I've sometimes wondered why nobody capable has ever taken apart Thomas Sowell's, and various others', claim that hereditarianism counts for almost nothing. Well, I need wonder no more. I couldn't have asked for a more comprehensive demolition.
It's neither a fun nor desirable undertaking. Sowell is a much more admirable figure than the vast majority of rightoid pundits, especially now that we live in a post-Candace Owens, post-Kanye West world. But just because Sowell is more admirable in his wrongness doesn't stop him from being wrong, and this particular wrong theory is especially bad given that it's wasted so much effort and credibility that could've otherwise been expended on hereditarianism.
My hat's off to Nathan for seeing through this unpleasant task.
I agree. Being less wrong can be more dangerous than being obviously wrong since it acts as a siren song to the faint-hearted.
I've liked Thomas Sowell for a long time, ever since I discovered he was sort of Milton Friedman's protege. I even read Sowell's autobiography because I was so interested in him. But when people say Sowell is the public intellectual they most admire, a little voice in my head wonders if they would have chosen him had he been white. Yes, he's an intellectual and yes, he's a conservative but more impressive than, say, Niall Ferguson?
Sowell has reached a guru-like status—similar to Chomsky on the left—with many followers who insist he can do no wrong. In that sense, he is overrated.
But I think Sowell is still superior Ferguson. Ferguson relies too much on rhetoric rather than empirical evidence.
I'm just going off my personal impression based on a reading of one of his books and an article or two of his. It's possible I haven't sampled enough of his work to make an accurate judgement.
I think it’s because the cultural explanation is nearly as taboo as the hereditarian one, and hereditarians feel like it’s a waste of effort to go after it when it is not the mainstream(or most destructive) explanation of racial disparities, which is of course environment/racism.
In critiquing hereditarianism in Intellectuals and Race, Sowell's citation of the low IQ of WWI Irish conscripts is particularly noteworthy.
On this point Sowell remarks that 26 percent of Irish soldiers exceeded the overall American norm as did even fewer percentages of ethnic Russians (19%), Italians (14%) and Poles (12%). However, the citation to Brigham (1923) largely (if not fully) reports results from an Irish sample consisting of 658 observations (see Table 9 of Brigham (1923)); it seems that these likely encompass the 422 Army Alpha, 205 Army Beta and 25 Stanford-Binet test takers first assembled by Yerkes (1921) (see Russell Warne's discussion of this study here: https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/). Importantly, as Warne notes in his review of past Irish IQ estimates, "The two lowest scoring American samples were both from data collected during World War I and reported by Yerkes (1921): 205 illiterate, foreign-born Irish draftees taking the Army Beta (avg IQ = 80.9) and 25 low-functioning foreign-born Irish draftees taking the 1916 Stanford-Binet (avg IQ = 77.4). Both of these samples are clearly not representative of the general Irish population. Removing these individuals increases the American Irish weighted mean to 97.8." That is, about a third of Sowell's Irish sample consists of illiterates whose verbal IQ scores are therefore of dubious validity.
The scatterplot in Warne's blog clearly shows that historic Irish IQ has likely always been about 98, contradicting claims of a massive, environmentally-mediated IQ rise in this (and likely all other) ethnic groups.
Excellent, clear analysis. Your delving into the actual sources used by Sowell is illuminating and helpful. I’m disappointed by the evidence you present of how slipshod, at best, Sowell’s scholarship can be. Perhaps he should write fewer books and make sure they’re right before he publishes them.
The hereditarian case you’re presenting basically suggests, if I understand you correctly, that the solution is to activate the social, cultural and sexual processes in African culture that would encourage the most intelligent Africans to raise more children to become successful adults who themselves produce offspring, rather than the current primitive free-for-all. This would take multiple generations to shift the average IQ of Africans but it resembles what probably happened for centuries, if not millennia, in high-performing groups like Jews, lowland Scots and Germans, where the prestigious match for one’s daughter was the rabbi, parson or minister. The celibacy of Roman Catholic priests distorted this process in Mediterranean countries!
How to implement an equivalent and sustained social-cultural reorientation in African culture, especially after 50 years of affirmative action generating massive noise and false signaling in the African-American community about which of them is truly intelligent, is anybody’s guess.
Nevertheless, regarding your essay—very well done! And thanks again.
The premise of your contemplated ‘solution’ to the problem of hereditary IQ differences is that people with higher IQ are in some way better people. Thus, you talk about encouraging the more intelligent Africans to have more children, which over multiple generations would shift the average African IQ upwards--- this would in some way be an improvement. IMO, it’s precisely this sort of talk that opens ‘hereditarianism’ to the criticism of ‘scientific racism.’
Hereditary aptitude differences, at individual or group scale, are a predicament of the human condition. Part of the classic liberal ethos is the sense that we humans are all in the same boat in this regard, we all own this problem. There is a sense in which all humans are created equal, which somehow has to temper the problem of natural hierarchies. Your IQ is higher than that of the guy mowing your grass, but you aren’t a more valuable human than he is.
By the way, an evolutionary take on this is that it’s the bell-shaped distribution of measurable human traits that is adaptive for the success of human social organization, not “the best” phenotypes on that curve. The idea that society would be better if everyone had a higher IQ is overly simplistic.
I think the assessment of human value, to the extent it can be measured at all, does need to be holistic, and I would think that within-species variation is fairly small compared to between-species variation. But whatever traits human beings evolved at a genetic or cultural level to make us more important than other animal species are going to vary along a continuum.
