A recent paper by Davide Piffer shows that East Asians tower on whatever common genetic variants predict education in Western populations.

You might say this is meaningless since the correlation between DNA and education in one particular culture is not nessecarily causal, let alone reflective of intelligence, but it’s striking how well a polygenic score built to predict education among whites does at predicting where whites rank compared to all the non-white groups in mean IQ.

For example when representative samples of the major races are reared in the same environment, you tend to get the following IQ ranking: East Asians > Whites > South Asians > Amerindians > Blacks, which is exactly the same pattern observed in the education polygenic scores.

Some people find it hard to believe East Asians could be smarter than whites because whites have invented so much of the modern world, but it’s well known that creative achievements require more than just ability; they also require certain primitive personality traits. Whites were evolved enough to have high IQ, yet still primitive enough to have the mental illness, non-conformity, and narcissism upon which creative output depends. It was this perfect balance between derived and basal traits that allowed whites to dominate.

But even this point should not be overstated. Throughout most of World history, non-whites have been on top.

NOTE: Kevin Bird has a paper countering some of Piffer’s claims so until this debate is resolved, strong conclusions are not justified.

At this point in the series I wanted to know how the reader would score on tests that he did not select for himself but that I chose for him. I figured a good measure of overall IQ would consist of at least 3 major cognitive domains, so the domains I selected were Verbal, Visual, and Numerical. To assess these three domains, the tests I chose were Vocabulary from the ancient WBI, Mug of Pee’s Gestalt, and the PATMA. These tests were chosen because they’re all quick, highly g loaded and normed by me personally.

Vocabulary from the ancient WBI: Verbal IQ 138 (mild genius)

Long before the WAIS or WISC, there was the Wechsler–Bellevue Intelligence Scale. Originally Vocabulary was considered too culturally biased to be one of the core subtests, but was used as an alternate subtest. Wechsler randomly selected words from the dictionary that were then tried out on groups of people of known intelligence. Those words that best discriminated between the bright and dull were included in the final selection of 42 words that were used in the 1937 standardization.

When the reader was given rare access to this ancient list, he got full credit (1 point) for 34 of the 42 words and partial credit (0.5 points) for 2 of them, giving him a raw score of 35 out of 42. This equated to +1.66 SD among Wechsler’s 1937 sample of young adult White New Yorkers (selected to be representative of white Americans as a whole), however by the 21st century, many of the words on the list have become impossibly difficult, so using modern white norms, the reader’s score is +2.4 SD. But since the white population of the U.S./Canada has a slightly different IQ distribution from that of the overall U.S. population, it equates to +2.5 SD or IQ 138 (U.S. norms). This is remarkably consistent with a historiometric estimate of the reader’s vocabulary based on his kindergarten teacher’s subjective impression.

Mug of Pee’s Gestalt: Visual IQ 95 (average range)

Mug of Pee’s Gestalt was normed on a random sample of 15 white Ontarians. When the reader was asked to take this test his self-reported score was -0.66 SD below the norming sample’s mean. Unfortunately, education level for this sample was not obtained so it’s unclear if the Ontarians were representative of Canadians as a whole or Ontarians specifically. This is important because on achievement tests, Ontarians outperform the rest of Canada (at least in childhood), but it’s not clear if this difference would map to fluid IQ measures like Gestalt.

Assuming that on a scale where Americans have a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, the Ontarians, like Canadians on the whole score 103.9 (SD = 13.9) on perceptual reasoning tasks, the reader’s score would equate to an IQ of 95. This is perhaps not surprising because the reader’s psychometric history showed his lowest score on Paul Cooijmans’s spatial test and there’s no historiometric evidence of spatial precociousness.

The reader also self-reported a high score on Cooijmans’s aspergoid test. Although my amateur clinical impression just from reading a few of his emails is that the reader is not autistic, his relatively low Gestalt might suggest otherwise because one theory is autistics lack big picture thinking. More testing is needed to confirm or debunk this hypothesis.

