anything, the academic consensus on why some countries are rich and others are poor is tacking closer to the shoals of genetic determinism than it has been since the days of high empire."

    Wow! A leftist who admits that the scientific consensus is beginning to contradict his ideology. Have you ever seen such a thing?

    Something is afoot, that's for sure.

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  135. The reason that many commentators on this website like to cling to this spurious claim (along with lower IQ standard deviation amongst Eastern Asians) is because they are averse to the fact that East Asians happen to beat them on standardized tests.

    Your grammar is poor, and your reasoning is worse.

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  136. Einstein's mother does not look european or even caucasian.

    Pushkin is regarded by russians themselves as their greatest literary figure, the Father of the Modern Russian language. He too looked non-european.

    The afro-haired Alexander Dumas is by far the most popular writer in the french language. His books The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are the most translated works of french literature and by far the most movies have been made out of his works than out of any other french writer.

    Karl Marx was a swarthy jew who was affectionately called "the moor" by his wife and daughters because of his dark complexion. Again not an european.

    Beethoven was described by his contemporaries as brown skinned, broad nosed and crinkly haired. His appearance was compared to that of mulattoes.

    Those who claim that ancient egyptians were not a colored race must be blind, since there are numerous extant portraits of them:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=ancient+egyptians&hl=en&prmd=imvnsu&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=TZmwT5ysEeapiQLfxcz4Aw&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CC4Q_AUoAQ&biw=1006&bih=556


    The Sumerians too were colored. They called themselves blackheads.

    The Indus Valley Civilization was a pre-aryan civilization. In any case the aryans themselves, who came much later on the scene, were not europeans.

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  137. Getting seriously OT here, sorry.

    Anonymous at 7:29 PM:
    Referring to Pushkin as "the greatest genius of Russian literature" is, of course, rather disrespectful to Bely, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Tolstoy, et al. You could argue that he was the "greatest," certainly if you confine yourself to Russian poetry, but such to make such a claim as if it were a priori true is absurd.

    Not absurd at all! Pushkin is so much above everyone before and after him, it's scary. Russian literature has a proud history and every one of the above is a man of great literary talent but let's face it: In comparison to Pushkin, Bely is simply a hack, Bulgakov and Pasternak are very one-dimensional, Dostoevsky couldn't write stylish prose while Tolstoy could but lacked Pushkin's precision (by a mile). The only reason he is not well known in the West is that his poetry and prose are so tight that they are practically impossible to translate well. Were Pushkin writing in English, we would not think very much of Shakespeare today, I suspect.

    Check this out:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-BYkREzkk4
    (that's Pushkin's death mask in the end of the video fragment, by the way).

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  138. Mr. Incredible5/13/12, 11:57 PM

    "crinkly haired"

    Beethoven did not have crinkly hair. He had straight hair. This is clear from his portraits, and from the actual lock of his hair still in existence. You can see it here:

    http://www.sjsu.edu/beethoven/collections/beethoven_hair/hair.html

    As for his other features, they are typical Alpine German. It's interesting that some have claimed black ancestry for two famous German Americans - Babe Ruth and Dwight Eisenhower - who had similar facial features to Beethoven. But as in Beethoven's case, there is no genealogical evidence whatsoever pointing to black ancestry.

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  139. Guys,

    on IQ and standard deviation, I asked Harpending about this (why no increased standard deviation in mixed populations) on his blog and he basically said there could be, but it just hasn't shown up, because standard deviation is tough to measure.

    http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/rischs-conjecture/#comment-354

    So could be true in European vs Chinese populations or even African vs European populations (in any direction). But we don't know either way really.

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  140. Difference Maker5/14/12, 12:10 AM

    [quote]In any case the aryans themselves, who came much later on the scene, were not europeans.[/quote]

    But they were certainly blond and blue eyed

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  141. Well, maybe all of those Russians and contemporaries who join in one voice to validate your claims could tell you about logical fallacies.

    Popularity is not synonymous with genius or even goodness. How many films are there of Joyce's "Ulysses"? How many of those people who come into contact with a work written or inspired by Dumas have read, say, Aeschylus? Does the relative dearth of high art in pop culture mean that the such art is in fact inferior?

    Regarding Beethoven, even if his peers compared his appearance to that of mulattoes, that does not mean that he himself was one. Think of all of those English Renaissance plays in which Continental Europeans--be they French, Italian, Spanish, what have you--are referred to as dark, black, ethiope, or the like, because they in comparison to Northern Europeans are dark (cf. Francisco in Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor, II.iii). Today we tend to think of epithets like those in purely racial/genetic terms. Yet, when Europe was homogeneous, these words had wider extensions, referring not only to the Sub-Saharran but also to the white fellow of a slightly darker hue (cf. Maggie in Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss").

    But surely a more scientific way of determining race is squinting at select photos and portraits of long-dead people and saying, "Ah, yes. Bit dark there. Certainly black. Total conspiracy. No doubt about it."

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  142. Einstein's mother does not look european or even caucasian.

    She looks Jewish.

    Our Afrocentric commenter seems to think that all Europeans who do not look like Dolph Lundgren must have non-European ancestry. The range of physical types in Europe is much larger than you realize.

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  143. This better be my lucky star5/14/12, 12:31 AM

    With your last line were you alluding to Gandhi's: 'First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win'? We'll see.

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  144. My explanation relies on variables that have been researched in relation to creativity and East Asians (g and psychoticism); your explanation relies on an X factor you imagine exists, that you imagine influences creativity and that you imagine East Asians suck at.

    Catty,

    The psychometric research on self assessed psychoticism (which is what shows the very modest, at best, relationships with creativity) shows East Asian nations as having higher or equal psychoticism, not lower

    http://www.bowdoin.edu/~sputnam/rothbart-temperament-questionnaires/pdf/childrn-temp-us-china-sim-diff.pdf

    "Barrett and Eysenck (1984) report data suggesting that relative to a British sample, subjects in China scored lowed on Extraversion and higher on Psychoticism. The results concerning Neuroticism were mixed due to very large gender differences in the British sample. Men in the UK sample had the lowest scores on Neuroticism, followed by Chinese men and then Chinese women with women scoring highest on this scale.

    Consistent with the Windel et all (1988) study of Japanese and American school-children, Japanese adults score lower on Extraversion and higher on Neuroticism than did the UK sample. Japanese adults also scored higher on the Psychoticism scale".