I mean, sure, there's nothing to stop a low-IQ person being more ethical or charitable or attractive and/or healthy than average, and if you put those together it probably counts for more than just being smart. But if someone is low IQ *and* an unemployed alcoholic recidivist wife-beater who wants other people to pay for his second liver transplant, etc., then... I'm not going to say this is an equally valuable human specimen, or that it doesn't matter if they pass on their genes more frequently.
You can regard IQ as a force multiplier for other goals and motivations. In theory, most people want their society to function, either for altruistic or non-zero-sum self-interested reasons, so intelligence helps them to pursue that goal more effectively. e.g, the police catch criminals faster, goods and services get cheaper thanks to better efficiency, accidents and addiction are less likely to burden the health service, which is itself more likely to treat and cure disease and has more funding because of a stronger economy, et cetera. Maybe it's not a moral trait in itself, but it allows moral people to get more done with the available inputs.
Frankly I think you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. In any case, I doubt Jews a a group would trade capabilities with Africans as a group. I think it’s also pretty obvious that the world benefits from the Flynn effect, which I’ve only made a mild, general proposal to nudge along because of the very clear benefits in Jews and many people living in Northern Europe (I could mentioned East Asia as well, where I believe the average IQ is 106).
Viciously removing their retards from the gene pool is a start. Now that we know how it's done we can accelerate the process. One way is to simply return to the era of harsh punishments for crime. This alone would take out tons of men who are too criminal to breed.
The other effort would be private donations, hush hush extra incentives for the rare MATH or PHYSICS graduate of dark African extraction to marry another and proceed to fuck and breed like rabbits. Get them married early and fucking early. Sneak into their homes poke holes in their condoms. I kid. But money is no object. With the public cost savings gained by simply implementing the law there will be enough to bribe their smartest and most well behaved.
Thirdly, to make up for the deficit in men, invite twang ha the hmong/Vietnamese/Chinese excess male to wife her up and neutralize her black genes with Asian genes to average around a white iq if possible. If you can have a second generation of blacks that's roughly 15-30% Asian by DNA that would be very good.
"The other effort would be private donations, hush hush extra incentives for the rare MATH or PHYSICS graduate of dark African extraction to marry another and proceed to fuck and breed like rabbits. "
Funny thing, until a few generations ago, polygamy was culturally encouraged, or at least quite common among the African elite.
Colonialism, and/or the missionaries, ended this practice, and introduced the nuclear family.
That said, they also introduced schools, which obviously empowers the first part of your point - getting smart Africans to meet each other and reproduce.
'The celibacy of Roman Catholic priests distorted this process in Mediterranean countries!'
I had never heard this before and found it fascinating. Even so, as I understand it Catholic Countries like Spain and Italy have IQs of around 98 compared to northern Europeans' 100. That's not much of a difference since, are we talking the Reformation? And perhaps those two IQ points could equally well be explained by the general Ice People versus Sun People idea. However, since the comment above was very articulate and sensible, I'm quite prepared to believe that your claim is correct.
I only wrote “distorted” I didn’t allege it was the sole, or even dominant factor. I’ve now read your very interesting comment on the genetic provenance of various groups and naturally agree that the factors you cite are dominant. Your comment about married Orthodox priests is a furphy, however. Not all religions are equally intellectual, and the Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes mysticism, rituals, meditative practices like continuous prayer and so on far more than the very intellectualized religious traditions of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. So Orthodox priests are less likely to be intellectual powerhouses like the Jesuits, for example. But in any case the genetic factors you cited in your comment are clearly the dominant factor in Mediterranean IQs. Something similar will probably happen in America too after all the bottom of the barrel immigration in recent years.
It would be very simple to improve the genetics of blacks in America (for some traits at least). Execution for common law felonies with no exceptions. Do this for a few generations, and you would see significant improvement as those with genetic factors for low IQ and violent behavior would be weeded out.
It would be simple. It would also require a will the American people simply do not have right now.
I don't know if this is a particular problem of this topic or of his entire corpus. Perhaps he really didn't wanna be seen as a racial sellout and that motivated his slipshodness on this topic, but it's not unreasonable to conclude there might be similar problems with his other works, and they at minimum deserve serious investigation given just how badly off he's been here.
This whole thing is very sad. It's much more enjoyable blasting buffoons, sellouts, and cranks. Their lack of redeeming qualities bides back any pangs of guilt on inflicting abuse their way.
I don't have a problem accepting that Northern Europeans in general are smarter than Southern Europeans, but something tells me that original WHG ancestry is probably not the main cause of this. Perhaps it is higher steppe ancestry, or some sort of selection in colder weather in the past 3,000 years or so. Although perhaps in a more primal way, patrilineal competition is probably a big factor in the more violent tendencies of Africans. Also worth noting that several Middle Eastern groups( Jews, Maronites, Zoroastrians) have high IQ without much steppe or WHG ancestry. By the way, has there been a study about a connection between lactose tolerance and IQ?
This article was a thing of beauty. A point-by point takedown of the Cultural Explanation and a strong argument for adopting the best policy in fighting wokism and ignorance in general... telling the truth.
Interesting article. The second article I've read today that talks about Sowell's racism theory. I hadn't known about Sowell until today. Interesting coincidence.
