+OK 6762 octets Received: from smtp12.nwnexus.com (smtp12.nwnexus.com [206.63.63.60]) by mail3.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA18179 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:01:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ml.egroups.com (ml.egroups.com [207.138.41.146]) by smtp12.nwnexus.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA24535 for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 10:01:22 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [10.1.2.1] by ml.egroups.com with NNFMP; 04 Oct 1999 18:01:21 -0000 Mailing-List: contact h-bd-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: h-bd@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/h-bd/ Received: (listserv 1.262); by m5; 04 Oct 1999 17:01:21 -0000 Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-h-bd@egroups.com Received: (qmail 16500 invoked from network); 4 Oct 1999 17:01:18 -0000 Received: from imo22.mx.aol.com (198.81.17.66) by qg.egroups.com with SMTP; 4 Oct 1999 17:01:18 -0000 Received: from SteveSlr@aol.com by imo22.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v22.4.) id aMOAa12189 (2619) for ; Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:01:14 -0400 (EDT) From: SteveSlr@aol.com Message-ID: <7bd55771.252a375a@aol.com> Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:01:14 EDT To: h-bd@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows 95 sub 14 Subject: [h-bd] Re: African IQ scores Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: Steve Sailer here: For the old-timers, I'm sorry to rehash an old topic, but H-Bd has lots of new members who might find this interesting. First, as Arthur Jensen has noted, and as Charles Murray has recently elaborated, IQ tests seem to be measuring different things in very low IQ whites and blacks. Whites with IQs of 70 are typically somewhat incompetent in social settings -- they are obviously "slow" in the Forrest Gump-sense, and often show physical symptoms of organic retardation. This is generally not true for blacks of the same IQ, who are likely to be lively, competent participants in their social set. It's only when they need to engage in more technical, less social activities that they run into the problems predicted by their IQ scores. According to Arthur Jensen, the best "culture-free" IQ test is probably the Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is wholly non-verbal. (You look at a series of diagrams, then pick out the next logical one in the sequence.) One of its great triumphs is that Eskimoes, who would seem to be environmentally shortchanged to the point of sensory deprivation, average 100 on it. Eskimoes do not, however, have a reputation as the life of the party. (On a "Simpson's" episode, Marge and Lisa join a group of environmentalists to clean up an oil spill, have a dismal time, and finally leave when they hear the entertainment for the evening will be an Eskimo stand-up comic.) It's possible that because Eskimoes have been evolving in the harshest environment on Earth, they have been selected for the kind of objective skills that help them wrest a living from the natural world. In contrast, tropical peoples like sub-Saharan Africans have been evolving in an environment where growing food is fairly easy, their main competition has not been nature, but other people, and thus they've been selected for subjective skills. Whether or not this environmental theory of genetic racial differences, which has been developed in different forms by such H-Bd members as JP Rushton, Ed Miller, and Peter Frost, turns out to be correct, it does appear that IQ tests don't seem to measure subjective social skills as well as they measure objective technical skills. Second, the finding that sub-Saharan Africans seem to average about 70 on tests that African-Americans average 85 on actually provides strong evidence that a poor environment can substantially degrade IQ scores. Assume that IQ is wholly determined by genes, and that white Americans average 100 and African-Americans average 85. Also assume that African-Americans are 75% African, 25% European by descent (the latest study points to a significantly smaller white fraction, but that only strengthens the point I'm going to make). Therefore, if genes are all that matters, the average IQ of people of 100% African descent should be 80, not 70. This implies that the environmental differences do matter, and that the difference between Africa and America account for 10 IQ points. What exactly is it about the tropical African environment that hurts IQ? We could come up with lots of candidates, and no doubt most of them have some impact, but I'd especially point to what evolutionary biologists call parasites -- bacteria, viruses, tapeworms, etc. (Thus, I'm not sure that a simple adoption study would tease out all the environmental detriments -- prenatal infections could be a sizable cause of lower IQ.) Presumably, the difference in environment between black Africa and black America is greater than the difference between black America and white America, but the latter is still significant. It's extremely doubtful that environmental improvements could eliminate the black-white IQ gap, but any increase in average black IQ would be a major boon to all Americans. I suspect the biggest payback would come from attacking pre-natal and early post-natal environmental differences. For example, a much higher percentage of black babies than white babies are born to mothers who abused drugs during their pregnancies. This is presumably bad for the unborn child's IQ (to say the least). One obvious way to improve the prenatal environment of children is to pay drug addicts to accept Norplant (a contraceptive that lasts 5 years) or be sterilized. Also, either more black mothers need to be encouraged to breastfeed or infant formulas need to be substantially improved. There are no doubt some other steps that could each drive up the average African-American IQ by some fraction of a point. As Greg Cochran has emphasized, the earlier the environmental intervention, the likelier it is to do some longterm good. In contrast, giving a billion dollars for minority college scholarships is likely to turn out to be merely an expensive way for Bill Gates to buy some good publicity in his anti-trust battle. Steve Sailer www.eSailer.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ How to contribute to H-Bd: 1. To reply privately to just the sender of this message, click the "Reply" button on your email package. 2. To reply publicly to the entire H-Bd list, click the "Reply All" (or equivalent) button on your email package. 3. To start a thread, email your message to h-bd@egroups.com .