The PATMA: Numerical IQ 131 (mild genius)

The PATMA is a quick test of lateral mathematical reasoning that appears to be exceptionally g loaded. The reader self-reports a score of 8 out of 10. Based on 11 (mostly self-reported) score pairs from people who have taken both the PATMA and (abbreviated) WAIS-III/WAIS-IV (roughly corrected for old norms) a score of 8 is now equating to an IQ of 131.

Overall global intellectual ability: Full-scale IQ 131 (mild genius)

It’s hard to calculate a composite score without knowing the intercorrelation of the above three tests, but a rough approach is as follows: The average score of the reader on these three tests is +1.42 SD (U.S. norms). If you average +1.42 SD on the 10 core WAIS-IV subtests, your full-scale IQ is 131. If we assume the above 3 tests are statistically equivalent to a random sample of WAIS-IV subtests, an overall IQ of 131 is implied.

In this series I’ve been estimating a reader’s IQ using different methods, and now in part 3 we examine his psychometric history. Psychometric history is especially important in forensic cases where criminals may have faked their current low scores to avoid culpability, so they need to be corroborated by past scores.

The reader wrote:

My ‘reading level’ was assessed at 4th grade when I was in the 3rd grade, and 5th grade when I was in the 4th grade.

Unfortunately claims like this are ambiguous because “reading level” is not defined. Does reading at a 8th grade level mean reading like the average 8th grader? I don’t think so because even half of U.S. adults can’t read at an 8th grade level, so maybe these grade levels are relics from an era when only elites made it to high school.

The reader the provides a less ambiguous statement:

At 13 I was given a reading comprehension test and told that I was on the same level as the average college freshman.

Americans with “some college (13 -15 years of education)” have an average IQ of 102 (U.S. norms). Americans who graduate college (16+ years of education) have an average IQ of 111. College freshman eventually enter either of these categories so let’s split the difference and assume they have an average IQ of 107 (68 percentile).

Of course reading comprehension and IQ are not identical, but they are so highly correlated that we’d expect college freshman to be around the same percentile on both (for young adults).

If average college freshman reading skill is at the 68th percentile for young adults, what percentile is it at for 13-year-olds? I don’t have data on reading comprehension per se, but using vocabulary as a proxy, the WAIS-R and WISC-R manuals show that a vocabulary score that would put you between the 63rd to 75th percentile among 18 to 19-year-olds, would put you at the 95th to 98th percentile among 13-year-olds. So we might guess that the reader had a reading IQ of 128.

The reader also wrote:

The mean of my scores on Paul Cooijmans’ tests is 131. The median is, I believe, identical. My highest score is 148 and my lowest is 118 (excluding one spatial test on which my raw score was 0).

A raw score of 0 on Cooijman’s spatial test probably equates to an IQ of 103 or less.

The reader states:

My US Mensa ‘pretest’ score was 120. This was the first I.Q. test that I took as an adult. My [redacted by pp, 2021-04-14] score was 130 (137 verbal, 118 performance). I won’t mention any other online tests because they probably aren’t even remotely credible.

I redacted the name of one of the test’s he took because in my opinion, that test gives people too much exposure to the type of content on professional tests, and thus could compromise them.

So it looks like on credible tests, his scores range from 103 or less, all the way up to 148. Assuming his highest and lowest score were on tests that correlate about 0.7 (typical correlation between different IQ tests), 128 is what his real IQ is likely to be. Perhaps lower, since his lowest score suffered from floor bumping, but not much lower since his lowest score was an outlier.

In my last article I used the demographic approach to estimate a reader’s IQ. This is used when you lack psychometric data, but you know other details statistically related to test scores. This method is most often used when dementia is suspected but the patient has no psychometric history, thus the only way to check if cognition has declined is to estimate the expected level of past IQ. Such estimates are made from demographic variables like education, occupation and race, but I like to add physical variables like head size, height, body mass index etc, hence I renamed it bio-demographics.