I only hope this article doesn't get you censored or otherwise cause you trouble. Seriously, "they" will likely call you racist for pointing out some of these hereditarianism arguments.
Don’t you think that the black violent crime rate is much more culturally influenced? And as important to influence? Note, I’m not focusing here on BW disparities but (especially) on the black homicide rate and other index crimes, which have varied a lot and recently. I guess this isn’t especially relevant to your essay, but keep it in mind.
Definitely. 150 years ago, Westerners thought that it made sense to challenge someone to a sword or gun fight if he insulted you. Now this sounds insane. For purely cultural reasons, our attitudes and disposition toward violence are completely different. We're also smarter than people 150 years ago, but I don't think the difference in intelligence is as extreme as the difference in violence. The black homicide rate has also changed a lot over time. Realistically, getting the crime rates of certain demographics down to acceptable levels would probably require draconian interventions that would not be welcomed by the communities that would most benefit from them. But we can still make some improvements to the culture on the margin.
We went draconian as recently as the 1990s, after the permissive 1960s. This is an issue that is less combustible and more likely to help blacks than the IQ differences–and you know I support research and discussion of those. As Sailer reminds us, if blacks could get their violent crime rate down, it would improve a lot of things for many people, especially inner city blacks.
Even in the anti-crime '80s and '90s, we weren't close to how things were in the pre-Warren/Burger Court days when they just made up a bunch of rights for criminals that never previously existed. Not that such was the only fault, as there was broad popular support for completely wrong ideas about crime which remain popular to this day.
Good piece as usual. Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but I believe the politics surrounding hereditarianism are simply too challenging for the average person to navigate, even if they inherently suspect that the racism and cultural explanations for racial disparities are dubious at best. This is how I view conservative elites who take the Sowell route of blaming "bad culture." I have a feeling that even they know it's a weak explanation—perhaps even more so than the racism argument—but they need something to avoid addressing the genetic explanation.
Again, maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I think there are too many incentives pushing people away from hereditarianism, especially if you're someone who wishes to operate in polite society with a job in a corporation, media, academia, and so on.
Sebastian Jensen wrote a good piece discussing the politics surrounding hereditarianism if you're interested.
I enjoyed this article, and your previous two pieces on the necessity of hereditarianism in combating wokeness. Belief in biological equality between groups is closer to its root cause than either civil right's law or critical theory, which are both motivated by egalitarianism.
But this doesn't answer why people adopt blank slatism in the first place, and why it has become more popular over time. The evidence against it is overwhelming, as is common sense. It suggests there is a link in the causal chain before blank slatism, and that belief in biological equality is just motivated reasoning.
The fact people are much more comfortable with genetic explanations for disparities which favour people who are not white, or which favour women, is further evidence of an earlier precondition of wokeness. Most Americans would be happy to accept black people are naturally better at basketball and American football, and many that Asians are innately superior at mathematics. And even if they don't accept these explanations, they're less concerned about these disparities.
The history of blank slatism you traced in Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem doesn't explain why Locke or Mill were seduced by this idea when there was no race taboo. Nor is there an explanation for why people can't be convinced to accept group differences by being presented with the evidence they have an innocent cause (heredity). The prime mover is likely an emotional relationship to the villains and victors of history (white men), or a revulsion to inequality generally.
This is a point that came up in my debate with Eric Kaufmann. Wokism stems from the equality thesis and Christian morality. But you can push the question back a step and ask, why did people accept the equality thesis (or Christianity) in the first place? There is obviously some tension between the idea that there is variation in morally loaded traits (like intelligence) and the theological idea that we're all "equals in the eyes of God." So in this sense, Westerners were morally primed for blank slatism, and blank slatism probably won't be defeated without a revolution in values.
In the 20th century state capacity reached the point that redistribution could reach a serious scale and simultaneously ordinary people had significant political power (this is especially true in democracies, but even partially true in non democracies because they require a degree of public consent).
Once it could redistribute, all sorts of excuses were going to be invented as to why people deserve this or that and what’s “fair”. Blacks vote 90/10 in one direction. That’s like picking up a 10 point swing every election just for giving them a few freebies from the government (and more than 10 points if it’s a Democratic primary).
All you need is some justifying rhetoric of why the receiving group shouldn’t feel bad about it and why the paying group should let it happen.
The same logic that can be used to buy off blacks can be used to buy off “workers” or “women” or “rednecks” (the war on poverty focused plenty on Appalachia).
Perhaps more importantly than such direct welfare giveaways, government is mainly in the business of paying credentialed professionals to “uplift” people. What would serious hereditarianism mean for education spending? Not something the teachers union would like.
There is just too much government money tied into blank slate ideology.
This is a very interesting article. I have long been impressed by Sowell’s written works, but some of cultural theories seemed a bit unfulfilling. This article does a good job of explaining why.
I do want to push back on a larger claim that you make. I do not believe that hereditarian explanations of racial inequalities are the most effective means to fight the Woke and the Left in general, as you claim. Even if you explain all differences in outcome between races by genes, that still does not end the Egalitarian argument. There are still huge inequalities within racial groups and national groups. The Left will merely shift to those inequalities within races.
To fully undermine the credibility of the Woke and the Left in general, we need to get to a point where it is widely accepted that all types of inequalities are largely accounted for by genetics (not just race).
