Race Differences in Behavior

Dr. Ralph Scott’s Forty-year Battle for Science in Research on Forced Busing: Angela Saini, Barry Mehler, and the Academic Left

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Angela Saini, who describes herself as a “freelance science journalist,” has written a propaganda piece on race for the Guardian (“Why race science is on the rise again”), a precis of a now-released book of the same title. You know what you are up against right from the beginning, with the phrase “so-called ‘races,’” with ‘races’ in scare quotes. She describes herself as growing up in an “Indian-Punjabi household” and appears to be yet another non-White who is campaigning against the idea that Whites are a real group—a group with interests and a long, proud history.[1] In other words, she is promoting her own ethnic interests in dismantling the West as an ethnic entity and sees herself as a lifelong victim of White racism (“racism was the backdrop to my teenage years”) because there was a White nationalist bookstore in her neighborhood and because of the murder of one Black person — Stephen Lawrence who has since been elevated to sainthood by the same activists and media that have systematically ignored or downplayed victimization of native Brits by non-White immigrants; see Tobias Langdon, “Black Saints, White Demons: The Martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence”).

The Guardian piece centers around one Barry Mehler, who has been a longtime anti-race realism activist as head of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism, a non-profit housed on the campus of a state-supported university, Ferris State in Michigan.

I’ve long been aware of Mehler, being a target of some his writing. Mehler was the protégé of Jerry Hirsch, a behavior geneticist who devoted much of his professional life to campaigning against sociobiology and against quantitative behavior genetics, especially as applied to humans. Hirsch has a cameo role in Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique, so you know what I think of ethnic activists like Hirsch and Mehler.

Indeed, Mehler is Faculty Advisor to Jewish Students at Ferris State University, a good indication that he has a strong Jewish identity. Saini’s article also shows his Jewish identification as informing his crusading against race science: Mehler “immediately saw parallels between the far-right network of intellectuals and the rapid, devastating way in which eugenics research had been used in Nazi Germany, terrifying him with the possibility that the brutal atrocities of the past could happen once more.”

Also indicative of his ethnic activism, Mehler has long been associated with the ADL. A 1995 article on the ADL website describes Mehler as the ADL National Commissioner. Another describes him as the chairman of the ADL’s Latin American Committee working to combat the confiscation of Jewish property and forced exile of Jews by the Sandinista government because of Jewish support for the previous government and because of Jewish support for Israel.

Not much doubt that Mehler is a Jewish academic ethnic activist, an activist ensconced at a state-supported university—the height of establishment respectability.

Once again, we see the confluence of Jewish identity and academic activism aimed at furthering Jewish interests, in this case by someone with no training in evolutionary biology or genetics. Despite the clear ethnic and political motivations characteristic of both Mehler and Saini, Saini has the gall to claim that race science is “innately political,” thereby absolving the activism of people like Mehler and Saini from any taint of extra-scientific interests. Read more

National Intelligence and its Consequences

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The Intelligence of Nations
Richard Lynn and David Becker
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2019

British psychologist Richard Lynn and Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen published their first study of national IQ differences, Intelligence and the Wealth of Nations, in 2002. The book found that a nation’s average IQ correlated at .62 with its per capita income, meaning that IQ explained 38% of variation in wealth (0.38 = 0.62 squared). In addition to the expected opposition from egalitarians, some critics’ skepticism was aroused by shortcomings in the book’s empirical data: the authors had direct IQ measurements for only 81 countries; values for the other 104 were mere estimates based on neighboring countries.

Plenty of international IQ data has accumulated since then, and the authors updated their results first in 2006 (IQ and Global Inequality), and again in 2012 (Intelligence: A Unifying Construct for the Social Sciences, hereafter Lynn & Vanhanen 2012; reviewed in TOQ 12:2, Summer 2012). In this last work, they provided direct data for 161 countries; the correlation between IQ and income rose to .71. Some of the earlier skeptics were won over.

Tatu Vanhanen died in 2015, but progress in the measurement of national IQ has continued. Heiner Rindermann of Chemnitz Technical University in Germany made an important contribution with his book Cognitive Capitalism: Human Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations (2018). Prof. Rindermann found a correlation of .82 between national IQ and per capita income, meaning that intelligence explains no less than two thirds of the variation between nations. He found positive correlations between IQ and many desirable social variables, boldly concluding that “national well-being mainly depends on the cognitive ability level of a society.” Rindermann also demonstrated that the cognitive ability of the most intelligent five percent of a population generally has a greater positive effect on national achievements and other desirable outcomes that the average intelligence of the overall population.