    Contrary to whatever Rushton feels like making up to fit with his r-K theory (which we are all aware you adore) whenever he gets up in the morning, the presence of low Extraversion and higher Neuroticism (which East Asians have particularly with regard to withdrawl and low self esteem, rather than volatility) in East Asians does not imply that they are particularly anti-psychotic.

    ....

    The introversion of East Asians and the extraversion of Westerners strongly modifies their public behaviour - their internal personalities do not necessarily show the difference in this way.

    E.g. introversion and neuroticism also explains why East Asians tend to think of themselves as emotional, while others think of them often as as kind of robotic - although they have generally have stronger negative emotions, particularly in terms of depression (as measured by neuroticism) and a diminishment of positive emotion (low extraversion), they are less expressive in public (introverted).

    Also, I think East Asians are just as creative and artistic as Westerners (and just as, if not more, technically competant at it), it's just modified by their more neurotic-depressed and more introverted personalities to produce art which Westerners who are more away from these tendencies tend to find boring. Introverted people want to reveal less about themselves and more neurotic people will have more negative emotions (or coping strategies) to reveal, and fewer positive feelings.

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  145. Pushkin WAS 1/8 black, and he was rather proud of his great grandfather because his great grandfather was kind of a big deal.

    However, the poet looks Russian. In every portrait available, he is pale, rosy cheeked and has a longish nose with a cherry tomato tip. I'm sure, Pushkin had some traits from his black ancestor, but they were apparent neither in his looks nor within his talents and personality. Here is AV Pushkin's portrait:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A.S.Pushkin.jpg
    While Ibrahim Gannibal was a hot headed, womanizing warrior, Pushkin was a frail, sensitive man of words who had to be majorly insulted multiple times before he agreed to a duel... which he lost.

    You know, there are many examples of great writers of Sub-Saharan ancestry out there. From your choosing people who are mostly not black as examples of black greatness, I gather that you don'r actually believe in possibility of real black achievement. That's a shame. You could have named James Baldwin, Toni Morrison or even Pushkin's great grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal who impressed the hell out of Voltaire as a teenager while he was impregnating various noble women, I mean studying, in Paris, and created the first ever Russian Naval Academy. Instead you chose to focus on miniscule amount of African genes that great European achievers might or might not have had.

    The one drop rule isn't biologically valid, you know.

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  146. "Yes, why can't we do anything about the widespread destruction of the natural world, global warming, species extinction, the failing economy and the education crisis right here in the US (really, we fall apart because of immigration of supposed dark skinned and stupid people? How pathetic is that?)"

    If you don't count the immigrants and the ghetto, there is no education crisis in the United States. You might not find American public schools to be inspiring cradles of greatness, but public schools' purpose is to teach basic skills and a broad body of basic facts. I have personal experience with public school systems in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Western Europe, and, trust me, our schools compare just fine, at the very least. So do our students, as long as you exclude the ghetto and the English learners.

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  147. "And ALL of the world's most popular religions were founded by non-whites."

    No - Joseph Smith was very definitely white.

    L. Ron Hubbard was white too, but time will tell.

    We don't know much about Mohammed's ancestry He was an "Arab", but he was from an elite tribe that may have had a lot of Greek, Roman or Carthaginian ancestry. Or even, horrors, Jewish. Who can say? That part of the world had been under intermittent Roman/Byzantine influence for 6 or 7 centuries before Mohammed was born, and Mecca was then a fairly cosmopolitan trading center in the region. Wouldn't surprise me if the elites had roots elsewhere that weren't advertised.

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  148. Lefties are panicked that a majority are starting to connect the dots between Obama, Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, and the fat lady who gives you shit at the DMV: in our economy and government the principal function of most blacks is to pretend to work, waste our time, and divert resources to themselves given any opportunity.

    And why is it that I always think of the theme to the Jeffersons every time I see Michelle Obama smirking for the cameras during one of her many taxpayer funded vacations?

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  149. Maya: However, the poet looks Russian. In every portrait available, he is pale, rosy cheeked and has a longish nose with a cherry tomato tip.

    Maya, Maya, Maya - didn't they teach you anything at all in school? What were your parents thinking? Damn commies! Have you never seen Pushkin's death mask? Or never heard that he was called a monkey throughout Lyceum and after? The guy was the greatest Russian literary genius ever - and the guy just happened to have some prominent African features (facial and behavioral). Facts speak very clearly that Abram Gannibal was a high IQ African who succeed wholly on his merits. Why is it so difficult to accept?

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  150. Simon in London5/14/12, 2:22 AM

    Maya:
    "I have personal experience with public school systems in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Western Europe, and, trust me, our schools compare just fine, at the very least."

    I agree. IME typical American public education (suburban school, middle income families) is a lot better than its British equivalent (state comprehensive schooling), yes. With nearly half of American school children being from lower IQ populations, Americans get a false impression of the weakness of their education system. It's particularly strong in junior & middle school.

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  151. I wonder what this Kenny guy thinks of Harrison Bergeron.

    Great story. I'm surprised they had us read it at school, given its anti-egalitarian message.

    And why is it that I always think of the theme to the Jeffersons every time I see Michelle Obama smirking for the cameras during one of her many taxpayer funded vacations?

    LOL, we-a movin' on up...

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  152. "In fact, Africa's current estimated 'average IQ' is about the same as Britain's in 1948."

    You cannot make such comparisons based on Lynn's data. Firstly, Lynn corrected all the national IQs, including those for African countries, for the Flynn effect. Secondly, even if you used uncorrected IQs, comparisons would be meaningless because measurement invariance is unlikely to hold for Britain's current and 1948 scores -- they do not measure the same construct (i.e., some or all of the gains may be artefactual, not real intelligence gains). Of course, Africa's current average IQ may not reflect the same actual level of intellectual competence as similar IQs do in today's Britain (this is the big methodological problem in Lynn's research).

    For us non-psychologists, please explain how Lynn and Vanhanen use IQ before it was invented.

    Obviously they did not have intelligence data from the 19th century. What they did was that they correlated current national IQs with past economic performance (for which data exists) on the assumption that the rank ordering of national IQs has remained the same during the last couple of centuries. In other words, they found that current IQs predict past economic performance, but of course there's a problem of possible reverse causality.