Ironically, it is also far easier to move a typical thinking moderate towards hereditarianism by focusing on inequality between individuals within the same group. It is not hard to convince many people that:
1 Some individuals are more intelligent than others.
2 The difference between those individuals is largely, though not entirely, caused by genes.
3 Those differences lead to substantial differences in life outcomes.
4 It is very hard to change to change environmental factors in ways that benefit the less intelligent without also helping those with greater intelligence. So those inequalities are extremely difficult to get rid of without causing substantial harm to society in general.
The same argument can be made for other heritable factors that lead to important differences in life outcomes.
Of source, the Woke will inevitably try to shift the focus to race, where they feel more comfortable, but why let them do so? Focusing the hereditarianism argument on race actually puts the Left in a stronger position. Keep the focus on individuals. That is where their argument falls apart.
Is it easier when you take out race? Certainly not on issues directly related to race (affirmative action, immigration, policing).
But let’s say we try the individual approach.
Let’s take education. If we take hereditarianism and the null hypothesis as true, we are wasting a lot of time, money, and effort in the education sector. But does any parent want to be told “your Johnny’s too dumb to learn to code.”
There is no race issue in South Korea and they have high IQ. However, they believe in environmentalism so hard they engage in endless hours of tedious repetition in cram schools learning little of value to the point where they don’t even have time left to breed.
Environmentalism = hope. It might be stupid false hope that will disappoint again and again, but I get its appeal.
We are a rich society and thus we buy a lot of false hope.
One other problem with Sowell's thesis is the relationship between violence and African ancestry. People with African ancestry have higher rates of violent crime than other groups in the US, the UK, Canada, Brazil, and pretty much everywhere else where we have decent data. In the US where we have the best data, blacks have higher rates of violence crime than whites as far back as this data goes. What could be the cultural explanation of this relationship? All of these places have different cultures and environments, and Africans of course also have different cultures too. I'm not intimately familiar with Sowell's writings, but my guess is that he never considered this problem.
"If the most intelligent blacks from the West Indies immigrate to New York, then they may have different outcomes from African Americans for entirely genetic reasons. Sowell doesn’t even acknowledge this possibility.
There is an obvious question that Sowell fails to ask: If West Indian black culture produces such good results in New York, why doesn’t the culture work its magic in the West Indies? Countries like Jamaica and Grenada continue to exhibit results that are consistent with lower average IQ."
West Indian immigration to the U.S. wasn't the top 0.001% as in the case with India. More like top 30-50% or something. Just look at how Jamaica has a population of 2.7 million versus 1.2 million Jamaican-Americans. Same story with Barbados, etc.
You have to ask why half or most prominent black Americans have Caribbean heritage when they're only a minority in the black American population and when they're drawn from just the top 30-50% of their country of origin. Look at Colin Powell, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, Kamala Harris, etc. Both Jamaican and Barbadian Americans have incomes higher than the national average too.
But there's a possibility the typical Barbadian and Jamaican is smarter than the typical African-American, because such tiny populations are taking up all kinds of leadership positions within the black American community.
I suggest there is a third choice for challenging wokeness: focus on explaining and defending the toleration of liberty (of person and property), which includes the right to discriminate. Solely promoting hereditarianism is a hard row to hoe, and it could even be embraced as a “natural social injustice” that requires state “correction”.
Defending the right to discriminate? You mean the very right we heartlessly tossed into a woodchipper sixty years ago for the sake of meeting the demands of the civil rights movement?
Not that I don't think it shouldn't be defended. It should. It's an essential, bedrock right of the free society, and our abandonment of it has been deeply damaging. But it's as least as much an uphill battle as defending hereditarianism.
It doesn't seem to be. For one thing, everyone is entitled to discriminate with his person and property. So there is no apparent implication that non-whites are being picked on and denigrated, as there may be with hereditarianism. That looks like a huge difference.
It completely undermines it. Even from the standpoint of our being a much less racist nation now than in the 1960s, and how perhaps our laws should now take that into consideration, the civil rightists still instinctively oppose such. They fundamentally reject both property rights and the right of free association, for both principled and strategic reasons.
Even if all the so-called "civil rightists" are completely and eternally implacable (which seems implausible), they can be ignored as long as a critical mass of intellectuals convert to the more libertarian position.
Just one comment about different populations of whites in North America. I don’t think we can conclude that “fringe” Britons were lower IQ. I’ve never been to the southern US but I live in Canada.
The country was heavily settled by Scottish Highlanders. Yet Canada does not seem that different from New England, that got more ethnic English.
If the “fringe” UK is doing poorly today (I have heard this too) it could because many of the smarter ones emigrated, leaving behind a depleted population.
I've sometimes wondered why nobody capable has ever taken apart Thomas Sowell's, and various others', claim that hereditarianism counts for almost nothing. Well, I need wonder no more. I couldn't have asked for a more comprehensive demolition.
It's neither a fun nor desirable undertaking. Sowell is a much more admirable figure than the vast majority of rightoid pundits, especially now that we live in a post-Candace Owens, post-Kanye West world. But just because Sowell is more admirable in his wrongness doesn't stop him from being wrong, and this particular wrong theory is especially bad given that it's wasted so much effort and credibility that could've otherwise been expended on hereditarianism.
My hat's off to Nathan for seeing through this unpleasant task.
I agree. Being less wrong can be more dangerous than being obviously wrong since it acts as a siren song to the faint-hearted.
