Academia cannot Tolerate linking Race and IQ

Maarten Boudry writes:

Two separate statements have recently been issued by members of Ghent University, in Belgium, calling on the university to rescind the appointment of Nathan Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher. One claims that his views “violate the university’s code of ethics and are morally beneath contempt”.

Cofnas is hated for this:

Any realistic path to victory over wokism requires widespread acceptance of hereditarianism among the elites. As I explained in “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem,” wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination. That’s what wokism is. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to the woke left because the mainstream right accepts the equality thesis but fails to recognize its implications. Woke law and woke institutions are primarily effects rather than causes of elites being woke. Undermining the equality thesis destroys the intellectual basis of wokism and gives the elites a reason to join the right.

According to this paywalled article, Cofnas is threatened with arrest in Belgium.

This is all taboo. Here is the logic. Some people are more intelligent than others. Intelligence is measured by IQ tests. All evolved human traits must be heritable. Numerous studies have shown IQ to be heritable. Heritable traits are very likely to have average differences over groups. Race is real and measurable. Self-identified race is nearly always the same as that identified by DNA tests. There are likely to be racial and sex differences in IQ, with a largely genetic origin.

This information could be used to justify discrimination.

Often this is addressed by attributing differences to culture or discrimination. If so, there could be some legal remedy. But those remedies have never worked.

So the response is to deny that race exists. Or deny that IQ exists. Or deny that human genetic differences exist. Or prohibit anyone from talking about the subject.

AI LLMs are already Sentient

New Quillette essay:

Most of today’s “artificial intelligence” is better described as artificial autocomplete than artificial mind. Large language models are vast pattern-recognisers: they have learned statistical regularities in text, and they are extremely good at reproducing them.

As neuroscientist Christof Koch points out, tools like ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Perplexity can only “regurgitate what other people” have written.

The AI LLMs have more intelligence that the people making these comments.

Artificial general intelligence has been achieved. The latest models are smarter than any individual human.

Whiteness is an Imaginary Thing

So says Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. From WABC:

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is facing criticism after comments resurfaced in which she said there is no “rich cultural heritage” that goes along with “whiteness.”

The New York Democrat made the remarks during a broader discussion about race, identity, and systemic power structures in the United States. Ocasio-Cortez argued that “whiteness” is not a cultural identity in the same way that specific ethnic identities are, but rather a social construct historically tied to power and exclusion.

Others say that there is no such thing as race, but that is not what she is saying.

I am wondering why anyone would say something so ridiculous.

Here is Rich Lowry trashing AOC.

Here is a girl who explains how she learned in college that IQ is meaningless and not studies anymore, and that some nations do better than others for reasons that have nothing to do with race and IQ. She is not happy saying it is culture either. It is the political system, or the money institutions, or the patriarchy.

This is wrong. A lot of national differences are attributable to race and IQ. IQ is measurable and useful. No doubt most of her generation has been brainwashed with falsehoods.

Yes, Genes Make People Different

Here is a copy of a video that got 10 million views:

[MSNBC/MSNOW reporter] 1:26 but there's no scientific evidence to prove that a black woman and a white woman are genetically different. Right? ... I mean this is like government data. ...

1:58 I'll say that again there's there is at least there is no scientific evidence to prove that

She is quite emphatic about it, and could have edited the comment out of the recording if she wanted to.

I am not posting this to make fun of her for not knowing basic biology. She probably took a college class where she was taught this.

We live in a world where DNA tests are commonplace, and the tests can identify race, other biological traits, and close relatives. We see professional athletes who are the sons of other professional athletes. And yet people recoil with horror at the suggestion that genes have something to do with who you are.

Here is another example:

Alison Gopnik is a well-known professor at UC Berkeley and popular writer on developmental child psychology, the Mind and Matter columnist for the Wall Street Journal from 2013-2023.

The biggest known influences on developmental child psychology are surely genetics and IQ. There is an enormous amount of research on this, so she would write about it, right?

No, she denies that any such questions are interesting.

the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities? Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one, given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with, I just think it’s not an interesting question.

No, she cannot really believe this. Any academic study of child development is going to look at why some kids turn out better than others. Otherwise what is the point?

The problem is that the research is too interesting, and too unsettling for many people.

