Not long ago the HBD community was shocked to learn about a theory claiming that genetic IQ had dropped by about 15 points since the Victoria era due to a combination of dysgenics and mutation load.  Some HBDers were extremely skeptical that such a large drop in IQ could have possibly occured in such a short span of time.  Well one of the scientists behind that theory is now claiming there’s been a 30 point drop in just the last 200 years.  Professor Bruce Charlton writes:

We currently believe that general intelligence has declined by approximately two standard deviations (which is approximately 30 IQ points) since 1800 – that is, over about 8 generations.

Such a decline is astonishing – at first sight. But its magnitude has been obscured by social and medical changes so that we underestimate intelligence in 1800 and over-estimate intelligence now.

A 30 point genetic drop in IQ would imply that that by the standards of people in 1800, people today are mentally retarded!!!

Such an extreme theory goes against everything I thought I knew about IQ and genetics, but I greatly admire these scientists for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom in such a radical way.  It will be interesting to see if such a paridigm shifting idea can gain acceptance by other experts in the field.

Blogger JayMan (a member of the HBD 23) achieved his 200th blog post yesterday. In honor of the occasion, I will post commenter Lion of the Judah-Sphere’s strong praise for JayMan:

…I think Jayman has the best HBD blog of all time. I didn’t discover his blog until last summer, but it has consistently, in my opinion, provided the most comprehensive understanding of the relationship between genetics and human culture (which is just a byproduct of genes). His series on the American Nations is truly brilliant, and totally revolutionized my understanding of American history and culture. And he cuts through a lot of the bullshit spouted by both conservatives and liberals by remaining as objective as one can possibly be. The downfall of some HBD bloggers is that they like to claim genetics are the cause of everything…except when they don’t want it to be. I think it’s funny when HBD conservatives claim that genes are the cause of all of black people’s failures- but want to ascribe cultural reasons whenever white groups or individuals fail…Oh, and Jayman also introduced me to the role of pathogens in human behavior. Truly a brilliant writer. …Also, both he and HBD Chick lead the way in discussing HBD topics outside of IQ.

However like any influential person who truly challenges us to think differently, JayMan has generated controversy, most notably, he was criticized by the HBD intelligentsia for claiming that Ethnic Genetic Interests don’t exist. Ethnic Genetic Interests are just the notion that favoring your own race, tribe or ethnicity is an evolved strategy for replicating genes. I personally think EGI is very plausible for very simple reasons I explained here and here, but I’m not going to say JayMan is wrong to dismiss it because there hasn’t been enough research to prove or debunk EGIs. I have no idea why JayMan believes what he believes, but it’s fun to come up with highly speculative theories (no offense intended):

1) As a racial minority, it is not in JayMan’s ethnic genetic interests to promote ethnic genetic interests because if people believe they have them, this could cause Whites to become less altruistic towards all racial minorities. Now I don’t think JayMan is aware that EGI is motivating his ant-EGI views, but ethnic genetic interests often operate at the subconscious level, like genetic whispers, guiding us in very subtle ways to advance our ethnic cause. On the other hand, if JayMan were controlled by his EGI, he probably wouldn’t be an HBDer in the first place, and JayMan is uniquely willing to allow criticism of his own people, unlike a lot of White, Indian, East Asian and Jewish HBDers who suddenly reject HBD theories the second it finds faults in their own people.

2) A more important reason why JayMan rejects EGI might be that he recently became a father. This probably makes JayMan feel like a Darwinian Alpha winner because he has passed on his genes, and this is a great source of personal pride and accomplishment. Now if EGI is real, it means that even some omega loser virgin can be a Darwinian winner by advancing their EGI which diminishes JayMan’s biological accomplishment.

3) As a black HBDer, JayMan may secretly feel guilty, fearing that he is betraying his race, and the notion of EGI may amplify that guilt by suggesting we evolved to be racially loyal. Well JayMan has nothing to feel guilty about regardless of whether EGI is true or false. He should feel proud that he is following truth, logic and empiricism wherever it may lead. People have this strange idea that if something evolved and confers Darwinian fitness, it is somehow virtuous. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rape confers Darwinian fitness, yet is one of the most disgusting acts a man can do. The most intelligent among us resist our primitive Darwinian impulses for nobler more abstract pursuits.

A reader sent me some emails which I’m publishing with his permission. His comments are in block quotes with my replies below.