I've liked Thomas Sowell for a long time, ever since I discovered he was sort of Milton Friedman's protege. I even read Sowell's autobiography because I was so interested in him. But when people say Sowell is the public intellectual they most admire, a little voice in my head wonders if they would have chosen him had he been white. Yes, he's an intellectual and yes, he's a conservative but more impressive than, say, Niall Ferguson?
Sowell has reached a guru-like status—similar to Chomsky on the left—with many followers who insist he can do no wrong. In that sense, he is overrated.
But I think Sowell is still superior Ferguson. Ferguson relies too much on rhetoric rather than empirical evidence.
'Ferguson relies too much on rhetoric rather than empirical evidence.'
You wouldn't like to flesh out that aspersion, would you?
I'm just going off my personal impression based on a reading of one of his books and an article or two of his. It's possible I haven't sampled enough of his work to make an accurate judgement.
That's fine, any example of rhetoric over empirical evidence from that one book or either of the two articles will suffice.
People have been dismantling this nonsense for decades. They're just suppressed and/or ignored because it's considered "racist".
I think it’s because the cultural explanation is nearly as taboo as the hereditarian one, and hereditarians feel like it’s a waste of effort to go after it when it is not the mainstream(or most destructive) explanation of racial disparities, which is of course environment/racism.
In critiquing hereditarianism in Intellectuals and Race, Sowell's citation of the low IQ of WWI Irish conscripts is particularly noteworthy.
On this point Sowell remarks that 26 percent of Irish soldiers exceeded the overall American norm as did even fewer percentages of ethnic Russians (19%), Italians (14%) and Poles (12%). However, the citation to Brigham (1923) largely (if not fully) reports results from an Irish sample consisting of 658 observations (see Table 9 of Brigham (1923)); it seems that these likely encompass the 422 Army Alpha, 205 Army Beta and 25 Stanford-Binet test takers first assembled by Yerkes (1921) (see Russell Warne's discussion of this study here: https://russellwarne.com/2022/12/17/irish-iq-the-massive-rise-that-never-happened/). Importantly, as Warne notes in his review of past Irish IQ estimates, "The two lowest scoring American samples were both from data collected during World War I and reported by Yerkes (1921): 205 illiterate, foreign-born Irish draftees taking the Army Beta (avg IQ = 80.9) and 25 low-functioning foreign-born Irish draftees taking the 1916 Stanford-Binet (avg IQ = 77.4). Both of these samples are clearly not representative of the general Irish population. Removing these individuals increases the American Irish weighted mean to 97.8." That is, about a third of Sowell's Irish sample consists of illiterates whose verbal IQ scores are therefore of dubious validity.
The scatterplot in Warne's blog clearly shows that historic Irish IQ has likely always been about 98, contradicting claims of a massive, environmentally-mediated IQ rise in this (and likely all other) ethnic groups.
Excellent, clear analysis. Your delving into the actual sources used by Sowell is illuminating and helpful. I’m disappointed by the evidence you present of how slipshod, at best, Sowell’s scholarship can be. Perhaps he should write fewer books and make sure they’re right before he publishes them.
The hereditarian case you’re presenting basically suggests, if I understand you correctly, that the solution is to activate the social, cultural and sexual processes in African culture that would encourage the most intelligent Africans to raise more children to become successful adults who themselves produce offspring, rather than the current primitive free-for-all. This would take multiple generations to shift the average IQ of Africans but it resembles what probably happened for centuries, if not millennia, in high-performing groups like Jews, lowland Scots and Germans, where the prestigious match for one’s daughter was the rabbi, parson or minister. The celibacy of Roman Catholic priests distorted this process in Mediterranean countries!
How to implement an equivalent and sustained social-cultural reorientation in African culture, especially after 50 years of affirmative action generating massive noise and false signaling in the African-American community about which of them is truly intelligent, is anybody’s guess.
Nevertheless, regarding your essay—very well done! And thanks again.
The premise of your contemplated ‘solution’ to the problem of hereditary IQ differences is that people with higher IQ are in some way better people. Thus, you talk about encouraging the more intelligent Africans to have more children, which over multiple generations would shift the average African IQ upwards--- this would in some way be an improvement. IMO, it’s precisely this sort of talk that opens ‘hereditarianism’ to the criticism of ‘scientific racism.’
Hereditary aptitude differences, at individual or group scale, are a predicament of the human condition. Part of the classic liberal ethos is the sense that we humans are all in the same boat in this regard, we all own this problem. There is a sense in which all humans are created equal, which somehow has to temper the problem of natural hierarchies. Your IQ is higher than that of the guy mowing your grass, but you aren’t a more valuable human than he is.
By the way, an evolutionary take on this is that it’s the bell-shaped distribution of measurable human traits that is adaptive for the success of human social organization, not “the best” phenotypes on that curve. The idea that society would be better if everyone had a higher IQ is overly simplistic.
https://ncofnas.com/p/are-smart-people-superior-a-reply
I think the assessment of human value, to the extent it can be measured at all, does need to be holistic, and I would think that within-species variation is fairly small compared to between-species variation. But whatever traits human beings evolved at a genetic or cultural level to make us more important than other animal species are going to vary along a continuum.
I mean, sure, there's nothing to stop a low-IQ person being more ethical or charitable or attractive and/or healthy than average, and if you put those together it probably counts for more than just being smart. But if someone is low IQ *and* an unemployed alcoholic recidivist wife-beater who wants other people to pay for his second liver transplant, etc., then... I'm not going to say this is an equally valuable human specimen, or that it doesn't matter if they pass on their genes more frequently.