Update: Here is another example of people scared of genetic info: DNA paternity tests are illegal in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Update: Google AI says:

In the modern scientific community, the consensus is that race does not exist as a biological or genetic category among humans.

Major scientific organizations, including the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), have concluded that there is no biological basis for dividing humans into distinct races.

This is obviously false, but enough people say it that some may even believe it.

Swedes are getting dumber

I found this online. Could be fake, I don't know. The cause for getting dumber is probably AI and other technologies.

Smart Babies are Slower to Walk

The most sensitive research topics are genes, race, and IQ. Anything relating all three is forbidden.

The London Telegraph reports:

Late-walking babies ‘may do better in school’

Genes that determine the age of taking first steps linked to educational achievement, suggests study

The study looked at age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants of European ancestry.

This is respectable research because it avoided racial issues, but there is other research that some groups learn to walk sooner.

These studies just find correlations. They do not mean that a particular baby will be smart just because he walks late.

How Europe Became Civilized

I mentioned the theory that Europeans advanced ahead of the rest of the world a millennium ago, based on evolving improved IQ genes. It appears that other factors were also at work.

This new podcast gives some theories of a distinguished Harvard professor:

Joseph Henrich – The Church Accidentally Triggered Industrial Revolution

Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence. Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years. I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error? Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain? The most interesting part of the podcast is Henrich’s explanation of how the Catholic Church unintentionally instigated the Industrial Revolution through the dismantling of intensive kinship systems in medieval Europe.

His theory says that Europe developed a collective IQ that allowed great advancement on many fronts. He actually has a lot of empirical evidence for the details of his theory.

He explains:

Well, so my story is that the rise of 45:28 the Industrial Revolution in Europe has to do with the consolidation of Europe’s collective brain. And one of the things that requires is trust in strangers, 45:36 and at least the beginnings of moral universalism. And it’s that moral universalism that eventually causes the British to say, “We’ve got to stop 45:44 with the slave trade thing.” It’s a moral decision that they made because it’s no longer consistent 45:49 with the changing moral values over time. Right, right. Okay, so we’ve been dancing around the thesis of your book following The Secret, which is The Weirdest People in the World. 46:00 And before we really jump into it, maybe you can give me a summary of what the thesis there is. 

46:06 Yeah. So the first observation is that there’s a great deal of global psychological variation 46:11 around the world. So European, American, Australian populations tend to be highly 46:17 individualistic. They’re inclined towards analytic thinking over holistic thinking. They have a lot of impersonal prosociality, so trust in strangers. They’re against conformity, 46:27 willingness to cooperate with strangers. So the question is, how can we explain the global variation in these features of psychology? And towards the end of the book, 46:35 I actually connect these features of the psychology to economic differences, including the Industrial Revolution that happened in Europe, which reshapes the world. And the 46:45 story is that the key event is the spread of a particular form of Christianity into Europe, 46:51 where the Catholic Church- what becomes the Catholic Church- systematically dismantles the intensive kinship systems in Europe, leading to small monogamous nuclear families. 47:00 And this transformation leads to the creation of new institutions. So by the high Middle Ages, you get the rise of guilds, which are voluntary groups of craftsmen and self-help societies, 47:09 because people don’t have their families to rely on. People begin moving around. There’s occupational sorting into different occupations. You get urbanization rising. Charter towns are 47:19 on the rise. Universities pop up. New kinds of monasteries pop up. And then Europe begins 47:24 to urbanize, and you get new kinds of law that are based around the individual. Contract law. 47:30 And then eventually this leads to a lot more innovation because ideas are flowing around Europe and then eventually the Industrial Revolution. So that’s the argument in a nutshell. 47:38 Can you explain again what exactly the Church did which led to the kin-based existing system breaking down? Yeah. So the Church outlaws polygyny, 47:49 and so that stops elite males from having multiple wives and concubines and whatnot, and creating kind of a giant family through that. It outlaws cousin marriage going all the way out to sixth 47:59 cousins at some point, and that included spiritual kin and other kinds of non-genetic relatives as 48:06 well as the cousins. It frees up inheritance, so it has inheritance by testimony rather than normal 48:12 patrilineal inheritance. And a simple example here is in most societies, you inherit access 48:18 to land corporately, which means you and your brothers and stuff all own the land. And it might 48:24 be your uncle is actually in charge of the land, your father’s brother. And so you can’t sell it, you can’t move it around, and you’re also tied to it. It’s where your ancestors are buried, 48:32 and so there’s this big importance of land. So the Church allows people to give land to the Church, 48:37 the Church becomes the largest landowner in Europe, because you can do it by testament. 48:43 So those are just some of the examples of the ways it transforms the family structure, and eventually you get these monogamous nuclear families which are basically unheard of around the world, at 48:52 least if you look at the anthropological record. And you can really see this when you can compare, individuals can move to European cities as individuals or nuclear families. In China when 49:01 you move to the city, you maintain contacts with the folks back home in the village, and people flow back and forth and you get these little enclaves of different clans and stuff in 49:11 the cities, the connections. And this is really important because your ancestors, and there’s rituals that have to be done back in the home community. But Christianity 49:19 does away with all those ancestor rituals.