    "Lynn and Vanhanen can do their analyses based either on "only" 81 countries or using estimates of neighboring countries. In either case, they get virtually identical correlation coefficients, suggesting the robustness of their approach."

    If the estimates are obtained from the 81 countries, why *wouldn't* the correlation coefficients be identical???


    The correlations are with outcome variables such as GDP and HDI, for which data exist for all countries. What Steve says is that the correlation between IQ and, say, GDP is (almost) as high for those countries for which IQs were estimated as it is for those from which they had actual data.

    After the publication of IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002), Lynn and Vanhanen have obtained IQ data from many countries whose IQs they originally estimated based on neighboring countries with racially similar populations. In IQ and Global Inequality (2006) they have data from 25 additional countries. For those 25 countries, the correlation between the originally estimated IQs and the IQs based on test data is +.91. In other words, the estimation method they used was spectacularly accurate.

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  153. "With nearly half of American school children being from lower IQ populations, Americans get a false impression of the weakness of their education system. It's particularly strong in junior & middle school."

    To be more precise, given the current ratio of 5:3:2 for numbers of white, hispanic, & black children in public school, and given their respective average IQs of 100,90, & 85 (which I feel is being generous to the non-whites), the fraction of children of below average intelligence is 64%, equivalent to a single ethnic population with an average IQ of 94.

    However, since the top 1% drives wealth creation in the economy, we would be worse off as a single ethnic group with a Bell Curve centered at 94. Then we would have half the number of workers with an IQ above 136 (.2% vs .4%). This means we are still living in a golden age for wealth redistribution politics since there is still a surplus of highly productive folks. If you redo the analysis for California in 2020, you find the number of workers with an IQ above 136 will be 0.001%, which is why redistribution politics is showing definite signs of breaking down in the Golden State, now. (Jerry Brown has announced a $16 billion annual deficit, driven mostly by spending on social services and entitlements.)

    I did these calculations using the normdist() function in excel. Feel free to check my work.

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  154. "I did these calculations using the normdist() function in excel. Feel free to check my work."

    Oops. I re-checked my work. The gifted fraction drops to 2.7%. Not so bad as I originally figured but we're nearly down to Kazakhstan (with more gangs and drug violence). I still believe this drop is speeding up the bankruptcy of California's heavily redistributionist government.

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  155. It's good news if intelligence levels in Africa are on the increase, but how can this statement make sense?

    "In fact, Africa's current estimated "average IQ" is about the same as Britain's in 1948."

    Britain was a shabby and war-weary country in 1948, but it also had enough brain-power among its 50 million inhabitants to build jet aircraft and start designing the world's first high-output fission reactor. We seem to have grown dumber since then.

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  156. Anon 12:14, you mean the Ken Olson who said that no one would ever need a computer at home? ;-)

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  157. Since this thread looks it will exceed 200 comments, I will again point out that you may read comments 201 et seq. if you access the comments section by clicking on the name of the blog entry rather than clicking on the word "comments" at the bottom of the entry on the main page.

    You will see the first 200 comments. Then you scroll to the bottom of the page, where there will bea link to click that will allow you to see 201+.

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  158. Belgians also seem weak in innovation and achievement despite high IQs.

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  159. "Anonymous said...

    Einstein's mother does not look european or even caucasian."

    She looks not unlike an old russian peasant woman.

    "Pushkin is regarded by russians themselves as their greatest literary figure, the Father of the Modern Russian language. He too looked non-european."

    He looks like Isaac Asimov - an ashkenazi jew, hardly an african.

    The afro-haired Alexander Dumas is by far the most popular writer in the french language. His books The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are the most translated works of french literature and by far the most movies have been made out of his works than out of any other french writer."

    You are right that Dumas does indeed have black heritage. This is not news. He was not however a great literary figure. He was a hack writer of pulp fiction, as has been pointed out by another poster. Some of his stories have been made into pretty good movies. "Batman Begins" was a pretty good movie. Does that make Bob Kane a great literary genius?

    "Beethoven was described by his contemporaries as brown skinned, broad nosed and crinkly haired. His appearance was compared to that of mulattoes."

    Then cite one of them. Otherwise your claim is just unfounded bulls**t. In 18th/19th century Vienna, one would think that somebody would have mentioned something along the lines of "that Beethoven fellow writes music uncommonly well for a darkie", if he was indeed black.

    Those who claim that ancient egyptians were not a colored race must be blind, since there are numerous extant portraits of them."

    I don't think anyone disputes that the ancient Egyptians had brown skin tone. What is disputed, and which assertion is wholly wrong, is that they were black africans. They clearly were not.

    "In any case the aryans themselves, who came much later on the scene, were not europeans."

    You are an ignorant fool.

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  160. I believe there are racial differences in intelligence. I also believe this does not justify oppression

    Agreed. The regime's "get YT" behavior is not justified by lower black ability (or anything else).

    And ignoring is a sign of stupidity.

    The man is stupid. Can we not say it? He is stupid.


    I don't think dishonesty or willful ignorance is necessarily a sign of stupidity. Selfishness, maybe.

    I have seen Poland, another intellectual lightweight, put at 106, while Israel, at 94, with about 2 million Ashkenazim of 103, is a technological powerhouse and an incredible source of innovation.

    And yet, none of the smart Jews want to live in Israel. They'd much rather stay far away from their fellow Jews, in the ANTI-SEMITE!!!-ridden USA.

    It really doesn't take incredible imagination to picture a world where intelligence won't be the be all and end all.

    We live in such a world, so, no, it isn't hard to imagine.

    Will it be those who have lived hygienic lives and have presumed to have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or those who have a high tolerance for premature death, violence, disgust, homelessness, injustice and who have always lived for the day?

    Yes, it will be the smarter, more cooperative people. As usual. Moreso, actually. That's why they call it "flexible strategizing."

    Somebody already pointed out conformist culture.

    I don't think yellow conformism is simply a cultural trait. I think it has a significant genetic component. As for the smaller SD, I wish the people asserting it would provide links or sources.

    If high IQ translates into environmental degradation, deforestation, extinction of Animals. I think it is pretty dumb.

    In such a case, why should low IQ beings be penalized for the sins of high IQ beings?


    LOL.

    I think Poland's unfortunate history may account for a lack of high-end intellectual contributions despite high IQ.

