Since commenter Mugabe keeps mentioning Bermuda as though this tiny island debunks over 100 years of HBD research, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the discussion Mugabe had on this topic with Lion of the Blogosphere. Original discussion can be found here. Note Mugabe is posting under the name “ron burgundy”:

In 2018, people taking DNA tests were measured on four proxies for IQ: education (n = 1.1 million), cognitive test, typically a super quick one ( n = 257,841), self-reported math ability (n = 564,698) and hardest math class completed (n= 430,445). Thousands of genetic variants (SNPs) were discovered and they implicated the brain and neuron to neuron communication (Lee et al., 2018). A total genetic score summarizing all four variables explained 7 to 10% of the variation in cognitive ability (implying a correlation of about 0.3), and 11 to 13% of the variation in education attainment (implying a correlation of 0.35) though that might be inflated by population stratification.

While none of the four phenotypes has a high g loading, you’d expect the total of all four (depending on how they were weighted) to have a reasonable g loading, so why the dismal correlation with genes? After all twin studies promised an adult heritability of 0.75, implying a genotype phenotype correlation of 0.87!

HBD deniers argue the twin studies gave inflated results because identical twins share prenatal effects and were not raised sufficiently apart. HBD proponents claim the twin studies are valid and the missing heritability is hiding in rare genetic variants not sampled by SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms).

While scientists are not yet able to predict an individual’s IQ from DNA with any useful certainty, they can predict the average IQ of a group from the average DNA of the group. That’s because error at the individual level cancels out at the group level. So while the above mentioned polygenic score (which Davide Piffer named EA3 PGS) correlates only 0.3 with IQ at the individual level, it correlates 0.985 at the ethnic group level (Piffer 2021).

Further, the correlation can not be dismissed as population stratification unless one believes that the same spurious correlations that hold within Whites (on which the polygenic scores were built) also hold between wildly different ethnic groups reared in the developed World. Of course with only seven data points, we can’t be overly confident in the strength of this correlation if expanded to a larger group of populations, but we can be 95% sure the correlation is at least 0.9.

In March 2024, Piffer and his colleague Emil O. W. Kirkegaard studied the EA3s of 2,625 “European-ish ancient genomes” and produced a most remarkable chart

Eyeballing the above chart, I estimated the EA3 PGSs of each of the historical eras. Unfortunately, I can’t simply apply the line of best fit from figure 9 shown above to these historical eras because Piffer calculates EA3s as Z scores relative to specific data set and thus are incomparable across datasets. Nonetheless, Piffer has confirmed that Upper Paleolithic Europeans have educ-cognitive scores similar to contemporary Africans (Piffer X account, June 6, 2024) On a scale where U.S. & British whites average 100, Europeans average 99 and it’s estimated Black Africans would average 80 if reared in the First World (Lynn 2006). If we thus equate the PGS of Upper Paleolithic Europeans to be equal to 80 and the PGS of contemporary Europeans (1 KG Eur) to 99, we get the following estimates of how each era would score in today’s environment:

Historical era (European-ish)	Estimated average EA3 PGS	Average expected IQ if reared in today’s First World (based on estimated line of best fit)
Upper Paleolithic	-1.6	80
Neolithic	-0.4	91
Copper Age	-0.5	90
Bronze Age	-0.3	92
Iron Age	+0.2	97
Imperial	+0.1	95
Medieval	+0.05	95
Contemporary Europeans (from the 1000 genome study)	+0.5	99

Of course minor fluctuations of a few IQ points here and there are to be expected given sampling errors and should not be over-interpreted. The big takeaway is that average European-ish genetic IQ has been relatively stable over the last few thousand years.

[Update 2025-03-20: An earlier version of this article incorrectly classified 1KG as an agent genome database when in fact it is contemporary]

[Update 2025-04-26: An earlier version of the article incorrectly estimated historical IQs from the line of best fit in figure 9, which can not be done because the historical PGS were calculated with respect to a different data set]

In August 2015, the music critics at Rolling Stone released their list of the 100 greatest song writers of all time. I found the top 25 online, removed the non-Americans for statistical convenience, and then recorded the ethnic background of each one.

Rank (among American song writers)	Name	Ethnicity
1	Bob Dylan	Jewish
2	Chuck Berry	Black
3	Smokey Robinson	Black
4	Mick Jagger & Keith Richards	White Gentile
5	Carole King & Gerry Goffin	Jewish
6	Paul Simon	Jewish
7	Joni Mitchell	White Gentile
8	Stevie Wonder	Black
9	Brian Wilson	White Gentile
10	Hank Williams	White Gentile
11	Bruce Springsteen	White Gentile
12	Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland	Black
13	Neil Young	White Gentile
14	Prince	Black
15	Ellie Greenwich & Jeff Barry	Jewish
16	Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller	Jewish
17	Lou Reed	Jewish
18	Robert Johnson	Black
19	Randy Newman	Jewish

Seven of the top 19 are Jewish (37%). But keep in mind that almost all of these people are from the Silent Generation which was likely around 5.8% Jewish (not counting recent older immigrants). Even still, Jewish representation is an astonishing 638% (37/5.8 = 6.38). Six of the top 19 (32%) are Black. Given that blacks were about 11% of America in the 1960s and 1970s (when most of these song writers were most relevant) their representation is an also incredible 291% (2.91). Around the same era, non-Hispanic whites were 87.5% of America, and if we subtract the 5.8% who were likely Jewish, that gives 81.7% of Americans who were likely White Gentiles, but given that only 32% of this list is, that gives a representation of only 39%.

But keep in mind that this list was made by music critics from the legacy media so they have their own biases as we all do. The results need to be replicated by more diverse methods before we can conclude, categorically, that when it comes to writing pop music, Jews > Blacks > White Gentiles.