In short, his evidence is that Christianity was crucial, although perhaps not for the reasons you might guess.

The host calls it "accidental" because there is no proof that the Church had the foresight to understand the long-term implications of its policies. I would not use that term, as they were very deliberate Church that it went to a lot of trouble to enforce.

If Henrich is correct, then the Medieval Catholic Church was acting for the good of humanity in a way that no one is doing today. We do not even have the legal and political frameworks for such actions today. Anyone making such arguments would be laughed at.

These issues should get a lot more attention. If we can determine what made Western Civilization great, then we should celebrate that, and learn from it so we can make it greater.

European IQ Gains and Industrialization

Economic historian Gregory Clark proposes this theory:

An actual genetic change in British peoples’ cognitive traits occurred which led to British people leaping ahead economically

This genetic change was common around northern Europe

The change in the status-fertility correlation in the 19th/early 20th century caused underperformance of British economic outcomes

There are other theories for British success.

The above article claims that the genetic data does not explain large enough IQ increases to explain the huge British advances.

This does not settle the matter. I have posted other theories. Maybe there are other IQ genes. Maybe the IQ of the elites went up more than the overall average. Maybe IQ was one of several contributing factors.

My suspicion is that genes for civilized behavior were crucial. Possibly also genes made Europeans more amenable to Christianity.

For current info on IQ, see this book review:

The Science of Human Intelligence (hereinafter SHI) is the most comprehensive and up-to-date textbook on human intelligence now available. It is lavishly and usefully illustrated, and includes hundreds of full references to the original research on all key concepts. It is a serious book for serious students, but has been carefully edited to be fully accessible to non-specialists.

The lead author, Richard J. Haier, is one of the world’s top experts on the neuroscience of intelligence, and asks all the right questions: Is IQ real? Can it be increased? Are there different kinds of intelligence? How does the brain work? Which is more important: nature or nurture? Are all groups equal? Perhaps inevitably, the section on race is incomplete, sometimes timid, and includes a shocking error, but it clearly recognizes that race differences in IQ could have genetic causes.

Believe in Racehorse Theory

In Pres. Trump's speech, he mentioned "if you believe in the racehorse theory", then Elon Musk's son will be smart.

He said something similar in 2020, according to Rolling Stone magazine:

It doesn’t take a secret decoder ring to understand what Trump was aiming at in Bemidji. The idea that white Minnesotans, like racehorses, have superior, inheritable genes is white supremacy — embraced not as a cultural construct, but as if it were based in hard science. In another moment, Trump’s remarks would have made for a front-page scandal. But on Friday, as America reeled from the death of a feminist icon whose departure threatens to accelerate a generation-long right-wing takeover of America’s highest court, as well as from a death toll in the coronavirus pandemic that has surpassed 200,000, the president’s open embrace of eugenics hardly sparked notice.

But it is time to wake up to the threat before us: We have an aspiring authoritarian president who romanticizes martial law and dreams of locking up his political opponents. Trump does not recoil from the most dangerous ideology of the 20th century, but instead celebrates it on the campaign trail in increasingly explicit terms. These may be dark times in America. But if Trump is not stopped at the ballot box in November, our democracy is in plain danger of fading to black.

Some professors argue:

This insidious idea has provided the foundation for some of the most unjust, repressive, and inhumane regimes in human history. This is why it matters.