In part 2 we take a historiometric approach. Like the biodemographic approach it’s also used when we don’t have test scores per se, but we do have a cognitive history amenable to quantitative analysis. For example if I know you learned to read at age 5, while the average kid can’t learn until 6, I might estimate your IQ is 120, since you were cognitively functioning at 120% your age level.

Another example might be when Homo Erectus was said to have the mind of a modern European 7-year-old because the tools they made could not be learned by children younger. This might also be called cognitive archeology, a term James Flynn used.

The reader wrote:

I was precocious only with respect to verbal ability. My kindergarten teacher evidently told my mother that I had the most extensive vocabulary of any child she had taught in a 20 year period. Her typical class probably consisted of 20 students, so I take this to mean that I had the most advanced vocabulary out of ~400. Half of the students at this school were white, and the other half black.

Of course being at the one in 400+ level at this particular school is not necessarily equivalent to being at the one in 400+ level for Americans as a whole, especially since the racial distribution of this school is not typical.

Since half the school is white, we can guess he was at the one on 200+ level among the white students, however because of systemic racism, upper class whites send their kids to white schools, leaving the children of the lower class to attend largely black schools.

On page 63 of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart he notes that whites with only a high school diploma average IQ 99 (U.S. norms) and those with even less average IQ 87. Splitting the difference, IQ 93 was perhaps the mean of white parents of students at this school.

But given the 0.5 IQ correlation between parents and their children, we’d expect the children of these white parents to progress 50% to the national white mean (IQ 103), thus the white students likely averaged IQ 98.

Assuming a standard deviation of about 15 we’d expect the one in 200+ level (+2.5 SD) to be IQ 136+.

So our historiometric estimate of the reader’s IQ (136+) is somewhat higher than the bio-demographic one (127).

Back in February, a reader asked me to estimate his IQ. He wrote:

Dear PP,

I’m a long-time reader of your blog. I particularly enjoy your estimates of the I.Q.s of historical and contemporary personalities.

Would you perhaps be interested in estimating my I.Q.?…

…I am underweight, but my head is decidedly small. I am currently unemployed and have never had a job that could be called ‘good’ by any reasonable standard…

…Best wishes,

A small-skulled, unemployed…

When I asked him to elaborate, he had a lot more to say but in part 1 we focus only on the bio-demographic data. He writes:

My height is 5’9″, and my weight is 121.6 lbs.

I have no formal education to speak of beyond high school. I believe that I graduated around the middle of my class.

I am 30 years old, white …

…I’ve long suspected that I have Asperger’s (and scored 1.9 SD above the mean on Paul Cooijmans’ ‘Aspergoid’ scale), but I have not sought a formal diagnosis…

… My current favorite writers are Schopenhauer and Cioran (I don’t know whether this is relevant or helpful)…

…Politically, my sympathies are broadly anti-democratic. Wilhelmine Germany is close to my ideal society…

…Strictly speaking, I am an atheist, but I find much of value in Theravada Buddhism. I believe that I will survive the death of this body…

…My head circumference is 21.75 inches…

I begin with the fact that he’s a long-time reader of my blog. Anonymous polls suggest my readers average genius level IQ of about 129 (U.S. norms). Not because of the quality of my writing, but because the topic of IQ interests a lot of super high IQ people.

The next question that needs to be answered is whether this reader is brighter or duller than my average reader. The fact that he is unemployed doesn’t tell me much because he’s still young, may have psychological issues, and we’re in the middle of a pandemic. But with only a high school education, he’s certainly much less educated than my average reader and education is perhaps the single strongest demographic proxy for IQ (though not as strong as it was in the 1950s).

On the other hand his favorite writers are Schopenhauer and Cioran, implying more intellectual interests than most of my readers.

But with a head circumference of only 21.75″, his brain is way smaller than my average readers’.