    Having been host to a large Jewish population significantly retarded their development. Legacy of Jewish colonialism, and all that. [1][2][3]

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  161. The irrelevance of a civilization is inversely proportional to the amount of clamour it generates about it's achievements.

    So, Chinese and Jews (and Indians) are irrelevant, now? That's definitely the upshot, here.

    I have no doubts that the Whites and Asians would flourish on a desert island, but I think they've lost the ability to deal with life boat ethics.

    The fact that we've seen a constant propaganda bombardment against our ability to deal with life boat ethics suggests that the ability is being suppressed, but is not lost. That certainly seems to be the thinking on the part of the ethnic group with the most to lose if we do start showing exercising said ability.

    We are much too squeamish about dealing with hostile populations, we invite them in, a dangerous proposition when a calamity comes, and harmony is needed for recovery.

    Who's this "we"? "We" did not invite them in. We didn't start a war when they were imported against our wishes, is a more accurate way to characterize the situation.

    Japan grows old, instead of venturing out and occupying.

    So? Japan will have a smaller, all-Japanese population. Feature, not bug.

    For those of you going on about the Scand countries in response to my previous point, a few points. First, the list offered by one commenter contained multiple Jews (Bohr, Strindberg)

    Are you saying Jews can't really be Scandinavians? A double-edged sword, my friend. You don't get one without the other.

    many minor, inconsequential figures (Hans German Andersen?), and mostly starts from the late 19th century. Where were all the Scand geniuses in the previous centuries when the other European countries were doing massive work?

    Where were all the Jewish geniuses?

    The Scand countries were fence-sitters in the great European intellectual ferment - subtract the Scands from European intellectual history, and you would barely notice.

    Substitute Jews for Scands and you get a similar result. I suppose that's not a refutation...

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  162. If one wishes to explain Asian underperformance as a function of conformism, which is pure sepculation, how come the West did it's best work when it was much more conformist than today and even had to fight a repressive Church?

    How did a "much more conformist" Europe fight the repressive Church? Maybe there's a sweet spot for conformity (just right, vs too much or too little). Maybe it's not about cultural conformity, but what Catperson likes to call "psychotic" personality, i.e., behavioral genetics? Maybe there's some countervailing factor trumping conformity? Maybe your idea of "best work" is the next guy's idea of "low-hanging fruit"?

    Further, the principle of parsimony requires us to explain Asian - and anyone's - intellectual underperformance as a function of their cognitive profile without bringing in extraneous factors like personality

    How in the hell is personality "extraneous" to cognitive profile? Please explain that one to me, it is neither sensical nor parsimonious from where I'm sitting.

    Probably the wider spread explains why there are so many extremely intelligent Indians (ok, I know most of the computer programmers aren't really all that, but there are prize winning scientists regularly appearing from India; not so much from Africa).

    There are, what? 900m Indians in India? Or is it 1000m now?

    This explains why Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than all other ethnic groups.

    Only partially. Another big factor is their social profile. They cuckoo their lower fraction into surrounding groups. This is why Israel doesn't live up to expectations - no surrounding host to compensate. They have to take out their own trash, make an "other" out of fellow Jews, etc.

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  163. Lets see: ancient egyptians, a colored race based in north-east Africa, created the grandest of the ancient civilizations and they were conquered and ruled for a while by the even darker Nubians/Sudanese. So who had the higher IQ 4000 years ago? Them or the nordic europeans who were considered barbarians until very recently?

    Last time I checked, ALL the ancient civilizations, Egypt, Sumer and Indus Valley, were founded in hot climates by colored races. And ALL of the world's most popular religions were founded by non-whites. How do you all explain that away?


    By "colored," you mean "mostly Caucasoid." By "non-Whites," you mean "Caucasoid." I don't see much to explain away.

    How do you explain away the fact that you have to go back 3 to 5 thousand years?

    Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ of any "race" and they run the world

    In the same universe as the black supermen, the least of whom can beat up any White man.

    Bohr was half-Danish and half-Jewish (mother).

    And thus, he was Jewish, or non-White, or non-Danish, or Danish, or White, depending on the dictates of "who-whom?"

    Einstein's mother does not look european or even caucasian.

    Said the guy (Obsidian?) who doesn't know what "Caucasian" means...

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  164. "If you redo the analysis for California in 2020, you find the number of workers with an IQ above 136 will be 0.001%...

    I assume you mean 0.001 or 0.1%, not 0.001%.

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  165. Peter A - we need pictures of Mohamed to study in order to resolve this matter!

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  166. @ medvedev

    I've only read Pushkin in translation, so I won't claim to be an authority, but I still say that it is wrong to put him as the indisputable head of Russian literature, as if all literature tended towards one type, one mode of expression.

    That Dostoevsky did not write "stylish prose" is not a fault. His is not the elegant style of the drawing room, but the visceral style of those parts of society and psychology at which polite gentlemen blush. As Bakhtin argued, Dostoevsky's pieces lack that authorial center, that guiding hand that clearly separates right from wrong, good from evil. Rather, he plunges you straight into the maelstrom, and forces you to make your own way out. In this way, I believe he is superior to Pushkin, or even to any other author, of any era, language, and nationality.

    Tolstoy's style, on the other hand, is closer to Pushkin's. A comparison between them, in which you say, "T is better than P; P is better than T," is, I think, more just. The same is probably true of Pasternak's.

    I find Bulgakov a direct heir of Dostoevsky, so I would't hesitate to say that the latter is the "greater genius."

    You are unjust to Bely! Even Nabokov put Bely as one of the four greats of 20th century literature. His forays in Symbolism are so unique, so different from that which came before him in Russia, that I would designate him as his own type, and not compare him to anyone.

    Of course, I am suspicious of aesthetic superlatives. To each his own style and movement.

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  167. See, they know The Truth and The Right. A priori. From God or Gould or Gandhi. So facts-schmacks; your heresies MUST be not only wrong, mistaken, and sad, but also evil.

    You're WRONG, WRONG, WRONG - as they people are wont to write.

    And anything that is done to wrong or EVIL people is acceptable because it is righteous. Hallelujah, brother!

    Who says the book burners were vanquished?

    Or that the Dark Ages ended?

    The Dark Ages never ended. For we're dealing with the same pitchforked, Bibled-up, self-righteous, fact-proof, emotion-first assholes that Voltaire found arrayed against himself and the scientists (or philosophes) of his time. They literally killed and tortured heretics then. Only a very thin and vanishing respect for the United States Constitution - that tool of white man oppression! - keeps them from killing and torturing heretics now.