The professors do not give any evidence that the theory is wrong. Unly that is leads to uncomfortable ideas.

Here is the scientific data

Whether differences in intelligence are due to people’s different genes or to their different environments has long been contentious. One answer to this question comes from twin studies and adoption studies. By comparing outcomes for identical twins (who share all their genes) with those of fraternal twins and with unrelated children, one can deduce the relative influences of genes in comparison with “shared environment” (all environmental factors shared by siblings growing up together) and un-shared environment (everything else, which can include things like randomness in embryonic development). Such studies give high estimates for the genetic contribution to differences in intelligence, such that the heritability of IQ is typically estimated as around 70%.

A different method is to look directly at genes, through Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), which sample large numbers of genes in large numbers of people, attempting to measure and add up the affect of each gene on IQ. This typically gives much lower estimates for the effect of genes, and the marked difference between estimates from twin studies and those from GWAS studies is referred to as the “missing heritability” problem.

The article goes on to explain that there are a large number of genes with small effects. They might have to sample 100 million people with genetic and IQ tests to get accurate estimates on what specific genes are contributing to intelligence. For now, we just know that there is an overall heritibility.

Humanity is in Genetic Decline

New paper:

Fitness, Mutational Load, and Eugenics
Matthew J. Maxwell

In 2016 geneticist Michael Lynch published a perspective in Genetics arguing that human physical and mental performance is declining at a rate of 1% per generation (Lynch 2016a). ... because medical interventions, such as “surgical procedures, pharmaceuticals, nutritional supplements, and physical and psychiatric therapies” have mitigated the effects of selection on “bad genes,” the incidence of deleterious mutations (mutational load) in the human population has, and will continue, to rise.

Lynch is not a fringe figure in the genetics community. He is former president of the Genetics Society of America, ...

The paper says this would lead to eugenics, and he is against that. He also disagrees with the reasoning.

Lynch avoided a policy recommendation:

What will it take to promote serious discourse on the slowly emerging, long-term negative consequences of policies jointly promoted by political, social, and religious factors? Should such a discussion even be pursued or should the process of accelerated genetic change simply be allowed to run its course — a slow walk down the path to what Hamilton (2001) called ‘the great Planetary Hospital’?”

No serious discourse is likely. I do not know what it would take.

Failing the Mirror Self-recognition Test

This is old news. A 2010 story:

The performance of young children on the ‘mirror self-recognition test’ varies hugely across cultures, a new study has shown. This is the test that involves surreptitiously putting a mark on a child’s forehead and then seeing how they react when presented with their mirror image. Attempts by the child to touch or remove the mark are taken as a sign that he or she recognises themselves in the mirror. Studies in the West suggest that around half of all 18-month-olds pass the test, rising to 70 per cent by 24 months. Chimps, orangutans, dolphins and elephants have also been shown to pass the test, and there’s recent debate over whether monkeys can too.

They found that non-western kids do poorly, with kids as old as 6 flunking it in Kenya.

Does this mean that Kenyan IQ is lower than that of chimps and dolphins? No, I don't think so. Interesting anyway.

The Failure of Psychology

Adam Mastroianni podcast:

Ever since I started my training in experimental psychology, I've been haunted by a doubt: how do we know that all of our work amounts to anything? Are we even headed in the right direction? I propose five tests to answer this question, and I show that psychology passes one and fails the other four. We're stuck in the adolescence of our field because we haven't yet discovered a paradigm. There s a way to cross that threshold, but it requires entertaining some strange ideas.

He says that if clinical psychologists really had useful skills that they learned, then they would be able to outperfeorm amateurs in an objective study. But this has been studied, and psychologists do no better than those with no training.

These studies are so embarrassing that they have now been declared unethical.

He also says that the Big Five personality traits, a high point of serious psychology research, does no better than enneagrams. But both do better than Myers-Briggs.

About 30% of psychologists subscribe to discredited Freudian ideas.

He says that for Psychology to become a science, it needs a theory for how the mind works, and rules for obtaining information.

The more scientific parts of psychology are in testing for intelligence, personality traits, and mental disorders.

Russell T. Warne writes a Quillette essay on how IQ testing gets bad press.

