Opinion
For all their blatherskite about “following the science!” the left are all-too-ready to throw science under the knee of Lysenko-like thugs, the instant scientific evidence points to a conclusion they don’t like. We saw this all too clearly during the pandemic.
As scholar Wilfred Reilly elaborates in his book, Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About, in few topics is the left’s aversion to inconvenient evidence more pronounced than on matters of race. From denying that race even exists, or that it has any biological basis, to willfully lying and distorting the facts about police shootings, the left simply cannot, will not, admit facts which demolish their prejudices.
Especially when it comes to race and IQ.
That different racial groups have different mean IQ scores is a well-established fact. There is simply no reasonable denying that racial differences in cognitive test scores exist. Acknowledging this is not “racist”, and it’s absolutely not “white supremacist”, given that several non-white groups out-score whites.
Although many Americans are shocked when they hear that whites outscore blacks on average (although they tend to be less shocked when they hear that Asians average higher than whites), this might be the most exhaustively documented finding in the history of the social sciences.
Nor is there much informed dispute anymore over whether or not IQ tests are measuring something real and fairly important.
There’s a fashion amongst the left, as well, to assert that “IQ tests are meaningless, anyway”. This is also false: IQ is well established as an important predictor of general success.
Failing on that front, the left try and then assert that IQ tests are “racially biased”.
Nor is there any evidence that IQ tests are biased against blacks in the sense that blacks perform better on average in real life than on the tests. They don’t.
Nor is there any evidence that a valid IQ test could be developed that makes the race gap disappear. There has been tremendous demand for one since the 1960s, but nobody has ever managed to come close to inventing it.
You begin to see the problem for the left. Race is their single biggest bugaboo: that nearly everything, from black crime to black poverty, can be blamed on “racism” is an article of faith the left cling harder to than Catholics to the Trinity.
So, if every objection to the fact of average IQ and race is demolished, what can the left do? Keep trying to explain it away, of course.
Karl Popper formulated falsifiability as a critical tenet of science in response to his own experiences in the field of psychology. Falsifiability is the fact that a theory can, in principal at least, be disproved. Relativity, for instance, can easily demolished by conducting an experiment that disproves its theories — just as the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the earlier theory of the Lumeniferous Aether.
Psychology, Popper noticed, was a field where theorists resolutely refused to concede they were wrong, even in the face of evidence. Instead, they resorted to ever-more ludicrous circumlocutions to find ways around the evidence. Their theories could never be proved wrong.
Leftists are the same when it comes to race and IQ.
So what happens is that when somebody manages to make clear these truths, the discussion among smarter people immediately switches to whether The Gap is genetic or not.
The famous Nature vs Nurture debate.
In many ways, though, it’s not terribly important for practical purposes whether IQ disparities are due to nature or nurture, because after more than a half century of our society obsessing over how to close The Gap, we’ve made little progress and lately have more or less given up hope that some kind of educational reform will do the trick. We don’t have much of a clue how to get blacks to catch up, and we may well be making their performance worse by catering to their worst instincts, just as we’ve managed to raise their homicide and car crash rates during the Black Lives Matter era.
This then quickly becomes an argument over whose fault it is and who must therefore pay […] New-fashioned wokes argue that low black IQ scores must be due to white evilness, for which the only cure for this and for whatever else ails blacks is reparations, now and forever.
There is, it is true, historical examples which indicate that environment, especially culture, play some role in IQ. Italians and Irish once scored as low as blacks in IQ tests (the US Army has a venerable and valuable database of IQ tests): today, Paddies and Guidos have lifted their game considerably.
Similarly, postwar Japanese and late-20th century South Koreans improved their average IQs. Interestingly, too, Japanese in America tend to outscore Japanese in Japan.
But did they succeed through welfare rather than through hard work?
Some argue, though, that it’s 100% genes. The Bell Curve’s Charles Murray (who regularly sparks violent campus demonstrations) is very much a “bit of both” guy.
At least, unlike the environmental theory, the genetic theory can be falsified. Some have tried this over the past century, but the only problem is that there was no objective way to accurately assess individuals’ ancestry. Now, we do.
Recently, our society has developed magnificent databases of around 10,000 young people for whom we have both DNA and IQ, such as the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment and Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development projects. Analyses of these databases could have falsified the theory that genes play a major role in IQ.
But they did not.
Instead, the results turned out in line with nature being more dominant than nurture in determining IQ.
Takimag
Naturally, the “social constructionists” concoct new epicyclic excuses, all of them sheeting the blame home to, you guessed it, “racism”.
Averages of race and IQ don’t teach you anything about individuals, either. An average is just that: you can still have black geniuses (such as Reilly, or conservative superstar Thomas Sowell, even Barack Obama), and you can still have white imbeciles.
Collectively, though, the averages matter.
As Charles Murray points out, artificially elevating moderately intelligent blacks to elite colleges, where they have to compete with fearsomely brainy Asians and Jews, only leads to high rates of black dropouts. In contrast, blacks who attend less prestigious, especially historically black colleges, are more likely to graduate with a degree — which is a pretty reliable passport to life improvement.
On the other hand, in Gaza, the average IQ is around 80: borderline retarded. That, too, clearly has its consequences.