Hi, I had a psychologist administer the WAIS-III test (along with several other tests including on for ADHD) IN 2006 when I was in law school, and my interest in the results was rekindled by your blog…

Here are his test results (click on image for larger view):

I was wondering if you’d be interested in interpreting the results and helping me figure out how to maximize my strengths and mitigate my weaknesses in order to maximize my income and status.

I am interested but you should know I’m not a psychologist or trained professional in any capacity.

Two facts that might pique your interest: first, I answered the series of questions you developed for estimating IQ, and the results exactly matched my full-scale IQ test result (132), … second, the psychologist stated that only 2.6% of the population has a disparity between Verbal Scale IQ (139) and Performance Scale IQ (116) as significant as mine.

It is rare to have such a large split but it’s not rare for someone with such an extreme verbal IQ. Assuming about a 0.7 correlation between verbal and performance IQ, the average person with a verbal IQ of 139 would have a performance IQ of 0.7(139 – 100) + 100 = 127 and about 15% of them would have Performance IQs of 116 or less. That’s just basic regression to the mean…

Additionally, she said that these scores represented low estimates of my IQ, as this disparity reflected attention deficit and anxiety issues that would disrupt my ability to concentrate and focus.

But the same problems that prevent you from reaching your potential on an IQ test could prevent you from reaching your potential in life.

I’d really like to understand how I can elevate my circumstances. My verbal iq is in the top .5% of the population, and my full scale is in the top 2%. According to you, I should be earning a fuckload of money. I firmly believe I should be doing so. But I need to shore up my performance weaknesses and learn how to optimize my efforts in a pragmatic way based on my scores…

Actually what I’ve stated is that the average self-made billionaire has an IQ around 130, but that’s not the same as saying the average IQ 130 is a billionaire or even a millionaire. The correlation between IQ and money is about 0.4, which means someone with better than one in a million financial success will typically regress to about the top 2% when it comes to IQ, while the average person who is in the top 2% of IQ will regress to around the top 25% in money. Regression to the mean implies that rich people are typically much less smart than they are rich and smart people are typically much less rich than they are smart. This chart I made shows the median incomes of Americans in their early thirties at different IQ levels:

I tend to think that if my performance and verbal scores were reversed, I’d be far better off.

Not really. You attended law school so presumably you’re in a field that requires verbal ability, not spatial talent. Second of all, if you look at Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, Ashkenazi Jews (verbal IQ > Performance IQ) are vastly more over-represented than East Asian Americans (Performance IQ > Verbal IQ), so your cognitive profile seems quite typical of billionaires. The problem is millions of Americans have your cognitive profile, while only several hundred can be billionaires.

I have numerous questions. Do my scores mean I’m condemned to simply be in the top .5% of human bullshitters, yet nothing special when it comes to putting any of my talents to practical use?

No. For starters, of all the scores you provided, the best predictor of your success and productivity is probably your overall IQ, and not any specific strengths or weakness, because your overall IQ best reflects g (general cognitive ability) and g influences all conscious human behavior and predicts your functioning in countless domains not measured on any IQ test. Secondly, being a bullshitter is of practical use in today’s society if you want to acquire money and status. Thirdly, your highest score was on a subtest called Comprehension which David Wechsler himself (author of the Wechsler intelligence scales) described as a measure of practical knowledge and social judgement so you should be especially good at maximizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses.

What does this get me in life? Does their substantial disparity explain why I’m a better songwriter than performer? Why I’m better at ideation than execution? Why I’m a better test-taker than student?

You understand the implications of your scores quite well which makes sense because your highest score was on the Comprehension subtest.

And am I stuck this way, or can I somehow use my superior abilities to elevate my weaker ones?

You can use them to compensate for your weaker ones.

For which professions would I be well-suited?

Your best scores are Comprehension, Vocabulary and Similarities. Similarities requires the ability to organize and categorize your thoughts, and as I said above, Comprehension requires practical social understanding. These two strengths combined with Vocabulary suggest you’d be good in media or politics. However you were only somewhat above average on the Picture Arangement subtest which measures the ability to visually interpret social situations. This relative weakness combined with anxiety and attention problems suggests broadcast media or politics might be challenging and you might be better off in print media/writing. Of course, it’s important not to over-interpret sub-test scatter (much of which is just caused by unreliability in the test). It’s also important not to over-emphasize cognitive ability. You’re above average in every subtest on the WAIS-III, and especially above average in overall IQ, so your real challenge is finding a field that you’re passionate about.

Is there anything I might do to minimize the anxiety and concentration issues she references?

When I suffer from anxiety, I try to imagine the worst case scenario and get comfortable with it.