But part of the reason it’s small is because he is so light and low weight/height ratio is a sign of genius.

Head size adjusted for body size

Using 2012 data from the U.S. army, the reader’s head circumference is about 1.36 standard deviations below average for an man (bottom 10%).

But the reader’s weight is 2.12 standard deviations below average for a man, and since the distribution of weight is positively skewed, his normalized deviation from the mean is 2.66 SD below the mean (bottom 0.4%).

Given that head size correlates about 0.41 with weight in U.S. men, his weight predicts his cranium would be be 2.66(0.41) = 1.09 SD below average.

Thus his cranium is only 0.27 SD smaller than his body mass predicts, so adjusted for body size, his head circumference is roughly -0.27 SD.

Statistically expected IQ

However given the average reader’s cranium is predicted to be +0.44 SD, even after adjusting for body mass, he’s about 0.67 SD smaller headed than the average reader.

And given that head circumference correlates about 0.23 with IQ, I’d expect him to be about 0.23(-0.67 SD)= 0.15 SD less intelligent than the average reader (who is a genius).

In other words, about 2 IQ points below the genius mean of 129, or roughly 127.

Of course, this is a very crude estimate with an enormous margin of error, and as the series continues, we’ll see how close it is.

For over a year, the prevailing narrative among the educated class is that the coronavirus jumped from bats to humans in a Chinese wet market. However an alternative theory is that the virus was created in Chinese lab. At first this theory was only believed by right-wing morons but increasingly it has been embraced by intellectuals like Bill Maher and Saagar Enjeti.

One reason to reject the bat theory is it seems unlikely that a virus that evolved in bats would immediately be so well adapted to humans. And why would a virus that evolved in bats spread primarily indoors when bats are always outside? These two facts cause people to suspect the virus is not natural but was designed to spread in humans. And the fact that it attacks organs and causes blood clots makes some suspect it was created as a potential biological weapon that somehow escaped from the lab. Unlike the racist scum pushing ant-Asian conspiracy theories, I don’t believe it was intentionally released.

If the virus does indeed turn out to be a biological weapon, then East Asians have created a powerful new weapon that has conquered the World. Although the virus has unintentionally caused enormous pain and suffering to billions of people, the fact that they could engineer something that effective is evidence of superior East Asian intelligence.

But because humans evolved to be tribal, despicable acts of violence have been unleashed against Asian-Americans like this brutal stomping of an older Oriental woman in New York.

When I learned that the assailant was black, my heart sank. How can one minority be so racist against another? You would think that they would know better.

On the other hand, blacks were the first and most tropical humans, while Mongoloids were the last and most cold-adapted humans. If ethnic genetic interests are real, being at opposite ends of the racial spectrum may cause hostility.

However when another anti-Asian racist (this time a white one) decided to beat up an elderly Oriental woman, she beat the living shit out of him. Even though he had every advantage, being twice her size, speed and strength and youth, she used her large brain size to adapt; to take whatever situation she was in, and turn it around to her advantage.

That’s really what intelligence is.

Genetically superior.

For years I have argued that (1) the more branching on the evolutionary tree from which you are descended, the more evolved you are (on average), and (2) the more evolved you are, the more superior you are (on average). To many educated people, this sounds ignorant because regardless of when your lineage branched off the evolutionary tree, all extant life has been evolving for the same amount of time. However years ago, I noticed that taxa descended from less branching just seem more primitive, so there must be a logical reason why branching matters. For example, plants seem more primitive than animals and plants have done less branching than animals.

Recently commenter Race Realist informed me of more modern taxonomy that might not fit my theory as neatly. Luckily, even the new taxonomy supports my theory. For example, after only one split on the evolutionary tree, bacteria/a-proteobacteria branch off. After two splits, discoba branch off. After three splits sa[r]p and amorphea splits off.

So simple branching predicts the clade that contains humans (amorphea) is on top of the evolutionary hierarchy and bacteria are at the bottom. Now among amorphea, once again the clade that contains humans (Holozoa) is tied for the most splits while Amoebozoa has only one.