You can regard IQ as a force multiplier for other goals and motivations. In theory, most people want their society to function, either for altruistic or non-zero-sum self-interested reasons, so intelligence helps them to pursue that goal more effectively. e.g, the police catch criminals faster, goods and services get cheaper thanks to better efficiency, accidents and addiction are less likely to burden the health service, which is itself more likely to treat and cure disease and has more funding because of a stronger economy, et cetera. Maybe it's not a moral trait in itself, but it allows moral people to get more done with the available inputs.
Frankly I think you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. In any case, I doubt Jews a a group would trade capabilities with Africans as a group. I think it’s also pretty obvious that the world benefits from the Flynn effect, which I’ve only made a mild, general proposal to nudge along because of the very clear benefits in Jews and many people living in Northern Europe (I could mentioned East Asia as well, where I believe the average IQ is 106).
The "classic liberal ethos" is trash and should be mocked and belittled.
Viciously removing their retards from the gene pool is a start. Now that we know how it's done we can accelerate the process. One way is to simply return to the era of harsh punishments for crime. This alone would take out tons of men who are too criminal to breed.
The other effort would be private donations, hush hush extra incentives for the rare MATH or PHYSICS graduate of dark African extraction to marry another and proceed to fuck and breed like rabbits. Get them married early and fucking early. Sneak into their homes poke holes in their condoms. I kid. But money is no object. With the public cost savings gained by simply implementing the law there will be enough to bribe their smartest and most well behaved.
Thirdly, to make up for the deficit in men, invite twang ha the hmong/Vietnamese/Chinese excess male to wife her up and neutralize her black genes with Asian genes to average around a white iq if possible. If you can have a second generation of blacks that's roughly 15-30% Asian by DNA that would be very good.
But just enforcing the law would do wonders tbh
"The other effort would be private donations, hush hush extra incentives for the rare MATH or PHYSICS graduate of dark African extraction to marry another and proceed to fuck and breed like rabbits. "
Funny thing, until a few generations ago, polygamy was culturally encouraged, or at least quite common among the African elite.
Colonialism, and/or the missionaries, ended this practice, and introduced the nuclear family.
That said, they also introduced schools, which obviously empowers the first part of your point - getting smart Africans to meet each other and reproduce.
'The celibacy of Roman Catholic priests distorted this process in Mediterranean countries!'
I had never heard this before and found it fascinating. Even so, as I understand it Catholic Countries like Spain and Italy have IQs of around 98 compared to northern Europeans' 100. That's not much of a difference since, are we talking the Reformation? And perhaps those two IQ points could equally well be explained by the general Ice People versus Sun People idea. However, since the comment above was very articulate and sensible, I'm quite prepared to believe that your claim is correct.
I only wrote “distorted” I didn’t allege it was the sole, or even dominant factor. I’ve now read your very interesting comment on the genetic provenance of various groups and naturally agree that the factors you cite are dominant. Your comment about married Orthodox priests is a furphy, however. Not all religions are equally intellectual, and the Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes mysticism, rituals, meditative practices like continuous prayer and so on far more than the very intellectualized religious traditions of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. So Orthodox priests are less likely to be intellectual powerhouses like the Jesuits, for example. But in any case the genetic factors you cited in your comment are clearly the dominant factor in Mediterranean IQs. Something similar will probably happen in America too after all the bottom of the barrel immigration in recent years.
Ah, a bit of feistiness never hurt anyone and your interesting, longer comment more than made up for it.
It would be very simple to improve the genetics of blacks in America (for some traits at least). Execution for common law felonies with no exceptions. Do this for a few generations, and you would see significant improvement as those with genetic factors for low IQ and violent behavior would be weeded out.
It would be simple. It would also require a will the American people simply do not have right now.
I don't know if this is a particular problem of this topic or of his entire corpus. Perhaps he really didn't wanna be seen as a racial sellout and that motivated his slipshodness on this topic, but it's not unreasonable to conclude there might be similar problems with his other works, and they at minimum deserve serious investigation given just how badly off he's been here.
This whole thing is very sad. It's much more enjoyable blasting buffoons, sellouts, and cranks. Their lack of redeeming qualities bides back any pangs of guilt on inflicting abuse their way.
I don't have a problem accepting that Northern Europeans in general are smarter than Southern Europeans, but something tells me that original WHG ancestry is probably not the main cause of this. Perhaps it is higher steppe ancestry, or some sort of selection in colder weather in the past 3,000 years or so. Although perhaps in a more primal way, patrilineal competition is probably a big factor in the more violent tendencies of Africans. Also worth noting that several Middle Eastern groups( Jews, Maronites, Zoroastrians) have high IQ without much steppe or WHG ancestry. By the way, has there been a study about a connection between lactose tolerance and IQ?
This article was a thing of beauty. A point-by point takedown of the Cultural Explanation and a strong argument for adopting the best policy in fighting wokism and ignorance in general... telling the truth.
This is really good. I'll add a link to this page in my Race FAQs (https://zerocontradictions.net/FAQs/race-FAQs).
Excellent piece; yeoman's work!
Interesting article. The second article I've read today that talks about Sowell's racism theory. I hadn't known about Sowell until today. Interesting coincidence.