Because of IQ’s distorted image, some of the most well-established facts about intelligence are unknown outside of the field:

A standardised test administered at the age of twelve can predict who will earn a PhD, register a patent, or achieve another major accomplishment by midlife.
Smarter people tend to live longer than average.
For most jobs, IQ is one of the best predictors of employee performance.
Genetic factors are a stronger influence on people’s IQs in adulthood than in childhood.
Some of the same genetic variants that are more common in low-IQ individuals are also more common in people with some mental-health conditions.

He notes that leftist journalists like to deny that IQ is meaningful, but they obviously do not believe what they are saying, because they happily report some IQ stories such as lead exposure lowering IQ. It is a little like those denying that race exists, while also arguing for racial reparations.

The upsetting thing about IQ is its relation to genetic determinism. People think that IQ is determines by genes, is innate and immutable, and determines life outcomes. Furthermore it is correlated with race, sex, nationality, and religion. That makes IQ scary.

Trump believes in Racehorse Theory

SciAm published this essay:

Eugenics was debunked as both biologically unsound and morally repugnant decades ago, but Donald Trump has repackaged its key lies to appeal to 21st-century American anxieties. In his worldview, there are hereditary haves and have-nots. Biology is used, not to draw attention to what all humans have in common, but instead to manufacture artificial divisions. It is a tool of dehumanization, meant to reinforce the notion that some people are inherently broken, inherently evil, inherently other.

There are hereditary haves and have-nots. Not everyone has the same inborn strengths and talents.

Sure, biology, like every other science, explores differences. For example, everything you eat is based on scientists having studied differences between animals, plants, feed, etc.

Appreciating human differences is what humanity is all about.

A rising tide of anti-eugenic scientists took issue with the biological myths undergirding his [Harry Laughlin's] vision. Genetic research on plants, fruit flies, livestock and humans revealed more and more about how chromosomes and genes worked. The human genome was found to be far more complex than eugenicists anticipated. There simply were no genes for crime or poverty, let alone leadership or honesty.

This is from a science magazine, so there ought to be scientific references to back up such assertions. Nope.

Crime and poverty are known to be correlated with IQ and other heritable personality traits. Hundreds of genes for these traits have been found. There is even a company that offers genetic screening of embryos.

He has been spouting this nonsense for decades. In 2007 Larry King was a recipient of Trump’s hereditary lesson. In touting his work for the how-to company the Learning Annex on King’s show, Trump said about talent and business success: “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”

Yes, some horses have the genes to be better racehorses. I never heard it called racehorse theory, but it makes sense.

I have to assume that SciAm would provide some evidence to refute the theory, if it could.

Another Disastrous Harris Interview

Kamala Harris may the dopiest candidate ever. She makes Sarah Palin and Joe Biden look like geniuses.

Here she is, in her only solo interview, from a very friendly reporter:

RUHLE: Madam Vice President, you just laid out your economic vision for the future.

HARRIS: Yes.

RUHLE: But, still, there are lots of Americans who don’t see themselves in your plans. For those who say, these policies aren’t for me, what do you say to them?

HARRIS: Well, if you are hardworking, if you have the dreams and the ambitions and the aspirations of what I believe you do, you’re in my plan.

I have to tell you, I really love and am so energized by what I know to be the spirit and character of the American people. We have ambition. We have aspirations. We have dreams. We can see what’s possible. We have an incredible work ethic.

But not everyone has the access to the opportunities that allow them to achieve those things. But we don’t lack for those things. But not everyone gets handed stuff on a silver platter. And so my vision for the economy — I call it an opportunity economy — is about making sure that all Americans, wherever they start, wherever they are, have the ability to actually achieve those dreams and those ambitions, which include, for middle-class families, just being able to know that their hard work allows them to get ahead, right? ...

Look, my mother raised my sister and me. She worked hard. She saved up. By the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy our first home. ...

For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people.

Not once has she given a straight answer to a straight question, or even said anything that makes any sense.

Funny how she never mentions that her mother bought that home in Canada.

The only issue where she has made herself clear is that she wants to abolish the Senate filibuster and pass a national law to legalize abortion in all nine months. Maybe even after birth also, she refuses to say. She is trying hard for the DEI and single childless catlady vote, but why would anyone else vote for her?

She got put in because Biden is not mentally capable of doing the job, but Biden is must more mentally capable than Harris. Apparently her support is based on her being a Deep State puppet, who will do as she is told.