Really, I just want that ten-trillion-dollar company my full-scale IQ seems to promise me. Or how bout just a paltry billion?

Even though your IQ is extremely high…higher than probably 50% of self-made billionaires, the average self-made billionaire not only has extreme IQ, but exceptional opportunities, special talents, drive, passion, certain personality traits, and that X factor. Given that IQ only explains 16% of the variation in income, you would need an IQ of 278 just to have a 50% chance of becoming a billionaire. So you can’t be a billionaire, but if you work hard and play your cards right, you might become a multi-millionaire.

When I was in the 7th grade I had a super intelligent teacher. She told the class that very few people could beat her at the board game Trivial Pursuit…when the teachers would play Trivial Pursuit in the staff room virtually no one could ever beat her. “I have the type of brain that can absorb, A LOT of information” she explained. Unlike other teachers who were so fearful of my IQ tests that they would walk the other direction when they saw me coming, this teacher wanted to be tested, she asked for it. She just had this “bring it on” confidence that only the most intelligent people have, because she knew so few questions could ever stump her.

Not only was she super smart but she was RICH. Years later a friend and I would go looking for her house and we were stunned. All our lives the other kids would tell us we were rich because we lived in the suburbs, but not until we found this teacher’s house did we know what real money looked like.

At the time I was TERRIBLE student; failing every single class except English where I was getting perfect grades. Me and this other blond girl I had a crush on since the 4th grade were both failing virtually everything. When we spoke to the drama teacher about this, she said to the blond girl “Why are you failing? Are you stupid? When God was giving out brains, you thought he said trains and asked for a slow one?”

Then she turned to me and said, “Why are you failing? You’re not stupid.”

Even though she only had me for drama class, she could see the intelligence shining through, because my ideas for skits were always better than my classmates and would have the class roaring with laughter with my impersonations of other teachers. So she could see the intelligence but she could also see I had something else. That X factor. You can’t teach it, you can’t measure it, but some people just have it.

I feel very sorry for all the super smart people who don’t have the X factor because they spend their whole lives bitter that they never achieved the success their IQs might imply and often become extreme liberals.

One day this teacher told the class that I was going to be VERY successful. She said I wouldn’t do well in school because school doesn’t suit me, “but once he gets out, he’s going to be VERY successful…In whatever field he decides to go into…Very successful..and make lots and lots of money”

As a 12 year old kid I was deeply affected by having this brilliant wealthy woman publicly predict my destiny. She was one of several teacher who predicted amazing things in my future. Now in my thirties, I feel the thirties are the decade for getting really really really rich. The twenties are for having fun, and in your twenties you have the raw intelligence to get rich, but not the wisdom. In your forties, you have the wisdom, but much of the energy and raw intelligence starts to go, especially if you abuse alcohol and drugs. The thirties are the sweet spot for success. Oprah got rich in her thirties:

The wildly popular Robert Lindsay has posted Dylann Roof’s manifesto. Roof does not appear to be a White nationalist because he considers East Asians to be a superior race and he considers Jews to be white. White nationalists have been breathing a sigh of relief that this evil terrorist is not one of them.

I’d hate to agree with such evil scum as Dylann Roof, but Jews are White, although they do have certain genetic diseases that distinguish them from other Whites, and the IQ gap between Whites (IQ 99) and Ashkenazi Jews (IQ 110) is larger than the IQ gap between Whites and Arabs (Arab IQ is probably 90 with First World nutrition), and IQ is arguably the most important genetic trait, so I’m not sure where you draw the line between White and non-White. Jews don’t just have much higher intelligence than other Whites, it’s a different kind of intelligence from any other humans on Earth; some combination of verbal IQ, social IQ, business IQ, and insightful creativity. They are absolutely brilliant at creating social movements on both the political left and right. In fact commenter Mugabe has argued that the very framing of left and right is Jewish.

In fact it’s almost impossible to have a social movement without a Jewish person brilliantly gravitating to the top of it and radically improving it in some way with some new abstract theory. I even see this in the HBD-o-sphere and the alt-right blogosphere (areas where you would not expect Jews to be). The latest example is Rachel Haywire who has been challenging alt-righters to radically change the way they think and gentiles have been following her ideas in droves, and not because they worship Jews (they don’t), but because Jews just come up with theories that change the way we think. They are almost like magical beings. While other races create concrete things, Jews create abstract theories, ideologies, ways of seeing the world differently. They invent the intellectual framework, the verbal categories.