Sadly, among Holozoa, the clade that contains humans does not come out on top, but I suspects that’s because they didn’t have enough room in the chart to create a comprehensive tree at that level of specificity.

Oprah’s recent interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry drew record ratings and made Worldwide front page news for weeks. Cunning and smart, the big brained billionaire knows how to spot an opportunity, and then brilliantly exploit it.

The very British Carole Malone writes:

OPRAH WINFREY is one of the smartest women on the planet. It’s why she’s a billionaire. It’s why when Harry and Meghan invited her to their wedding she went like a shot.

Not because she was overcome with excitement at being a royal wedding guest (although she must have been curious).

And not because of Meghan, who was a two bit actress in a Netflix soap opera at the time. But because, even back then, Oprah, always alert to the main chance, had her beady eye on the Big Interview. She wasn’t Meghan and Harry’s friend back in 2018, having met them just once before the wedding, and I suspect she isn’t now. But everything she’s done to help them, e.g. get their first home in LA, introduce them to all the right people, will have been done with a view to the big prize. And now she’s got it.

Source: What Meghan and Harry are doing is despicable, Oprah interview betrays Queen; Express; March 4, 2021

Love that line “went like a shot” especially when spoken by a British woman. I just picture Oprah’s private jet flying like a speeding bullet to the UK wedding while using her nearly 2000 cc cranium to calculate how to lure the couple into the interview of the century: The way to get it, is to pretend I don’t want it.

During the interview, the couple made the explosive claim that an unnamed member of the royal family was concerned that they might produce a dark skinned baby. This caused British gossip Pierce Morgan to go absolutely ballistic. Even though Meghan and Harry clarified that the alleged royal racist was NOT the Queen or Prince Phillip, Morgan took this as a personal attack on her majesty.

However Meghan’s co-ethnic struck back, driving Morgan off the set of his own show. It’s unclear whether he quit or was fired, but after thousands of viewers and Meghan herself complained about his behavior, he never returned.

Meanwhile on the other side of the pond, talk show host Sharon Osbourne defended her friend Morgan against accusations of racism. This led to allegations that Osbourne herself was racist, and after being allegedly ambushed on her own show, she too was removed from TV indefinitely.

Queen Elizabeth released a statement saying she will address Meghan and Harry’s accusations in private. The palace has also opened up an investigation into whether Markel bullied palace staff. Many are asking whether the monarchy can survive this.

Meanwhile the real Queen sits somewhere in her $100 million Santa Barbara mansion, watching all the chaos she unleashed.

In a previous article I declared the kalash to be white, even though they diverged from whites 12,000 years ago and are more genetically unrelated to whites than whites are to non-white Caucasoids. Commenter “Some Guy” wrote:

I assume you wouldn’t group together two different species as one just because they had a similar phenotype Pumpkin, isn’t it a bit strange to do the equivalent with races/subspecies?

Some scientists (not all and perhaps not most) do group different species together into the same taxon based on phenotype. A good example are reptiles. Note in the below evolutionary tree, crocodiles and snakes are both reptiles, but birds are not, even though crocodiles are much more closely related to related to birds than to snakes. Thus the grouping is based on phenotype, not lineage.

However no scientist would ever classify bats as a type of bird even if their phenotypes were 100% identical (which they’re not).

Do any of my readers grasp the subtle difference between the two trees that makes it okay to lump distantly related but phenotypically similar species together in some cases but not in others? I’ve mentioned it before but people often ignore me. 🙂

UPDATE 2021-03-18

So now that commenter Lerenzo (and perhaps Austin Slater) grasped the difference, I can now make it explicit.

It’s NEVER okay to lump genetically distant species together (no matter how similar the phenotype) if they form a polyphyletic group but some scientists feel it’s okay if they form a paraphyletic group. Of course everyone agrees it’s okay if they form a monophyletic group.