    Darwin said that writing The Origin of Species felt, to him, "like confessing to a murder." That's the atmosphere humanity's best minds have always had to operate in. Nothing has changed.

    Some truths are simply not for the mob and the mob-masters, like the moron Charles Kenny, who act, in their fear and willful blindness, as rabble-rousers against what they take to be Frankenstein monsters. They are cowardly beasts with whom one cannot reason.

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  168. Anonymous1 said: "The reality of HBD will be ... viciously suppressed until such time as there is a scientific solution to the problem; at which point it will suddenly become a 'human right' that low-IQ people be 'repaired' ..."

    Anonymous2 replied: "I've had the same thoughts, but if in order to be repaired they have to borrow genetic material from Whites or Asians will they still be Black or Hispanic?"


    There's already a technology to improve mental function and lift one's station in life: it's called school. Blacks consider it "acting white" and largely reject it. I cannot imagine what they'd think of rewriting their genome.

    -SWPH

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  169. Anonymous at may 14, 12:37 am

    Not sure where in your link it says East Asians are more psychotic, but their mental hospitalization rates in the U.S. are lower than whites

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  170. Actually East Asian Americans have lower mental hospitalization rates than white Americans, so not sure where in anonymous 12:37's link (please pick a name!) they are highly psychotic

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  171. @catperson

    First, I wish to point out that EVEN if neuroticism correlates to genius and Asians have lower levels of neuroticism, there is of course no indication that neuroticism causes genius. Genius could still be entirely a function of intelligence and neuroticism could simply be something that comes along for the ride as a genetic side-quirk when one has exceptional intellectual talents or highly specialized intellectual abilities (or even a mental ailment developed as the result of habitually seeing things others do not).

    But not just in the usual "correlation is not causation" way.

    Rather, if neuroticism opens the mind in certain ways and makes one see things one would not otherwise see, then one has a cognitive capacity - a purely intellectual ability - that one would not otherwise have.

    So even then genius is still a purely cognitive affair - ie. Asians lack a certain kind of purely intellectual ability. They cannot see certain connections that are open to one with a neurotic personality.

    So the introduction of neuroticism as an additional factor does not really add any explanatory power. We are still back at the level of pure ability. At best it gives us an interesting correlate to look for.

    There are two aspects to Occams Razor.

    1) Whenever possible, try to explain things by what is known without appealing to the unknown. Don't assume things.

    2) Use the fewest number of variables that are sufficient to explain things. Don't introduce more variables UNLESS they help explain it better.

    My explanation uses only knowns. We know that genius is a function of cognitive performance. Therefore I say until we can prove otherwise, we have no right to think genius is anything but an aspect of cognitive performance. We have no right to bring in unknowns like personality whose impact on cognitive capacity we have no idea and we have no right to assume that IQ tells us all there is to know about intelligence. Before we introduce factors additional to pure cognitive performance, we better be damn sure we know everything there is about cognitive performance.

    My positions strikes me as far more intellectually responsible, and satisfies widely accepted rules for the formulation of hypothesis far better, than yours.

    Explaining Asian un-creativity in the personality fashion appeals to two types of people.

    1) Asian apologists, obviously. This group of people hardly need to be taken seriously.

    2) IQ supremacists. People so besotted with IQ that they have a strong disposition to find it complete and infallible. They ignore the numberless ways IQ is a leaky vessel and fails to explains so much about the world and are so charmed with the idea of being able to assign a number to human intelligence that they depart from the rules of good thinking.

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  172. I think East Asians are just as creative and artistic as Westerners (and just as, if not more, technically competant at it), it's just modified by their more neurotic-depressed and more introverted personalities to produce art which Westerners who are more away from these tendencies tend to find boring.



    The historical record makes it very clear that East Asians are not as creative as Westerners. Creative people are people who create things, and Westerners have created far more things than East Asians.

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  173. Check this out:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-BYkREzkk4
    (that's Pushkin's death mask in the end of the video fragment, by the way)



    And you think it looks African? Hilarious. Embarrassing, but hilarious.

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  174. Beethoven was described by his contemporaries as brown skinned, broad nosed and crinkly haired. His appearance was compared to that of mulattoes.



    So this is what they teach people in those "black studies" courses.

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  175. Once I was enthused about Ninja Warrior. Once I was enthused about race-IQ debates. Sadly I have tired of both.

    I got on some race-IQ thread somewhere that was very active. My in-box was filled each day with impassioned comments pro and con, day after day. I just watched. I didn't comment. I didn't even read them. They were all just rehashes of arguments I had heard thirty or forty years ago. Really quite boring.

    The Steve Sailer blog is different in that it attracts a high proportion of people who have some background and some ability to control their urge to herd. Notice I don't say ability to think. The race-IQ question itself has little to do with the brains of the person who is doing the thinking. The arguments are not particularly esoteric or difficult. It helps if you know what a z-score is but that is not required.

    Much more important is the thinker's perception of self.

    An analogy: In psychology there is something called inner directedness and outer directedness. It is studied with the perception of the upright. You knows which way is up through two means. First through your internal proprioceptive sensors and secondly through seeing vertical walls and lines in the environment. Men tend to be more inner directed and women more outer directed.

    Penn and Teller had recent show based on this illusion. You build a room that is offset from the vertical and people get confused. What they feel and what they see differ.

    In IQ-race issues it is quite clear what the signal from the environment is. Everything around you says - race isn't real, all people are equal, those who think otherwise are bad. While internally you may notice that while the Europeans who sailed south in the fifteenth century came from a culture that had created the pyramid of Cheops, the Pont du Gard, and Notre Dame - the Australian Aborigines they met had yet to develop as much as a rock wall.

    The evidence for inequality is not subtle. It takes a person with a supreme sense of outer directedness to ignore it.

    And the rewards for providing a defense against your lying eyes are proportionate. Steven Jay Gould being an excellent example. Normally academics who specialize is something like the study of extinct mollusks don't get fame, book contracts, monthly magazine columns, and TV appearances. But Gould also provided a steady stream of shoddy arguments against race and IQ. He provided a real in-demand service.

    The race-IQ debate has been stalled now for a dozen years. That is straining my attention span.

