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Michael van der Riet's avatar

From where I sit I can see Northcliff, a couple of clicks distant, where Mzilikazi took anyone who potentially posed a challenge to his rule, to give them flying lessons. The history of the Zulu nation is full of similar executions and assassinations. This is not merely a myth propagated by white racist historians, but appears in approved history textbooks in the New Rainbow Nation South Africa too.

If this is true or partly true, it is possible that not only in South Africa but in large stretches of Sub-Saharan Africa the same custom prevailed. I call it daisy-cutting. Anyone who stuck their head up too high above the mean was likely to lose it. Winning a battle too well for his paramount chief could be fatal for a general. Over centuries, the genes for ambition and achievement, which could be proxies for g, were systematically selected against.

Possibly.

I can't think of any other mechanism that could have caused a nationwide lowering of g. I believe that many geneticists have tried to establish if there is any link between high melanin and crinkly hair, and general intelligence. And there isn't a link.

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Ian Jobling's avatar

You rely heavily on the pseudo-scholarly publication Mankind Quarterly for this article, which is not viewed as a credible source by academic human scientists. Behavior genetics has changed a lot since the Bell Curve, and you have to ignore a lot of science if you still believe that there are innate IQ gaps among the races. https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/on-race-racism-iq-and-heritability?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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East Hunter's avatar

Your background on this topic is interesting but I still think your original views were right. I don't think I linked a single MQ article but the modal article there is higher quality than in most similar journals. Anonymous expert consensus is in favor of hereditarianism but the visible "experts" are far-left activists who censor this topic. In your piece you cite the Flynn effect but I think what you mean is the Dickens and Flynn hypothesis about gene-environment correlations. This is an unlikely explanation for a number of reasons, no the less because White IQ is high even in adverse environments and Black low even in favorable ones. For instance, the mean IQ in Hungary is still a full SD higher than in American Blacks and about equal to Whites, despite lower incomes, a turbulent history and the absence of decades of massive affirmative action. There is actually not much evidence for a narrowing of the BW gap, Turkheimer et al conveniently truncated their graph to make their point. All the other evidence in my piece is unaddressed in yours and I rarely see an attempt at a refutation that doesn't include name-calling, appeals to authority and a call for censorship.

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Ian Jobling's avatar

No it's called the Flynn Effect. You can read about it here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The Flynn effect is a fundamental issue in the debate over the heritability of IQ. If you don't know what it is, you shouldn't be writing about this topic. IQ has been rising by 3 points per decade, which is evidence that IQ probably isn't measuring an innate ability. You should reread my article until you understand this argument. You should also reread my article to understand why the customary way of measuring the impact of environment on IQ is inadequate. I don't know about what article you're referencing when you talk about Hungarians so I can't really comment on it.

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Vasubandhu89's avatar

Most intelligence researchers now believe that the Flynn effect and racial gaps in IQ have different causes. In fact, James Flynn conceded this toward the end of his life. The biggest reasons are that measurement invariance generally holds for racial IQ gaps, while it is does not hold across generations, and Flynn effect is not on g, but racial gaps are mostly on g.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000226

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Vasubandhu89's avatar

James Flynn: the "casual explanation of IQ gains does not provide the key to the black/ white IQ gap." Flynn also says that the Flynn effect does not "shows that blacks can [match whites for IQ] when environments are equal.”

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/flynn2010a.pdf

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Garreth Byrne's avatar

Good piece. Not sure the "Down Syndrome people are treated fine" argument is of much merit though given the propensity for parents to abort them. Also typo for "the split happened about 100 years ago".

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East Hunter's avatar

Thanks for pointing out the typo. You are right about the issue with the Down syndrome argument, I thought my readers are not smart enough to notice this but I was wrong.

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