I only hope this article doesn't get you censored or otherwise cause you trouble. Seriously, "they" will likely call you racist for pointing out some of these hereditarianism arguments.
Thanks, I feel.I learned something today.
Don’t you think that the black violent crime rate is much more culturally influenced? And as important to influence? Note, I’m not focusing here on BW disparities but (especially) on the black homicide rate and other index crimes, which have varied a lot and recently. I guess this isn’t especially relevant to your essay, but keep it in mind.
Definitely. 150 years ago, Westerners thought that it made sense to challenge someone to a sword or gun fight if he insulted you. Now this sounds insane. For purely cultural reasons, our attitudes and disposition toward violence are completely different. We're also smarter than people 150 years ago, but I don't think the difference in intelligence is as extreme as the difference in violence. The black homicide rate has also changed a lot over time. Realistically, getting the crime rates of certain demographics down to acceptable levels would probably require draconian interventions that would not be welcomed by the communities that would most benefit from them. But we can still make some improvements to the culture on the margin.
We went draconian as recently as the 1990s, after the permissive 1960s. This is an issue that is less combustible and more likely to help blacks than the IQ differences–and you know I support research and discussion of those. As Sailer reminds us, if blacks could get their violent crime rate down, it would improve a lot of things for many people, especially inner city blacks.
Even in the anti-crime '80s and '90s, we weren't close to how things were in the pre-Warren/Burger Court days when they just made up a bunch of rights for criminals that never previously existed. Not that such was the only fault, as there was broad popular support for completely wrong ideas about crime which remain popular to this day.
If you genuinely care about people then you don't worry about whether the intervention is welcomed or not you just man up and do it.
Good piece as usual. Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but I believe the politics surrounding hereditarianism are simply too challenging for the average person to navigate, even if they inherently suspect that the racism and cultural explanations for racial disparities are dubious at best. This is how I view conservative elites who take the Sowell route of blaming "bad culture." I have a feeling that even they know it's a weak explanation—perhaps even more so than the racism argument—but they need something to avoid addressing the genetic explanation.
Again, maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I think there are too many incentives pushing people away from hereditarianism, especially if you're someone who wishes to operate in polite society with a job in a corporation, media, academia, and so on.
Sebastian Jensen wrote a good piece discussing the politics surrounding hereditarianism if you're interested.
https://open.substack.com/pub/sebjenseb/p/the-politics-of-hereditarianism?r=8vgq9&utm_medium=ios
Excellent
I enjoyed this article, and your previous two pieces on the necessity of hereditarianism in combating wokeness. Belief in biological equality between groups is closer to its root cause than either civil right's law or critical theory, which are both motivated by egalitarianism.
But this doesn't answer why people adopt blank slatism in the first place, and why it has become more popular over time. The evidence against it is overwhelming, as is common sense. It suggests there is a link in the causal chain before blank slatism, and that belief in biological equality is just motivated reasoning.
The fact people are much more comfortable with genetic explanations for disparities which favour people who are not white, or which favour women, is further evidence of an earlier precondition of wokeness. Most Americans would be happy to accept black people are naturally better at basketball and American football, and many that Asians are innately superior at mathematics. And even if they don't accept these explanations, they're less concerned about these disparities.
The history of blank slatism you traced in Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem doesn't explain why Locke or Mill were seduced by this idea when there was no race taboo. Nor is there an explanation for why people can't be convinced to accept group differences by being presented with the evidence they have an innocent cause (heredity). The prime mover is likely an emotional relationship to the villains and victors of history (white men), or a revulsion to inequality generally.
This is a point that came up in my debate with Eric Kaufmann. Wokism stems from the equality thesis and Christian morality. But you can push the question back a step and ask, why did people accept the equality thesis (or Christianity) in the first place? There is obviously some tension between the idea that there is variation in morally loaded traits (like intelligence) and the theological idea that we're all "equals in the eyes of God." So in this sense, Westerners were morally primed for blank slatism, and blank slatism probably won't be defeated without a revolution in values.
In the 20th century state capacity reached the point that redistribution could reach a serious scale and simultaneously ordinary people had significant political power (this is especially true in democracies, but even partially true in non democracies because they require a degree of public consent).
Once it could redistribute, all sorts of excuses were going to be invented as to why people deserve this or that and what’s “fair”. Blacks vote 90/10 in one direction. That’s like picking up a 10 point swing every election just for giving them a few freebies from the government (and more than 10 points if it’s a Democratic primary).
All you need is some justifying rhetoric of why the receiving group shouldn’t feel bad about it and why the paying group should let it happen.
The same logic that can be used to buy off blacks can be used to buy off “workers” or “women” or “rednecks” (the war on poverty focused plenty on Appalachia).
Perhaps more importantly than such direct welfare giveaways, government is mainly in the business of paying credentialed professionals to “uplift” people. What would serious hereditarianism mean for education spending? Not something the teachers union would like.
There is just too much government money tied into blank slate ideology.
This is a very interesting article. I have long been impressed by Sowell’s written works, but some of cultural theories seemed a bit unfulfilling. This article does a good job of explaining why.
I do want to push back on a larger claim that you make. I do not believe that hereditarian explanations of racial inequalities are the most effective means to fight the Woke and the Left in general, as you claim. Even if you explain all differences in outcome between races by genes, that still does not end the Egalitarian argument. There are still huge inequalities within racial groups and national groups. The Left will merely shift to those inequalities within races.
