Race, genes, and intelligence

William Saletan challenges the politically correct conventional wisdom. I recommend you go read the entire thing (the first in a series), but here are a couple of his most provocative statements.

Among white Americans, the average IQ is 103. Among Asian-Americans, it’s 106. Among Jewish Americans, it’s 113. Among Latino Americans, it’s 89. Among African-Americans, it’s 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, 100 in Britain, and 67 in South Africa. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to each other than to the worldwide black average. It’s been that way for at least a century.

Remember, these are averages, and all groups overlap. You can’t deduce an individual’s intelligence from her ethnicity.

In fact, there’s a mountain of evidence that differential evolution has left each population with a balance of traits that could be advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on circumstances. The list of differences is long and intricate. On average, compared to whites, blacks mature more quickly in the womb, are born earlier, and develop teeth, strength, and dexterity earlier. They sit, crawl, walk, and dress themselves earlier. They reach sexual maturity faster, and they have better eyesight. On each of these measures, East Asians lag whites and blacks. In exchange, East Asians get longer lives and bigger brains.

10 thoughts on “Race, genes, and intelligence”

  1. From The Human Genome Program: DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.

    http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml

  2. When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

    But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

    The New York Times

  3. You can visit the HapMap project yourself and see that for many important SNPs, there are significant differences in their distribution in different population groups.

    There are over 3 billion SNP pairs in the human genome, so it doesn’t matter that 99.99% are identical between races, it only takes differences in a few thousand important SNPs to make the races different.

    For many of the intelligence related SNPs that have been discovered, the distribution of the alleles differ between races differ to a statistically significant extent.

  4. Brad DeLong is among the many responding to Saletan.

    NewMexiKen referenced Saletan’s article because I thought it was provocative and a topic that is quickly coming into much intellectual currency — yet again.

    Personally I think his analysis is grossly simplistic.

  5. There are obvious causes of poor intelligence test results such as poor nutrition, lack of parental free time to spend with their children, or parents schooling. I have not read the references for Saletan’s article but I suspect that such variables are not controlled for.

  7. Based on the experience I have with IQ tests, or any other standardized testing, it seems that said tests tend to reveal more about what information the test-taker has been exposed to than what level of intelligence and problem-solving skill they actually possess.

    I don’t agree that acquired knowledge and intelligence [potential] are the same thing, and I believe that these discrepancies largely account for the racial averages being different. We need a test that can measure how much one is capable of learning and understanding as opposed to what one has actually had occasion to learn thus far. And failing that, we need tests that are not racially and culturally biased.

  8. Saletan responds to the environmental arguments in part two.

    Again, I am not implying I agree with Saletan by linking to him. I am saying it is a challenging topic that won’t go away.

  9. Saletan attempts to explain himself:

    I’m not an expert. I think it’s misleading to dismiss the scenario, as some officials have done in response to Watson. But my attempts to characterize the evidence beyond that, even with caveats such as “partial,” “preliminary,” and “prima facie,” have backfired. I outlined the evidence primarily to illustrate the limits of the genetic hypothesis. If it turns out to be true, it will be in a less threatening form than you might imagine. As to whether it’s true, you’ll have to judge the evidence for yourself. Every responsible scholar I know says we should let the trends play out.

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