In this new book, Richard Lynn’s first since the loss of his Finnish coauthor, he teams up with David Becker, a younger colleague of Prof. Rindermann in Chemnitz. The authors explain:

The main difference between this study and the previously published studies is with regard to the level of detail provided. Previous studies have been criticised for drawing upon unrepresentative, small or incomparable samples with regard to particular nations. In updating these studies, we endeavour to obviate this problem, so that; this information is as clear as possible to other researchers. The central aim of this revision is to standardize each individual step of the process through which we have reached our estimations and made our calculations. This has the advantage of complete transparency, such that other researchers can refollow our steps should they wish to do.

This aim necessitates a highly technical presentation less adapted to the needs of the general reader than Lynn’s and Vanhanen’s books.

Also new to this study is use of the “National IQ Dataset,” a working file first uploaded to the internet in August, 2018 and continually updated to provide the best current data on IQ around the world. The most recent version can be viewed at http://viewoniq.org/.

Read more

Assault on Psychology: Research on Race Differences Anathematized

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Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) has been called the Father of Modern Science. So it is fitting that he was, perhaps, the first scientist to be censured and silenced by political forces represented in his day by the Catholic Church. The issue then was evidence Galileo presented supporting the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system that contradicted the Aristotelian geocentric theory espoused by the establishment.

Elites have often used science to support the dominate ideology while suppressing evidence incompatible with their beliefs. One notable case was the rise of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), a Ukrainian biologist, rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the inheritance of environmentally acquired characteristics. This theory won favor because it fit well with the creation of the New Soviet Man: human nature was not innate, but as malleable and adaptable as were the characteristics of spring wheat.

The ideological orthodoxy of today is egalitarian multiculturalism, sometimes described as social or cultural Marxism. According to this doctrine the perceived differences between racial groups are superficial physical traits or cultural characteristics determined externally by history and the social environment.  All ethnic groups have equal potential for social development. A multicultural society is the most desirable and progressive social arrangement. There are no legitimate group interests that would preclude social harmony in a diverse and inclusive society.

Over the past half century, as social Marxism has tightened its ideological grip on the main stream media (MSM), education, corporations and the government, very few public persons have challenged its canon. But a handful of social scientists, mainly psychologists, have, along with Galileo, gone where the evidence led them. Because psychology deals with intelligence and behavior, the field is especially important for egalitarians to control. This essay will take a brief look at five psychologists who have contested established dogmas, and paid a price for doing so. Read more

White Men Can’t Jump, Black Men Can’t Shot-Put

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raceandsport_frontcoverRace and Sport: Evolution and Racial Differences in Sporting Ability
Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn
London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2015

 

The Ulster Institute’s latest study in human differences will come as a pleasant surprise to those who have complained about their previous somewhat narrow focus on IQ. Race and Sport is not the first book to venture into the taboo area of innate racial differences in athletic aptitude, but it is the most thorough and systematic so far.

The ice was first broken by Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It (2000). Numerous publishing houses rejected this work before it could see the light of day; some publishers were explicit about their fear that discussion of innate Black superiority in sport would lead inevitably to genetic explanations for low Black intelligence. A more serious objection to Mr. Entine’s thesis is that there are many sports Blacks do not dominate, and not all of these are winter sports (where an environmental explanation might be convincing).

Dutton and Lynn see reason for cautious optimism in the relative lack of furor surrounding the more recent publication of David Epstein’s The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete (2013). Epstein accepts that athletic ability is partly genetic in origin, although he does not focus on this matter. Read more

Science and Politics in Academe: Good Research is Not Enough

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At first glance, few people are as disagreeable as individuals with a touch of Asperger’s. Basically, they are high-IQ guys who tend to intuitively grasp things like logic, mathematics, and mechanics, yet are remarkably inept at socializing with other people. Because of their inborn characteristics, people on the Asperger’s end of the spectrum are often “nerds” who spend far more time facing a computer or slaving away in a lab than with other people. We have all seen The Social Network (2010) and its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged personality: a strange mix of raw genius, social clumsiness and lack of scruples, the latter allowing Zuckerberg to rip off the Winklevosses and betray his best friend Eduardo Saverin according to the wish of the gleeful manipulator Sean Parker. (Notice that the shared Jewishness of Zuckerberg and Saverin didn’t prevent the former from betraying the latter. That community has its breakdowns in ethnic networking too.)

Dark Enlightenment figure Nick Land claims that the biodiversity people — those scorned as “racists” by the mainstream media and parasitic class — are endowed with low agreeableness. They tend to have “low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. …  Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement.”