To fully undermine the credibility of the Woke and the Left in general, we need to get to a point where it is widely accepted that all types of inequalities are largely accounted for by genetics (not just race).
Ironically, it is also far easier to move a typical thinking moderate towards hereditarianism by focusing on inequality between individuals within the same group. It is not hard to convince many people that:
1 Some individuals are more intelligent than others.
2 The difference between those individuals is largely, though not entirely, caused by genes.
3 Those differences lead to substantial differences in life outcomes.
4 It is very hard to change to change environmental factors in ways that benefit the less intelligent without also helping those with greater intelligence. So those inequalities are extremely difficult to get rid of without causing substantial harm to society in general.
The same argument can be made for other heritable factors that lead to important differences in life outcomes.
Of source, the Woke will inevitably try to shift the focus to race, where they feel more comfortable, but why let them do so? Focusing the hereditarianism argument on race actually puts the Left in a stronger position. Keep the focus on individuals. That is where their argument falls apart.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-achieving-equality-is-an-impossible
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
Is it easier when you take out race? Certainly not on issues directly related to race (affirmative action, immigration, policing).
But let’s say we try the individual approach.
Let’s take education. If we take hereditarianism and the null hypothesis as true, we are wasting a lot of time, money, and effort in the education sector. But does any parent want to be told “your Johnny’s too dumb to learn to code.”
There is no race issue in South Korea and they have high IQ. However, they believe in environmentalism so hard they engage in endless hours of tedious repetition in cram schools learning little of value to the point where they don’t even have time left to breed.
Environmentalism = hope. It might be stupid false hope that will disappoint again and again, but I get its appeal.
We are a rich society and thus we buy a lot of false hope.
One other problem with Sowell's thesis is the relationship between violence and African ancestry. People with African ancestry have higher rates of violent crime than other groups in the US, the UK, Canada, Brazil, and pretty much everywhere else where we have decent data. In the US where we have the best data, blacks have higher rates of violence crime than whites as far back as this data goes. What could be the cultural explanation of this relationship? All of these places have different cultures and environments, and Africans of course also have different cultures too. I'm not intimately familiar with Sowell's writings, but my guess is that he never considered this problem.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/07/africans-violence-and-genetics/
"If the most intelligent blacks from the West Indies immigrate to New York, then they may have different outcomes from African Americans for entirely genetic reasons. Sowell doesn’t even acknowledge this possibility.
There is an obvious question that Sowell fails to ask: If West Indian black culture produces such good results in New York, why doesn’t the culture work its magic in the West Indies? Countries like Jamaica and Grenada continue to exhibit results that are consistent with lower average IQ."
West Indian immigration to the U.S. wasn't the top 0.001% as in the case with India. More like top 30-50% or something. Just look at how Jamaica has a population of 2.7 million versus 1.2 million Jamaican-Americans. Same story with Barbados, etc.
You have to ask why half or most prominent black Americans have Caribbean heritage when they're only a minority in the black American population and when they're drawn from just the top 30-50% of their country of origin. Look at Colin Powell, Susan Rice, Eric Holder, Kamala Harris, etc. Both Jamaican and Barbadian Americans have incomes higher than the national average too.
But there's a possibility the typical Barbadian and Jamaican is smarter than the typical African-American, because such tiny populations are taking up all kinds of leadership positions within the black American community.
I suggest there is a third choice for challenging wokeness: focus on explaining and defending the toleration of liberty (of person and property), which includes the right to discriminate. Solely promoting hereditarianism is a hard row to hoe, and it could even be embraced as a “natural social injustice” that requires state “correction”.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/woke-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
https://jclester.substack.com/p/toleration-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
https://jclester.substack.com/p/liberty-in-itself-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
https://jclester.substack.com/p/discrimination-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-state-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
Defending the right to discriminate? You mean the very right we heartlessly tossed into a woodchipper sixty years ago for the sake of meeting the demands of the civil rights movement?
Not that I don't think it shouldn't be defended. It should. It's an essential, bedrock right of the free society, and our abandonment of it has been deeply damaging. But it's as least as much an uphill battle as defending hereditarianism.
It doesn't seem to be. For one thing, everyone is entitled to discriminate with his person and property. So there is no apparent implication that non-whites are being picked on and denigrated, as there may be with hereditarianism. That looks like a huge difference.
The entire purpose of the SNCC protests in the '60s was to fight against the right of whites to discriminate with their person and property.
That doesn't seem to undermine the huge propaganda difference between the two approaches.
It completely undermines it. Even from the standpoint of our being a much less racist nation now than in the 1960s, and how perhaps our laws should now take that into consideration, the civil rightists still instinctively oppose such. They fundamentally reject both property rights and the right of free association, for both principled and strategic reasons.
Even if all the so-called "civil rightists" are completely and eternally implacable (which seems implausible), they can be ignored as long as a critical mass of intellectuals convert to the more libertarian position.
Excellent argument and very convincing.
Just one comment about different populations of whites in North America. I don’t think we can conclude that “fringe” Britons were lower IQ. I’ve never been to the southern US but I live in Canada.
The country was heavily settled by Scottish Highlanders. Yet Canada does not seem that different from New England, that got more ethnic English.
If the “fringe” UK is doing poorly today (I have heard this too) it could because many of the smarter ones emigrated, leaving behind a depleted population.