The reason polyphyletic groups are not okay no matter how phenotypically similar they might be, is probably that their similarity has independent origins. By contrast phenotypic similarity in both monophyletic and paraphyletic groups is inherited from a common ancestor.

Unfortunately many scientists today even reject paraphyletic groups and treat all monophyletic groups as taxa regardless of phenotypic diversity. This has led to absurdities like humans being called apes, birds being called dinosaurs, and Andaman Islanders being denied their blackness.

The Kalash are a fascinating population because they look just like whites, yet are indigenous to South Asia. Genetically, they are more distant from Whites than Whites are from the blackest skinned South Asian which is why I’ve long argued that genetics is a poor way to define race.

Human populations show subtle allele-frequency differences that lead to geographical structure, and available methods thus allow individuals to be clustered according to genetic information into groups that correspond to geographical regions. In an early worldwide survey of this kind, division into five clusters unsurprisingly identified (1) Africans, (2) a widespread group including Europeans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians, (3) East Asians, (4) Oceanians, and (5) Native Americans. However, division into six groups led to a more surprising finding: the sixth group consisted of a single population, the Kalash

The Kalash Genetic Isolate: Ancient Divergence, Drift, and Selection
Qasim Ayub,^1,7,∗ Massimo Mezzavilla,^1,2,7 Luca Pagani,^1,3 Marc Haber,¹ Aisha Mohyuddin,⁴ Shagufta Khaliq,⁵ Syed Qasim Mehdi,⁶ and Chris Tyler-Smith¹

So isn’t that interesting that when you divide the human genepool into five clusters, you get traditional races: 1) Negroids, 2) Caucasoids, 3) Mongoloids, 4) Australoids, and 5) Americoids. But when you divide us into 6 clusters, the Kalash emerge as their own distinct macro-race. This shows that the split between Kalash and conventional Caucasoids is about as deep and as ancient as the paleolithic splits between major races like Native Americans and East Asians and predates civilization, agriculture and even the Holocene.

Since the split from other South Asian populations, the Kalash have maintained a low long-term effective population size (2,319–2,603) and experienced no detectable gene flow from their geographic neighbors in Pakistan or from other extant Eurasian populations. The mean time of divergence between the Kalash and other populations currently residing in this region was estimated to be 11,800 (95% confidence interval = 10,600−12,600) years ago, and thus they represent present-day descendants of some of the earliest migrants into the Indian sub-continent from West Asia.

The Kalash Genetic Isolate: Ancient Divergence, Drift, and Selection
Qasim Ayub,^1,7,∗ Massimo Mezzavilla,^1,2,7 Luca Pagani,^1,3 Marc Haber,¹ Aisha Mohyuddin,⁴ Shagufta Khaliq,⁵ Syed Qasim Mehdi,⁶ and Chris Tyler-Smith¹

If the Kalash diverged from the ancestors of whites 12,000 years ago, yet look just like whites, then either a white looking phenotype evolved twice independently, or much more likely, the white race is at least 12,000 years old.

Whites should be very proud to be 12,000 years old! Young enough to imply evolutionary progress (if you believe in such) but old enough to have been selected by nature (before agriculture and civilization).

It would be nice if some of the white nationalist types who are so concerned about preserving the white race, would put some of that energy into preserving the Kalash who are far more at risk of extinction and represent the last representatives we have of original whiteness.

With a mean IQ of 100, whites are one of the highest IQ groups on the planet (behind only Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians). But were their genetic IQs 100 from inception, or did they only become 100 after agriculture and civilization. We know for example that Native Americans and Arctic people score lower than their East Asian cousins, suggesting that the neolithic transition might have boosted IQ.

Thus I would predict that the Kalash (even if raised from birth in middle class Western society) would score at least 0.5 SD below conventional Whites.

It’s also interesting that the Kalash are some of the earliest migrants into South Asia. Is it possible that South Asians evolved from whites?