In modern-day America, anyone arguing that the difference in
average IQ between blacks and whites, or the difference in the distribution of
IQ between men and women, at least partly explains the difference between
average black and white income or between male and female numbers in some
academic fields, risks being accused of racism or sexism. Striking examples of
the possible consequence of such an accusation are provided by the cases of James
Watson and Lawrence Summers. Watson, who received a Nobel prize for his role in
the discovery of DNA, arguably the most important biological breakthrough of
the century, was so careless as to tell the Times
that he was
"inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because
"all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is
the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He was
attacked ferociously for the statement, accused of prejudice, stripped of
titles and positions.
Prejudice is belief held without evidence. Watson’s view
might well have been mistaken —I now think it was, although at the time I did
not — but there was evidence to support it, since the average measured IQ in
African countries was strikingly below that in European countries. His attackers,
so far as I could tell, had no evidence in their support and were acting on
pure prejudice.
Summers, then president of Harvard, commenting in an
academic talk on the small numbers of women in elite academic positions in
fields such as mathematics, offered several possible explanations. One of them was
that although the average IQ of men and women was about the same, female IQ had
a tighter distribution than male IQ. That would imply fewer women than men far
out on the upper tail of the distribution, where Harvard math and physics
professors are located. Summers was fiercely attacked for mentioning that
possibility, forced out of his position at least in part as a result. Again there
was quite a lot of evidence for the claim, no evidence against.
The result of suppressing arguments for an unpopular view is
that nobody honestly knows what conclusion would come out of an open debate,
hence whether or not the view is true, although many people may find it prudent
to pretend to. Until very recently, the only convincing argument I had seen
against the claim of lower African genetic IQ was one offered by Thomas
Sowell in his Ethnic America. He observed
that the average family income of immigrants to the U.S. from the West Indies reached
the U.S. average in one generation. West Indians are blacker than
Afro-Americans in both their genes and their skin color, so if Afro-Americans
did badly because of their African genes, West Indian immigrants should do
worse, and similarly if the reason was discrimination. Sowell offered instead an
explanation based on the different cultures produced by differences between
West Indian and North American slavery.
I have now found more and even better arguments against the
hereditarian explanation of racial differences. Chanda Chisala is a Zambian
immigrant who appears, like Sowell, happy to engage in arguments on
unfashionable subjects. His main topic is not Afro-American IQ but African IQ. He
offers several independent lines of evidence to show that its low measured
value, variously claimed to be 70 or 80, must be due to African environment not
African genes. His evidence is of two sorts: The academic performance of
African immigrants in first world countries, where they are exposed to a first
world educational environment, and the performance of Africans on two games,
checkers and Scrabble.
U.K. data on student performance is available not merely for
racial groups conventionally defined but for linguistic subgroups within those
populations. Africans on average do not particularly well, but many of the
African subgroups, including both the Igbo and the Yoruba, the two largest
Nigerian tribes, substantially outperform the native English, in some cases East
Asians as well.
His U.S. evidence is more anecdotal. One year, a single
college applicant in the U.S. was accepted by all eight Ivy League schools. He
was a Nigerian immigrant. Another Nigerian immigrant is a serial entrepreneur
who invented a computer application, founded a company, and sold it to Apple
for an estimated billion dollars. Black
students in elite universities are African or West Indian immigrants or their
children in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the population. In
a number of cases where data happen to be available, black refugee immigrants,
not native speakers of English, substantially outperform in school native
Afro-Americans. That is the opposite of the result one would expect if Africans
were genetically inferior in intelligence to whites, since Afro-Americans,
unlike Africans, have significant white ancestry.
His second line of argument is that African performance in
checkers and Scrabble competition would be impossible if African average IQ
were anything like as low as the estimates. Both games are, at the high end,
heavily g loaded. While success in Scrabble at low levels depends in part on
vocabulary, the critical skill in high level plays is the ability to do the mental
arithmetic needed to decide which of alternative plays will give the player the
most points and his opponent the fewest. Top white players have very high IQ
and many of them are mathematicians. Yet a substantial fraction of the world’s
top players of checkers, including some at the very highest level, are African,
and a substantial fraction of the top players of English language scrabble,
including at least one world champion, are from Nigeria.
In 2015, of the ten top players in the French Scrabble
championship, three were from France, three from Gabon, three more from other
African countries. Gabon is an ex-French colony with a population of 1.7
million. If one believes Richard Lynn’s figures on its IQ average and standard
deviation, there should not be a single person in the country close to the intelligence
level required to be a top Scrabble player. Similar arguments make it very
nearly impossible that Nigeria could have as many of the world’s top players of
English Scrabble as it does if his estimates were close to correct.
