A Coloured is a Coloured is a Coloured?

05 Saturday Feb 2022

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At least five years ago, I became perhaps the first person to try to estimate the IQ of Bushmen from the IQs of the races that gave rise to South Africa’s Coloureds. Commenter Someguy has also tried this but I assume he was inspired by me, but he’s so bright he may have thought of it independently.

But commenter Mug of Pee made an important point:

south africa’s coloreds in general aren’t the same as cape coloreds.

are they?

“colored” under apartheid did not just mean cape coloreds.

did it?

interesting that “kaffir” (a word borrowed from muslim slavers) is now like “[n word redacted by pp, 2022-02-05]”. but colored is still socially acceptable. just like in the US referring to blacks as “coloreds” had become offensive, but now non-whites are referred to with more than twice as many syllables with “people of color”.

it’s the stupidity stupid.

it’s the cape coloreds who are plurality bushman. the reason why the cape coloreds are koi-san is because when the dutch landed there were no bantus for like 500 miles in all directions.

and “khoesan” should be hyphenated. there’re two peoples, the koi and the san.

So who are the Coloureds who scored IQ 85 in K Owen’s 1992 paper on Raven IQ in South African standard seven school kids? “The coloured sample consisted of 778 pupils drawn from 20 coloured schools in the Cape Peninsula” he wrote.

The most authoritative source I could find on Coloured genetic admixture is Uren et al. 2017 which gives the following data:

Population structure and infectious disease risk in southern Africa. Mol Genet Genomics. 2017 Jun;292(3):499-509.

Ignoring the first study because it failed to separate Bushmen from other Blacks and averaging the most recent three, we get the following admixture levels: 30% Bantu, 34% Bushmen, 15% White, 7% Chinese and 14% South Asian. We know from Owen’s study (after I adjusted for 1991 HDI) that South African Bantu, Whites and South Asians had IQs of 80, 98 and 92 respectively.

The Chinese are usually said to have IQs around 105, however the Chinese ancestors of Coloureds were likely indentured labourers. Lynn (2006) noted that in the United States, the descendants of Chinese who arrived as labourers had IQs of only 101 so I’m adopting this as the best estimate for South Africa’s Chinese.

Thus Coloured genetic IQ = 0.30 (Bantu genetic IQ) + 0.34 (Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.15 (White genetic IQ) + 0.07 (Chinese genetic IQ) + 0.14(South Asian genetic IQ)

85 = 0.30(80) + 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.15(98) + 0.07(101) + 0.14(92)

85 = 24 + 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 14.7 + 7.07 + 12.88

85 = 58.65 + 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ)

85 – 58.65 = 0.34(Bushmen genetic IQ)

78 = Bushmen genetic IQ

So contra Richard Lynn, it seems Bushmen are roughly as intelligent as the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Their socio-economic disadvantage was caused by physical inferiority and distance from the civilized Arab World, and not from low genetic IQ.

A sub-Saharan is a sub-Saharan is a sub-Saharan.

Revisiting my revisiting of Bushmen genetic IQ

03 Thursday Feb 2022

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In my last post I cited evidence showing South African Coloureds are 19% Bantu, 20% White, 8% East Asian, 22% South Asian, 28% Bushmen and 3% Southeast Asian. From this data I estimated Bushmen have a genetic IQ of 67 (UK norms), which if true, would be the lowest racial mean ever discovered.

However commenter “Some guy” provided alternative ancestry estimates which made me want to replicate my results using a different dataset.

One major study states:

…nearly 75,000 autosomal SNPs that could be compared with populations represented in the International HapMap Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project. Analysis by means of both the admixture and linkage models in STRUCTURE revealed that the major ancestral components of this population are predominantly Khoesan (32-43%), Bantu-speaking Africans (20-36%), European (21-28%) and a smaller Asian contribution (9-11%), depending on the model used. This is consistent with historical data.

Using the midpoint of each of these ranges, Coloureds genetic IQ = 0.375(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.28 (Bantu genetic IQ) + 0.245(White genetic IQ) +01(Indian genetic IQ)

Substituting my estimates for the genetic IQ of each of these South African ethnic groups (except for Bushmen which is least known):

85 = 0.375(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.28(80) + 0.245(98) + 0.1(92)

85 = 0.375(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 22.4 + 24.01 + 9.2

85 = 0.375(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 55.61

85 – 55.61 = 0.375(Bushmen genetic IQ)

29.39 = 0.375(Bushmen genetic IQ)

78.37 = Bushmen genetic IQ

This is much higher than the IQ 67 I reported based on somewhat different admixture levels. Of course in this study the data was directly reported while in the other one, I had to estimate it from a chart, though I did so very carefully.

More research is needed to determine whether Bushmen are a uniquely challenged population (genetic IQ 67) or whether they are just typical sub-Saharans (IQ of roughly 80) or somewhere in between. Answering this question is the closest we have come to knowing how smart the very first members of our species were.