RUHLE: But tariffs aren’t unique to President Trump. President Biden has tariffs in place. He’s actually looking to potentially implement more. Where do you come out on, is there a good tariff, a bad tariff?

HARRIS: Well, part of it is, you don’t just throw around the idea of just tariffs across the board. And that’s part of the problem with Donald Trump.

I — frankly, I’m going to — and I say this in all sincerity. He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues. And one must be serious and have a plan, and a real plan, ...

No, she says nothing with sincerity. She appears to not even know what a tariff is. She has no explanation for Biden continuing the Trump tariffs, or what her tariff policy will be.

Now Harris has a 30-second ad saying that she will secure the border, and her plan is to hire more border agents. Really? Does she even know that the border crisis was created by the Harris-Biden administration issuing dozens of executive orders undoing what Pres. Trump did? She is famous for being the Border Czar who never went to the border, so goes to the border now and promises to do something? This is unbelievably lame.

California aims to pay Racial Reparations

AP reports:

California lawmakers this week passed some of the nation’s most ambitious legislation aimed at atoning for a legacy of racist policies that drove disparities for Black people, from housing to education to health.

None of the bills would provide widespread direct payments to African Americans. The state Legislature instead approved proposals allowing for the return of land or compensation to families whose property was unjustly seized by the government, and issuing a formal apology for laws and practices that have harmed Black people. ...

The Democratic governor hasn’t weighed in on most of the bills, but he signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation. ...

Democratic Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is Black, called his bill to issue a formal apology for discrimination “a labor of love.” ...

Newsom approved a law in 2020 creating a first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations proposals. New York state and Illinois have since followed suit with similar legislation. The California group released a final report last year with more than 100 recommendations for lawmakers.

Newsom signed a law last month requiring school districts that receive state funding for a career education program to collect data on the performance of participating students by race and gender.

California never had slavery, and as far as I know, never had racist policies that drove disparities for Black people.

The schools will collect that will show racial disparities. Sure. But California did lower the IQ of Blacks, and paying reparations will not raise their IQ.

Kamala Harris CNN Interview

I watched the CNN interview of Kamala Harris and Walz. Part 1 is here.

They may be the lowest IQ candidates every. She could not explain what she wants to do as President. She could not give a straight answer to a question. She could not explain her flip-flops.

She kept saying that her values had not changed, but she cannot explain those values.

Her biggest problem is that she cannot decide whether to run on the Biden record, or to be a candidate of change.

I think that her performance was worse that Biden's in his June Trump dedate. Biden at least seemed like a real person, but a little senile. Harris seems like someone who has never had anything substantive to say about anything.

The Atlantic Notices Race Realism

The Atlantic magazine reports:

That term—noticer—has become a thinly veiled shorthand within segments of the right to refer to someone who subscribes to “race science” or “race realism,” the belief that racial inequities are biological.

I think he means that racial differences are largely biological, but not entirely.

Take Nick Fuentes, a 26-year-old white nationalist whose many followers call themselves “Groypers.” He has repeatedly argued that white people are intellectually superior, and praised people who believe in race science. In a single podcast interview in 2022, Fuentes said that “there is a genetic basis” for Black people committing criminal acts and that Black people are “more antisocial and have higher incidences of sociopathy and on average a lower IQ.”

If true, being antisocial and sociopathy might be a lot more important than lower IQ.

Race science is wrapped up in the right’s attack on Kamala Harris as the “DEI candidate.” The implication is that Harris’s success can only be attributed to her race and gender, not her intellect or experience. To a race-science proponent, that’s just what the data say.

Can there be any doubt about that? Left-wing support for Harris nearly always mentions her race and sex. The DNC speeches emaphasized it a lot. Republicans, not so much. Nobody speaks highly of her intellect or experience.

No matter how hard people try, however, race cannot be reduced to the results of an IQ test. There is more to the complicated genetic, cultural, economic, and historical realities of race than a few lines on a chart. When I asked Sailer to explain the links between race and intelligence, he said that he doesn’t “see strong reasons to assume that intelligence is all that different from a trait like height, which is clearly driven by both genes and environment.” He cited regions of Serbia and South Sudan as having tall populations despite being relatively poor, suggesting that health and nutrition are not the primary explanation for average national height.