Africans do not do nearly as well at chess, although they do
not do noticeably worse than other racial groups. Chisala’s explanation is that
for chess, unlike Scrabble or checkers, playing at the highest level requires
extensive instruction in the literature of the game, so much so that Bobby
Fisher found it necessary to learn Russian in order to read the Russian chess
literature. Few Africans have the opportunity for that sort of training. Russia
has dominated modern chess competition at the highest level not because
Russians are smarter than other people but because the Soviet Union chose to
put a lot of resources into subsidizing the training of its chess players for
purposes of international prestige. They put resources into checkers
for the same reason, only to find their dominance challenged by players from
Africa.
The evidence Chisala offers does not tell us whether the
average African genetic IQ is 95, 100, or 105, but it is clearly not 70 or even
80. That conclusion is one that those skeptical of the hereditarian position will
be happy with. Other parts of his argument are not. In the process of arguing
that Scrabble performance at the high end requires a high IQ, Chisala takes on the
issue of the effect of differences between the male and female IQ distribution,
the same issue that got Lawrence Summers in trouble.
A possible explanation of why top physicists or
mathematicians are almost all men is that women are culturally discouraged from
entering such fields or discriminated against in them. That does not work for
Scrabble, since more women than men play it and nearly half the qualifiers to
the North American Scrabble championships are women. Yet only about 5% of the highest
rated players are women and no woman yet has won the world championship. As
Chisala puts it, “This rising gender disparity as you go higher in expert
Scrabble is a big win for the hereditarian corner of the gender-and-intelligence
debate.”
He goes on to write:
However, as we have seen many times in this research, a big
win for the hereditarian side comes with a hidden pact with the devil: a
victory in the gender-and-intelligence debate logically implies a decisive loss
in the race-and-intelligence debate (you truly can’t have your cake and eat it
in this world). How is it that black Africans, who (on average) are supposed to
be about 30 IQ points below white women and supposedly have lower visuospatial
or mathematical intelligence and even lower variance in their intelligence
distribution, can achieve what has been accepted as statistically impossible
for white women – outperforming white men – …
Chisala’s evidence that the genetic IQ of Africans is comparable
to that of whites raises the puzzle of why Afro-American IQ apparently is not.
One obvious possibility is that, as in the African case, observed lower IQ is
due to environment rather than genetics. Chisala rejects that explanation, in
part on evidence that the children of wealthy American blacks do less well than
the children of poor whites, despite what one would expect to be a more
favorable environment, as well as on evidence that African refugees, from a
much less favorable environment, outperform American blacks. He offers instead
a genetic explanation. His conjecture is that a feature of African genetics makes
Africans more vulnerable than whites to unfavorable mutations and that such
mutations were imported into the Afro-American gene pool early on by crosses
with poor whites. I found his arguments for that conjecture less convincing
than his arguments against the genetic inferiority of Africans, which leaves
the puzzle of Afro-America IQ, for me, still unsolved.
Part of what I like about Chisala is that he has taught me
something I did not know — having read him I am now confident that African
genetic IQ is not significantly lower than European. Another thing I like about
him is his approach to arguing. He treats Lynn and Jensen, probably the two
most prominent of the hereditarian scholars, not as wicked racists but as able
scholars who have, for understandable reasons, reached mistaken conclusions.
Even when he finds Jensen misstating evidence in a way that makes it appear to
support his position, he treats it as a single mistake in the work of a
generally careful and competent scholar.
This is connected with a related feature of his work that
helps make it more persuasive than other attacks on the hereditarian view of
racial IQ — he takes the other side’s arguments seriously. The usual attacks I
see on the hereditarian position are ones such as the claim that some races
cannot have a lower IQ than others because there is no such thing as race, true
in some sense of “race” but irrelevant to questions about the average IQ and
average outcomes of races as conventionally defined, or ones that provide some
evidence against the position but not very strong evidence, the sort of arguments
that might or might not stand up against obvious criticisms.
Each of Chisala’s webbed essays is followed by a long thread
of comments, many trying to explain away his evidence. He responds, usually in
the next essay, by carefully examining the explanation and showing why it
cannot be adequate. It is because he approaches the subject in that way that he
does a more convincing job of rebutting hereditarian arguments on race than
other critics.
The rebuttals are sometimes entertaining as well as
convincing. Responding to the argument that Africans who decide to migrate to
the U.K. are a select group, much more intelligent than the African average, he
offers statistics showing that many are poor, few have high end careers. He
also writes, responding to one critic:
I do not really know how it works in
Jamaica, but I am quite confident that realizing that life is better in a very
rich country than in your poor country is never exactly the most g-loaded
epiphany among Africans.