    Albertosaurus

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  176. Well, there's a scandophobe with a chip on his shoulder loose about this thread. As others have pointed out, the Nordic countries have produced AT LEAST their fair share of outstanding thinkers and doers. But even if they hadn't produced a single one, they would still have to their credit a group of the most stable, coherent, altruistic civilizations ever established on planet Earth. Has any other population group established a region with greater quality of life, mutual trust and less threat to its neighbours? The Scandinavians have everything that is good about our species. Which makes what the usual suspects are doing to them especially unforgivable.

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  177. "According to which source does Poland have an average IQ of 106?"

    That just means it takes 106 Polish guys to screw on a lightbulb.

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  178. Anyone mentioned Henryk Górecki, of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs fame ?

    And the Polish cryptanalysts who broke Enigma?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Cipher_Bureau

    Josef Pilsudski, who saved Western Europe from Bolshevik invasion at the Battle of Warsaw ?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Warsaw_%281920%29

    (incidentally, Samuel Miliband, a Polish citizen and grandfather of the current UK Labour Party leader, fought in that battle - on the Bolshevik side)

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  179. I find it amusing how some folks here are insisting that Pushkin looked european when in fact his ethiopian ancestry, of which he was very proud, was still clearly reflected in his face. How long do you think a man who looked like Pushkin would last in a Moscow subway ride today before getting beat up or killed by russian racist thugs (who most likely are descendants of the serfs)?

    http://www.elainefeinstein.com/Pushkin/pushkin.jpg

    By the way, Pushkin who was born an aristocrat in Czarist Russia is an ancestor of many european royals including the British Royal family. Peter the Great's ethiopian general and engineer, Gannibal, has numerous famous descendants, and Pushkin was the most illustrious of them all. Too bad he died so young.

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  180. Dang, four comments in a row rejected? That's a personal record, I think.

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  181. As for Beethoven having african ancestry, the testimony of his contemporaries trumps later idealized, whitewashed portraits. It shouldn't be surprising that someone with african genes is the greatest genius of european classical music. Look around right now: practically all genres of american music, which dominates the world today, is the creation of african-americans.

    http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/sf/faq068.htm


    "Frederick Hertz, German anthropologist, in "Race and Civilization," refers twice to Beethoven's "Negroid traits" and his "dark" skin, and "flat, thick nose." (pp. 123 and 178).

    Frau Fischer, an intimate acquaintance of Beethoven, describes him thus, "Short, stocky, broad shoulders, short neck, round nose, blackish-brown complexion." (From r. H. Schauffler, The Man Who Freed Music, Vol. I, p. 18, 1929).


    Alexander W. Thayer, perhaps the foremost authority on Beethoven, says, "Beethoven had even more of the Moor in his features than his master, 'Haydn.'" (Beethoven, Vol. I, p. 146). By "Moor" was meant "Negro." Until recent times the German for "Negro" was "Mohr.



    Paul Bekker, another very noted authority on Beethoven, says that "the most faithful picture of Beethoven's head" shows him with "wide, thick lipped mouth, short, thick nose, and proudly arched forehead." (Beethoven, p. 41, 1925. trans. Bozman). Thayer adds that Beethoven was an ugly little man, and no one would be more astonished than the great composer should he return and see how he has been idealized by sculptors and painters.


    In short, the general description of Beethoven, even to his frizzly hair, fits that of many an Aframerican or West Indian mulatto. In the Southern States Beethoven would have been forced to ride in the jim-crow car."

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  182. Regarding Pushkin and Dumas, you are looking at them through very American eyes. In Europe, there is no one-drop rule, and neither of them has ever been considered black. Rather, they were ordinary white Europeans who had minor exotic ancestry.

    Pushkin was 1/8 black, Dumas 1/4.

    Dumas was less than 1/4 black, probably 1/8 like Pushkin, because his grandmother was "an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French and African ancestry" (Wikipedia).

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  183. "As for Beethoven having african ancestry, the testimony of his contemporaries trumps later idealized, whitewashed portraits."

    Er...most of those "later idealized, whitewashed portraits" date from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. You can see this on Wikipedia--not usually the greatest source but it does the job here. The idea that Beethoven was black comes from J.A. Rogers, who made a a career out of claiming this or that white person was not white at all, and whose works were not exactly the best edited, being self-published, and resultantly haven't fared well against academic criticism.

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  184. Catperson:

    Not sure where in your link it says East Asians are more psychotic

    The page marked as 363. I excerpted the section FFS...

    but their mental hospitalization rates in the U.S. are lower than whites

    Not clearly related to trait psychoticism, but general mental illness and how well/publicly a person copes, which will be different in less expressive and higher IQ persons, who are less visible and more functional, same as with criminality.

    I mean - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5111202/ns/health-mental_health/t/global-study-finds-mental-illness-widespread/#.T7F2euj2beo. There is hardly a global pattern here.

    Perceived East Asian mental illness is masked by their introverted personalities (just as perceived Jewish mental illness is inflated by their extraversion and obsessions with talk therapy - "I gotta see my analyst!").

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  185. "The Dark Ages never ended. For we're dealing with the same pitchforked, Bibled-up, self-righteous, fact-proof, emotion-first assholes that Voltaire found arrayed against himself and the scientists (or philosophes) of his time. They literally killed and tortured heretics then. Only a very thin and vanishing respect for the United States Constitution - that tool of white man oppression! - keeps them from killing and torturing heretics now."

    I take your indignation as a strong case for free will. If not, why get so twisted? Where should they be sent, HELL?

    "I consider nothing that is human, alien to me." - Terence

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  186. "Peter the Great's ethiopian general and engineer, Gannibal, has numerous famous descendants, and Pushkin was the most illustrious of them all"

    It is worth pointing out here that Peter the Great, the greatest Czar of Imperial Russia, himself looked exotic for a russian. He looked more like a gypsy or arab than an european. Here are a couple portraits of Peter the Great by his favorite court painter:


    http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/artists_l-z/nikitin/peterthegreat.jpg


    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Nikitin_peter_deathbed.jpg/428px-Nikitin_peter_deathbed.jpg

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  187. IT is worth pointing out here that Peter the Great, the greatest Czar of Imperial Russia, himself looked exotic for a russian. He looked more like a gypsy or arab than an european.