There is a grain of truth here. Trying to understand one’s fellows from the objective, disinterested point of view of science is not a behavior everyone will be attracted to or able to attain. Calm reflection about abstract principles is different from both blind habit and the passionate defense of some dogma — or one’s people. The pure scientist, after all, can never “take his own side.” He must forever be purely objective.

Honest — sometimes excessively; balanced in his epistemology to the point of favoring the groundbreaking — or plain truth in general — to popular dogmas; naively believing that his grand abstractions are an excellent recipe for society, like the Enlightenment thinker Condorcet who believed in an unlimited and exponential progress in future history. Read more

A bit of IQ realism in the LA Times

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Christopher Chabris, a psychologist at Union College, and Jonathan Wei, a researcher at the Duke University Talent Identification Program and at Case Western Reserve University, wrote an op-ed refuting a central dogma of cultural Marxism, that standardized tests have no validity (“Hire like Google? For most companies, that’s a bad idea“). What the professors write is not as surprising as where it appears. In general, while academic research continues to show the value of IQ testing, the mainstream media has been hostile to IQ testing because of the touchy subject of race differences.

Their article was a response to highly publicized comments by Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, who told the NY Times that “GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless…. We found that they don’t predict anything” (much to the delight of Tom Friedman, among others). Chabris and Wei:

Decades of quantitative research in the field of personnel psychology have shown that across fields of employment, measurements of “general cognitive ability” — which is another way of referring to the old-fashioned concept of intelligence or IQ — are consistently the best tools employers have to predict which new employees will wind up with the highest performance evaluations or the best career paths. We shouldn’t rush to assume that Google, with its private data, has suddenly refuted all that work. …

Chabris and Wei attribute Google’s experience to “restriction of range”— that is, once you select from a pool of high-IQ people, other traits within that pool become important contributors to individual differences. Bock’s emphasis on other qualities, such as intellectual humility (not being obsessed with having a high IQ score) and being an emergent leader (someone who can lead when appropriate but also follow when appropriate) certainly makes sense. But among potential Google employees, these other traits occur within a pool of people already selected for high IQ — even for those employees without a college education. One need not be a college graduate to win Google’s CodeJam competition, but you can’t possibly win without a high IQ. In the words of one winner, the problems were “more like mathematical work or solving logic puzzles.” Read more

A Tale of Two Trials: What the George Zimmerman and O.J. Simpson Verdicts Reveal About Racial Denial

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One transparent outcome of the “not guilty” verdict in the George Zimmerman trial is the racial disconnect between the average American and the nation’s powerful elites (the mass media, politicians, and “civil rights” leaders). The ever-widening gulf between racial reality and racial fantasy—the daily repetition of Black violence in contrast with the media-driven narrative of nonstop injustices of an oppressed minority—seems more pronounced in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict.

We live in an era of extreme racial denial. The nation’s media and political elites—what Joseph Sobran termed the “hive”—live in a fantasy realm that dismisses latent racial differences, an existence defined by unrealistic egalitarianism and hyper-liberalism; racial disparities are merely symptomatic of the lingering impact of slavery, racism, and discrimination. The emphasis is always on some inanimate object—“mean” streets, “gun” violence, “epidemic of violence,” “crack” cocaine, “heat waves,” “underfunding” of Head Start, the lack of upward “middle class mobility”; or the fault of law enforcement—“police brutality,” “deficient” law enforcement strategies, “racial profiling,” or “Stand Your Ground” laws.

The crux of the Zimmerman case is fundamentally about holding Blacks accountable for their own actions. The jury of six females—five Whites and one Hispanic—reached a reasonable conclusion that the defendant acted in self-defense in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The evidence presented at trial countered the prosecution’s claims that Zimmerman was the aggressor, stalked Martin, initiated the altercation, and as a “wannabe” cop shot Martin—an innocent “unarmed” 17-year-old bystander. Most of the media coverage in the wake of the verdict reinforces the unfounded assumption that Trayvon Martin was innocently preyed upon—nothing more than a victim of “profiling,” who was just an “unarmed” teenager, a kid, trying to get home. This is the fantasy that our elites are hyping and one the jury simply rejected outright.

The Zimmerman jury, after a careful assessment of the evidence, concluded that Martin was the aggressor. After an initial encounter, Martin forced Zimmerman to the ground after sucker-punching him, pounded Zimmerman’s head against the concrete sidewalk, and after 45-seconds of screaming and fearing for his life, Zimmerman shot Martin to save his own life.

The verdict has produced a predictable tsunami of racial demagoguery from beltway pundits. Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Tavis Smiley, and Jesse Jackson have exploited the jury decision to project their own warped views about the endless suffering of Blacks from White oppression. Read more