Say Anything Blog

That’s an ideal that’s cemented into our founding principles, but it’s a statement that some rather controversial research claims to have proven as untrue.

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn’t “the same as ours.” “Racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” said the Federation of American Scientists. “Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence,” declared the U.S. government’s supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied “that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn’t a scientific leg to stand on.”

I wish these assurances were true. They aren’t. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.

This really isn’t all that surprising given what we know about societal evolution.  European society was (and still is) more advanced that African society, and Asian societies were in a lot of ways more advanced that European societies.  So it follows that descendants of those various societies would have varying levels of intelligence.  This will probably have less and less impact as time goes on and our societies interact more and more, but as it stands now there’s probably going to be some inherent genetic differences in levels of intelligence among the various races.

What does this mean in terms of government?  It shouldn’t really mean anything as the goal of government should be equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality of outcome.  Meaning that the role of government is to prevent racism and discrimination from denying opportunities to people of certain races, but not necessarily try to correct inherent weaknesses in certain races with policy.