    And yet he was the great westernizer; someone who didn't look quite Russian, much less German or Scandinavian.

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  188. And you think it looks African? Hilarious. Embarrassing, but hilarious.

    No, I think that it most definitely looks part African. Not a slightest doubt about it.

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  189. By the way, Pushkin and Dumas aren't anomalies. There seems to be a pattern of part-africans being the greatest writers in many varied cultures.

    There is the famous example of Antar bin Shaddad one of the greatest poets, if not the greatest, in the arabic language. He is also known as the Father of Chivalry;

    There is Machado de Assis, the greatest writer of Brazil; and probably the greatest in the portuguese language.

    Based on this pattern I am guessing that the greatest writer in the english language, Shakespeare, whose true identity was never revealed, may also have had african ancestry. Such people weren't too unusual in the England of that time and that region. Who else could have written so sympathetically of the black General Othello?

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  190. "Just once I would like to see actual BAD people go to hell rather than heretics, blasphemers, freethinkers, libertarians, individuals, individualists, pot-smokers, Harry Potter fans, Trekkies, gays, lesbians, transvestites, cripples, nerds, dorks, Linux freaks, children, teenagers, college students, and the like.

    That would never work, though. The BAD people are needed to run society mostly because they are such great leaders, and can scare the bloody hell out of the BAD people that run other societies."

    Overly strict upbringing? Still got that strong sense of right and wrong, just flipped over. Religious observance has been around a long time - long enough to be considered a trait?

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  191. The greatest writer in the Sanskrit language, and the greatest Guru of Hinduism, was the sage Vyasa. He organized the Vedas, wrote the most influential hindu epic Mahabharata of which the Bhagavad Gita is a part, along with numerous other hindu scriptures. He and the curly-haired Buddha are the most influential indians of all time. Vyasa was born to a fisherwoman and is described as black-skinned. As incidentally is the godman Krishna who preaches the Bhagavad Gita in Vyasa's epic the Mahabharata.

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  192. Personally, I always thought Shakespeare was Mongolian. The ways he describes battles, bloodshed, the lamentations of the women--no Englishman could have written that. Only one whose very genes hark for conquest and the cool Mongolian plains could.

    But, yeah, this was pretty common for the old writers. Edmund Spenser, for instance, was Chinese. I kid you not. Just look at the name. Take "Spen," flip the "p" upside down, and cut off the bottom. What do you wind up with? Why, you wind up with "h", and the Chinese word "shen," or body. Now, the rest of the name, "ser," is obviously a poor romanization of the word "si," which is Chinese for "four." Thus we have "body-four" or "Four-Bodies," which most definitely refers to the four nations which comprise the UK--England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. And what, I ask you, was Spenser's main subject? The union of Ireland and Britain into one nation (see "The Fairy Queen")! Obviously Spenser was a hired Chinaman who wrote about his adopted countries disunity.

    The list goes on. Alexander Pope was certainly a Coptic. Dickens was absolutely a South American Indian--just look at how he depicts the displacement of one culture by another. No white brain could think up that! Coleridge was an Abyssinian lass sprung from her masters harem who became the mail-order bride of Wordsworth (see "Kubla Khan").

    All this was covered up by the Great Venetian Invasion of 1903, sadly.

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  193. " TH said...
    From my European perspective, the absurdity of claiming that Pushkin or Dumas were black can be illustrated by applying the same standard to black Americans. The majority of black Americans have more white ancestry than Pushkin and Dumas had black ancestry. So, following anon's reasoning, this means that, say, Michael Jordan is really a white man because he probably has more white ancestry than Pushkin or Dumas had black. But this is just silly. As a matter of fact, Jordan is biologically defined by his blackness, just like Pushkin and Dumas were biologically defined by their whiteness, regardless of any minor admixture."

    Well said sir. It points out the utter ridculousness of the Afro-centric posters on this thread who want to claim Beethoven and others such as Dumas or Pushkin as one of their own.

    It also totally destroys the logic of their purported claim.

    If Blacks in America are, as you point out, on average 20% European, then can't we claim that the greatness of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane and all the Blues and soul greats is due to their White ancestry?

    I mean all these Blacks have probably more White ancestry on a percentage basis than Dumas, Pushkin and certainly Beethoven (who probably has none) have Black ancestry.

    Think about it. If their musical greatness was due to their African ancestry, then Africa would be the home of all types of great musical traditions and innovations. But actually Africa has never produced any music even remotely of the quality of Duke Ellington.

    Ergo, this alleged Black genius must be the result of White genes.

    When I see Afro-centric posters make outlandish claims like the ones on this thread I usually just laugh and assume they are trolls.

    However, there are some "Black academics" who apparently believe this type of stuff.

    Next, they will tell us that the ancient sub-saharan Blacks went to the moon but that evil Whitey stole this techology from them (and is keeping it a secret!!Shhh!).

    Their need to bolster their poor sense of self-esteem should be pitied.

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  194. language major5/14/12, 6:10 PM

    Le Persan said...
    "As for Beethoven having african ancestry, the testimony of his contemporaries trumps later idealized, whitewashed portraits."

    Er...most of those "later idealized, whitewashed portraits" date from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. You can see this on Wikipedia--not usually the greatest source but it does the job here. The idea that Beethoven was black comes from J.A. Rogers, who made a a career out of claiming this or that white person was not white at all, and whose works were not exactly the best edited, being self-published, and resultantly haven't fared well against academic criticism."