It seems Jews endured an incredible amount of natural selection in the last 1000 years or so, enough to raise their IQs some 15 points above the white-middle eastern hybrids they’re descended from, and create this very unique kind of intelligence. That much evolution in such a short span of time is unimaginable.

In some ways Jews are so unique one could almost argue there are only two human races: Jews and non-Jews. And then the non-Jewish race could be divided into 3 subraces: Negroids, Caucasoids and Mongoloids.

Because this blog attempts to merge horror with HBD, I had to post this video of HBDer Richard Spencer reviewing World War Z:

I have never even seen the movie World War Z. I’m a bit of an anomaly. A horror blogger who can’t stand zombie movies. I love the original Night of the Living Dead (1968?) and the sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), but after watching those two films, every other zombie movie seemed kind of repetitive. I haven’t even watched a single episode of Walking Dead even though it’s one of the most popular shows on TV.

But this review of World War Z by Richard Spencer (who I previously blogged about) and how he connects it with hipster racism and other political issues is brilliant. It’s very rare for someone with no notes to speak extemporaneously about a movie for this long, and be this fluid, articulate and insightful off the cuff (or so it seemed). This guy may very well have an IQ above 150.

Usually when we think of pro-white alt right political activists, we think of low IQ uneducated proles because that’s the stereotype the media spreads, so I was stunned when I listened to this interview with Richard B Spencer, who speaks better than the liberal professors I had in university.

In the unlikely event that the pro-white alt-right ever becomes a major political force, this guy could run for president. He is articulate, measured, polished, insightful and inspiring. He’s also a major HBDer, and apparently runs Washington Summit Publishers which sells books by the likes of Richard Lynn.

It’s long been claimed that racists have low IQs, and that’s probably true if you define racism as hatred of blacks. But if you expand the definition of racism to include other races, it’s probably not as true.

Racists probably have low IQs for three reasons:

1) They’re tribal. If you believe in ethnic genetic interests, then we are programmed by evolution to hate other races, and low IQ people would be least able to resist their evolutionary programming. By contrast high IQ people can think abstractly and thus question their impulses.

2) They overgeneralize: One black person mugs them, and suddenly all black people are bad. This kind of simplistic over-generalization is a sign of low IQ, kind of like how the retarded Jason from the Friday the 13th films killed all teenagers because one teenaged girl killed his mother.

3) They’re conservative: Conservatism is a sign of low IQ. That doesn’t necessarily mean conservatism is wrong, it could mean that conservatism is so obviously right that even idiots embrace it, while it takes quite a bit of (misguided) thought to reject it.

Now point number of three is where it gets tricky. Not all forms of racism are conservative. If we define conservative as siding with the rich and powerful against the poor and disenfranchised, then anti-black racism is definitely conservative, because for the most part, blacks are the most poor and powerless race on Earth.

But if you’re racist against White people, or racist against Indian Americans, or Asian Americans, or Ashkenazi Jews, this might actually be a liberal and thus high IQ view; indeed the most disgustingly anti-Semitic people are often Marxists or anti-Israel leftists.

So it’s not so much that IQ is negatively correlated with racism, but rather IQ is correlated with the amount of wealth and power of the people you are racist against. So someone with an extremely low IQ would be racist against the black pygmies of the Congo; the most poor and powerless people on Earth. Someone with an even lower IQ might pick on populations even less powerful like dogs or cats.

However the major flaw with high IQ is it seems to put people at risk for antisemitism because Ashkenazi Jews have great wealth and power. Low IQ people tend not to be antisemites unless they’re in a culture where it’s brainwashed into them like the Muslim World, or raised by skinheads, because 1) low IQ people lack the facial pattern recognition to even tell who is Jewish and who is not, since the Jewish phenotype is much less obvious in Western countries than the black phenotype, and 2) Jewish behavior is very subtle and sophisticated, so low IQ people can’t even tell if a Jewish person does something wrong because it’s way above their head. By contrast black misbehavior is much more obvious and concrete (i.e. mugging).

Now if Jewish ancestry is a sign of high IQ, and sadly if antisemitism is a sign of high IQ, and if Jews are almost never antisemites, then the very rare and tragic people who are genuine self-hating Jews are probably the smartest type of racist of all, just because it would be statistically so rare to be both a Jew and an anti-semite, unless both traits were reflecting your IQ. Self-hating Jews are the mirror image of self-hating blacks who are probably the dumbest type of racist.

And of course all racism is evil, regardless of whether it’s a sign of high or low IQ.