Genetics may play some role in the average height in these two countries, but intelligence is not like height. As three prominent psychologists have written, “Modern DNA science has found hundreds of genetic variants that each have a very, very tiny association with intelligence, but even if you add them all together they predict only a small fraction of someone’s IQ score.” Furthermore, that race is not a biological phenomenon is the consensus view among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists, building on generations of empirical research.

Here is how those psychologists summarize the argument:

1) Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is a meaningful construct that describes differences in cognitive ability among humans.

2) Individual differences in intelligence are moderately heritable.

3) Racial groups differ in their mean scores on IQ tests.

4) Discoveries about genetic ancestry have validated commonly used racial groupings.

5) On the basis of points 1 through 4, it is natural to assume that the reasons for racial differences in IQ scores are themselves at least partly genetic.

They accept steps 1-4, but not step 5.

To escape that conclusion, a lot of academics deny that race exists at all.

If Harris is elected, she will not deny race. She has supported paying racial reparations. You can be sure that racial animosity will get much worse.

Fluoride in Water Lowers IQ

AP reports:

A U.S. government report expected to stir debate concluded that fluoride in drinking water at twice the recommended limit is linked with lower IQ in children.

The report, based on an analysis of previously published research, marks the first time a federal agency has determined — “with moderate confidence” — that there is a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids.

The John Birch Society was famous for questioning fluoride in the drinking water. Apparently they were right.

Cofnas Fired for criticizing Diversity

The London Telegraph reports:

Nathan Cofnas, an early career research fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, is reported to have had his research affiliation with Emmanuel College terminated.

The lecturer had said that in a meritocracy, “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” and dismissed racial equality as “based on lies”. ...

“The committee first considered the meaning of the blog and concluded that it amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of diversity, equality and inclusion policies,” the newspaper quoted the letter as saying.

“The committee concluded that the core mission of the college was to achieve educational excellence and that diversity and inclusion were inseparable from that. The ideas promoted by the blog therefore represented a challenge to the college’s core values and mission.” ...

a 2019 article by Mr Cofnas claiming that there were “gaps” in IQ between different racial groups.

No academic freedom anymore.

If Cofnas were wrong on the facts, someone would write an academic paper proving him wrong. Nope. They fire him because he is right.

I have previously mentioned Cofnas, such as here, on Jewish evolutionary strategy. I do not think he is always right, but he addresses important issues with reason and data.

In a survey of taboo questions, the intersection of race and IQ tops the list.

AAAS uses Neanderthals for Racism Lesson

AAAS Science, the leading USA science journal, reports:

Anthropologists take up arms against ‘race science’

At their annual meeting, biological anthropologists began to build a playbook to thwart racist misuse of research

Anthropologists are fighting the erroneous notion that humans are divided into a few separate races. They emphasize that human genes and populations show complex patterns of variation and mixing.

LOS ANGELES—Calling someone a Neanderthal was once an insult, meaning you thought of them as a knuckle-dragging brute. “[Neanderthals] have always been used as a mirror for thinking about ourselves … projecting things we don’t like about ourselves onto another group of humans,” said Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder, last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) here.

As scientists have learned more about Neanderthals’ cultural sophistication and abilities, though, their public image has gotten a glow-up. For some people, their status was elevated still further by the widely publicized discovery in 2007 that some Neanderthals carried genes suggesting they had red hair and light skin. These ancient inhabitants of Europe and Asia became coded as white, and on social media some people began to claim Neanderthal ancestry as a mark of racial superiority.

Such misuse of science spurred researchers to organize an AABA symposium devoted to combating race science, or the idea that genes and other biological variation can be used to sort humans into races—some superior to others.

They sure picked a funny example, because nearly all the Neanderthal science articles show a bias against them. They nearly always refer to Neanderthal as archaic and extinct, and the African hominins as modern humans. In fact, according to the latest research, the Neanderthals were at aleast as modern and human as the Africans.

The Wikipedia article on History of the chair used to say:

"In Sub-Saharan Africa, chairs were not in use before introduction by Europeans."

The editors removed this for being racist.

So the descendants of Neanderthals were the only ones to ever invent chairs.

The AAAS article goes on to aruge for retracting and censoring scinentific that shows group differences in intelligence.