    I think this line in the thread may be plucked by the same troll who was claiming blackness for Beethoven a few weeks ago. The composer's death mask is online , just google Beethoven death mask; you also get a realistic sculpture that appears free of any negroid features as far as I can see. Naturally the death mask impression was taken right after demise. The features were entirely those of a white European and I've seen countless Germans who look more or less similar. South Germans are often swarthy, if indeed Beethoven was. This person was also claiming that Beethoven would have been subjected to Jim Crow laws had he been in America! Sometimes you just have to laugh.
    Although blacks were rare in Europe, people were familiar with the black African phenotype. Had this famous composer resembled it, they would have noticed with amazement, a black man standing on a European stage, creating European cultural sound artifacts. Yet I have never read of anyone noticing that he was black or anything close to it.
    As for the Dumas and Pushkin, they are black only (especially Pushkin and Dumas fils) according to a one drop rule. Still, you can claim them and they were known and recognized as partially black in their lifetimes, though in the case of Pushkin it wasn't a major concern for him. Three writers (and the Dumas hardly count as the greatest writers) do not a point prove in the pantheon of European writers.
    There is a black American painter who has repainted many famous European paintings of the past centuries. Naturally, since they were in a time and place where blacks were not often, and they themselves were white, they painted their subjects white. This black American, rather than creating his own art, repainted them all black. Think.
    It was an interesting insight into the psychology of a black person with enough intelligence to be aware of Western intellectual and cultural history, and also to realize that his race had little to do with its creation.
    Shakespeare could "sympathize" with anybody. That is why he was a genius. It's called empathy and does not require genetic input.
    I suppose the black genes you posit also helped in his creation of Venetian Jewish merchants (he must have been Jewish); and Scottish desperados like MacBeth. Shakespeare also saw into the female psyche in a way that is rare.
    Again, empathy and insight into people and situations different from themselves is not a notable black trait, so it would not account for any great number of black writers. There was not writing in sub-Saharan black Africa except what was brought in from Arabs or Europeans, or the Ethiopians dating from their links to early Semitic cultures. Pushkin's black ancestor was Ethiopian, btw.
    This troll (oh, let's be nice; maybe he really thinks this way) would love to blackwash Europe if he could, but here in the west, with all the education and advantages accruing to them, there is no plethora of black achievement in intellectual feats and musical genius is what has been done in the 20th century, which is impressive in the opinion of many music historians.
    But sorry. You can't have Beethoven and Shakespeare. They're not yours.

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  195. Gannibal through Pushkin is not an ancestor of the British royal family. One of Pushkin's daughters, Natalia Pushkina, married a younger son of William, Duke of Nassau (Nassau-Weilburg line). Because she was not considered of equal rank (nothing to do with her African ancestry but the fact that her family were non-dynastic nobles), she was given the lesser title of Countess of Merenberg. Natalia's daughter Sophie von Merenberg (see her very non-African-looking photos at the wiki link below) morganatically married Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, against the will of his family (again an issue of dynastic rank). One of her daughters, Nadejda, married the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, Lord Louis Mountbatten's older brother. So Pushkin's descendant married cousins of the royal family resideing in England but did not marry into the British royal family itself.

    Links with photos:

    Sophie of Merenberg (1/32 African ancestry)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_of_Merenberg

    Sophie's daugter Anastasia Wernher, nee Css de Torby (1/64 African ancestry)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasia_de_Torby

    Sophie's daughter Nadejda Mountatten, nee Css de Torby (1/64 African ancestry)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadejda_Mountbatten,_Marchioness_of_Milford_Haven

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  196. Shakespeare was Armenian.

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  197. >Where should they be sent, HELL?<

    That's where they belong in the afterlife. On earth, they merely should not be artifically elevated. Their natural level is that of Elmer Gantry. That is how a sane society treats them, and that is how decent people do in fact treat them now.

    How much fame and influence do you think S. J. Gould would have had, had his race stuff been honestly peer-reviewed? Many of his arguments are actual con jobs. But just try to tell the New York Times or any laboratory-bombing anarchist that.

    The fact that these hooligans successfully menace science, ruining scientists (ex. Watson), is not to be covered up out of some misguided sense of politesse.

    At least as low a rung as Derbyshire, Watson, Rushton, et al. now artificially occupy is what your favorite neomedieval dunces would be perched on, were the current elites not committed to grinding the human mean back down to violent misologism.

    As to the free will straw man, is there anybody out there who is interested enough to knock it down again? I've done it all my life, hundreds of times over decades, so maybe someone else would like to perform the duty this time.

    Oh hell, I'll do it. (in the tone of a professor long past retirement:) Free will is not a mystical, supernatural transcendence of, for example, gravity ("I have free will: I WILL myself to jump off the roof and fly)") or mind ("I WILL myself to become Beethoven"). It is merely a choice among available options. If you are three feet tall, being a star NBA player isn't an option. That doesn't infringe on your free will. You are free to choose among your options. Likewise, if you have an 80 IQ, being a physicist isn't an option. That doesn't infringe on your free will. You are free to choose among your options. For conclusion, human will cannot be an all-transcending logos; it is best regarded as a natural (or if you're religious, earthly) phenomenon, bounded by the natural world, and whose locus is determined by the natural world. (sound of chalk squeaking on blackboard; sound of communist students chanting "Hey, Ho, Western Civ has GOT TO GO"; sound of professor finally getting his retirement - forced - for being a "sad racist" in the opinion of a 22-year-old who doesn't like the word "blackboard")

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  198. medvedev said:

    "Maya, Maya, Maya - didn't they teach you anything at all in school? What were your parents thinking? Damn commies! Have you never seen Pushkin's death mask? Or never heard that he was called a monkey throughout Lyceum and after? The guy was the greatest Russian literary genius ever - and the guy just happened to have some prominent African features (facial and behavioral)."

    I attended primary school in a Slavic country where various portraits of Pushkin were displayed as frequently as Lenin's portraits were in my government preschool building. His picture was also all over my reading textbook. Yet, I had no idea Pushkin was anything but Russian until I learned about it. The other students didn't suspect it either. Yet, you'd think that in an environment where children took great care to single out and investigate possible persons of Georgian, Armenian, Jewish or Mongolian descent, someone would ask what's up with Pushkin's face, if there was anything to notice.

    So what if Pushkin's childhood classmates called him monkey? Mutual teasing was a big part of boarding school culture (have you ever read the poems Pushkin wrote about classmates during his boyhood?), and all the students were well aware of Pushkin's ancestry. He was proud of it, and it wasn't a secret. (Btw, in 2nd grade I shared a desk with a boy whom everyone called "Monkey". He wasn't African.) But it's laughable to suggest that the kids at the academy could have guessed who Pushkin's great grandfather was just by looking at him. And, no, the guy doesn't have any prominent African features which is normal. Most people don't resemble one specific great grandparent.

    " Facts speak very clearly that Abram Gannibal was a high IQ African who succeed wholly on his merits. Why is it so difficult to accept?"

    I will assume that English isn't your primary language and compliment you on communicating very well, all things considered. However, I must point out that you didn't read my comment attentively, or that you, probably, used a bad dictionary. When referring to Ibrahim (or Abram, if you insist) Gannibal, I did nothing but praise him and his intellect.

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