I will post three different studies below which substantially back up the hard hereditarian thesis of the B-W IQ gap. These studies do not make me happy; in fact, for a long time, I delayed putting them up on site. Nevertheless, whatever your position is on the B-W IQ gap, it should be important to examine all of the evidence for both sides.
Unless you are an ideologue though. In that case, don’t bother, just examine the evidence for your side, and don’t read any from the other side. Hell, that’s what most people do anyway. C’mon, join the crowd! Be like everybody else! Be a Normie! Don’t be a weirdo! Don’t be left out! Step right up and starting acting like an ideologue right now! What are you missing out on, other then social rejection?
Study 1:
Rowe examined the 1994 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health’s survey of a representative sample of youths, with intentional oversampling of Black children of highly educated parents. The mean age for the entire sample (9,830 Whites, 4,017 Blacks, and 119 mixed-race individuals) was 16 years. The Black adolescents averaged a lower birth weight, a lower verbal IQ, and a higher number of sexual partners than did the White adolescents.
For each characteristic, the mixed-race mean fell between the means of the other two groups. Rowe found the social class explanation of the group differences “unconvincing” because, of the three variables, only verbal IQ showed a moderate correlation with social class, and statistically adjusting for it left the main findings unchanged. He also rejected the “discrimination based on skin tone” hypothesis because it was eliminated by deliberately selecting only those mixed-race adolescents who were judged by their interviewers to be Black based on their physical appearance.
Notice how the 1/2 Black group scored exactly halfway between both the White and Black groups on three things:
Verbal Memory: This one is somewhat easier to swallow this one than the others.
Number of sexual partners: This one is going to upset people a lot, and there is going to be a lot of resistance to this idea because it directly ties behavior biologically and genetically to race, which is exactly the thing that the Race Deniers hate more than anything else. They can even handle the intelligence stuff better than the behavioral thesis. People are used to the race-IQ argument, and many folks have made some sort of peace with it, but once you start saying that genes and biology cause the races to behave differently, you are going to set up a forest fire of protest.
Lower birth weight: I have long known that Blacks were associated with lower birth weight, and as an environmentalist, I was cheered by this because it seemed so environmental. And if it was environmental, we could perhaps increase the birth weight of Black babies. This would be important, as low birth weight is associated with all sorts of bad outcomes, including lower IQ.
However, note that this study found that Blacks had the lowest birth weight, Whites had the highest and the half-Blacks had birth weights between the two. That is a disturbing finding that is really making me start to question my environmental-low birth weight link. And it is so much worse when the study seems to rule out an environmental influence quite well.
But the implications don’t seem to make sense. The logical conclusion here is that there something biological in Blacks – something in Black genes – that is somehow causing the low birth weights. Now this is hard for me to comprehend because I am wondering how genes could possibly effect something like birth weight, which looks so environmental on the surface.
Similarly, Stanley and Porter (1967) found the scores on the SAT of all-Black college students in Georgia were too low to be predictive of college grades, thereby raising the question of whether test scores on Black Americans are as valid as those for White Americans. However, when Hills and Stanley (1970) gave the School and College Ability Test (a much easier test to pass) to similar students, they found that their scores were normally distributed and did predict college grades, though the average for the Black college students was at about the 50th percentile on eighth-grade national norms.
This study made me wince. The first sentence reads well for Blacks when it says that SAT test scores do not accurately predict test scores in Black college students. This implies that tests on Blacks are not doing what they are supposed to do – that is, predict success later in school. However, the reason given for this is painful. The reason we cannot predict Black college grades from SAT scores is that the Black SAT scores were so low that they were not usable as a source to predict later grades. Ouch. That was painful.
However, the School and College Ability Test or SCAT did predict Black college scores well, but the reason it predicted scores better was that it was easier to take so as a result of the simpler test, the Black scores were high enough to adequately predict college grades. Ouch. The last half of the sentence is also painful. The average Black college student’s score on the SCAT was the same as White 8th graders. Black college students were testing at the same level as White 8th graders. Yikes.
The average IQ scores of around 70 for Black Americans in certain areas of the Deep South of the United States where the degree of White admixture is significantly below the general average (Chakraborty et al., 1992; Parra et al., 1998) are also consistent with the hereditarian interpretation of the effects of hybridization. An average IQ of 71 was found for all of the Black children in an entire school district from a rural county in Georgia; the average White IQ in the same county was 101 (Jensen, 1977).
This one was hard to take for a number of reasons. First of all, pure Blacks in the US South were scoring ~70 on IQ tests. This is approximately the same score as Lynn and Vanhanen found for pure Blacks in Africa. This conclusion was the source of a lot of conflict because so many people could not believe that Black Africans could possibly have IQ’s that low.
Another study by Nesbitt who cherry-picked scores about as much as Lynn and Vanhanen did came up with an average IQ of 80 for African Blacks. This conclusion was seen as more palatable, but I was always dubious of it, as I did not think that Black African scores were that high. I didn’t think they were 70 either. I thought they were in between at ~75. But it looks like Lynn’s African 70 IQ may have been correct after all, which is painful to believe.
It is also quite painful to believe that there are Black populations in the US with IQ’s as low as 70. That is far too low of an IQ and that group is going to have all sorts of problems adjusting to modern society. They will also be quite difficult to teach in school.
White students in the very same county had IQ’s of 101. That’s harsh. A 30 point IQ difference between Whites and Blacks in that county is going to have same very real everyday consequences.
First of all, it is hard to have friendship;s with people who have more than 20 IQ points difference from you because the lower scoring person will not understand the higher scoring one and the higher scoring one will easily get bored of the lower scoring person. So Blacks and Whites will find it hard to make friends in that county.
For intimate relationships, it is best to have no more than a 12 point difference. Now, it doesn’t have to be that way. My parents had a 21 point gap and they were married forever and a day, but my father while less intelligent, was still a very smart man. But this means that not only will Whites and Blacks in that county find it hard to make friends, but they will find it even harder to date, become lovers, or marry.
Also, with that massive 30 point gap, Whites will succeed much more than Blacks in school and employment and will have much more money and property than Blacks. In short, Whites will be much more successful at life than Blacks in that county. Blacks will be much more likely to live in poverty, use welfare, have out of wedlock and teenage births, commit crimes and go to jail and prison. Bottom line is Blacks are going to fail a lot more in that county.
These differences in achievement will not go over well. Whites will complain that Blacks are stupid, drop out of school and hardly go to college, have more out of wedlock and teenage births, commit much more crime and fill up the jails and prisons. In short, the Whites will start to resent the Blacks as stupid, lazy, irresponsible criminals and jailbirds. Blacks will be seen as a perennially problem group of costly, dangerous leeches and bums.
Blacks will resent Whites for hating them for these things, and there will never ending complaints about White racism. However, the White racism will actually result from these very different life outcomes between the races. Black will resent all the failure in their lives which they will blame on White racism or Whites holding them back. Blacks will resent high Black arrest nd incarceration rates and the police will come to be seen as the enemy of the Black community.
In short, it’s a recipe for an explosive situation. This is an exaggerated version of what is actually going on in Black-White dynamics in this country, and while a 15 point IQ gap will create some clear discrepancies, a 30 point IQ gap will create a racial catastrophe, tremendous conflict between the races, and a potential for even inter-group fighting and violence. It’s a human volcano waiting to blow. This was approximately the same IQ gap that separated Blacks and Whites in Zimbabwe and South Africa,and look what happened there.
It was hard for me to write this piece, but I think Alternative Left people should at least by mindful of the data on both sides of the B-W gap in various things and the resulting nature versus nurture debate that ensues.