Revisiting the genetic IQ of Bushmen

02 Wednesday Feb 2022

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The Bushmen are one of the most unique populations in the human species, having been genetically and culturally isolated from most other humans for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. And yet despite their incredible uniqueness and ancient splitting off date, almost nothing is known about their intelligence level; indeed political correctness prevents scientists from even asking the question.

Given that Bushmen split from the rest of our species before behavioral modernity appeared, their IQs hold the answer to questions that scientists have been asking for decades. Was the Upper Paleolithic Revolution (the sudden explosion of art and advanced tools some 70 to 40 kya) a cultural change or a genetic change?

With Bushman on the verge of extinction and political correctness only growing stronger, we may never be able to test more Bushmen, let alone raise them in white upper class homes and see if their scores improve, let alone scan whole genomes for IQ variants.

But fortunately the genetics of Bushmen are preserved in the South African Coloureds and the IQs of these have been well studied. They have a phenotypic IQ of 82 and, I estimate, a genetic IQ of 85.

Source

Based on the above graphic, Coloureds are are 19% Bantu, 20% White, 8% East Asian, 22% South Asian, 28% Bushmen and 3% other. The other is probably Southeast Asians. In their book, The Intelligence of Nations, Lynn & Becker cite a 1996 study by Hadidjaja et al. in which samples of Indonesian kids obtained Raven IQs (corrected for Flynn effect) of about 80 to 86, or roughly 83. Given Indonesia’s 0.529 HDI in 1991, I used a technique to estimate their genetic IQs at 93. Meanwhile, I’ve estimated that South African Whites, Indians, and Blacks have genetic IQs of 98, 92 and 80 respectively. Armed with the genetic IQ of Coloureds (85) and the genetic IQs of five of the six races that compose their ancestry, and their relative proportions, solving for the fifth race (Bushmen) is simple algebra:

Coloureds genetic IQ = 0.19(Bantu genetic IQ) + 0.2(White genetic IQ) + 0.08%(East Asian genetic IQ) + 0.22(South Asian genetic IQ) + 0.28(Bushman) + 0.03(Southeast Asian IQ)

85 = 0.19(80) + 0.2(98) + 0.08(105) + 0.22(92) + 0.28(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 0.03(93)

85 = 15.2 + 19.6 + 8.4 + 20.24 + 0.28(Bushmen genetic IQ) + 2.79

85 = 66.23 + 0.28(Bushmen genetic IQ)

85 – 66.23 = 0.28(Bushmen genetic IQ)

18.77 = 0.28(Bushmen genetic IQ)

18.77/0.28 = Bushmen genetic IQ

67 = Bushmen genetic IQ

Estimating genetic IQ in deprived populations

28 Friday Jan 2022

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≈ 61 Comments

By the end of the 20th century, Whites, Indians, Coloureds and Blacks in South Africa averaged IQs of 98, 92, 82, and 69 (UK norms). Although all four “races” were in school when tested and used to paper-pencil tests, and although the test used (Standard Progressive Matrices) was culture reduced, there were enormous difference in the quality of environment the four races were exposed to including the biological environment which affects brain growth. I tried to correct for this by comparing the different rates of stunting (low height), but as commenter “some guy” noted, this measure is too confounded with genetic height to be a good proxy for environment.

Perhaps a better proxy is Human Development Index (HDI) which combines income, education, and life span. While life span is confounded with genetics to some degree, being reared in a poor uneducated home is a clear environmental effect.

In 1991, South Africa’s Whites, Indians, Coloureds, and Blacks had HDIs of 0.901, 0.836, 0.663, and 0.50 respectively (see table III).

source

To put these numbers in perspective, I wanted to know the HDI of black Americans because black Americans have continued to score 15 points below white Americans for roughly a century, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether they’re reared by their biological parents or adopted into White professional homes. Thus black American HDI is perhaps a ceiling beyond which environment much affects IQ.

An article in The Atlantic (October 14, 2014) by Theodore R. Johnson reported their HDI but I don’t think a 2014 figure is comparable with the 1991 figure for South Africa’s races, both because living standards have changed over time and so has the method of calculating HDI. But assuming the relative ranking of black America has been similar over time (slightly above Saudi Arabia and slightly below Qatar) then in 1991 they had an HDI of about 0.705 (Saudi Arabia) to 0.745 (Qatar) or roughly 0.725.

Black Americans (1991 HDI 0.725) score 15 points lower than white Americans, but 16 points higher than South African blacks (1991 HDI 0.5). The former gap is arguably 100% genetic judging by the results of the Minnesota transracial adoption study suggesting HDI has no effect on IQ once you hit at least 0.725. The latter gap is probably 31% genetic, because Black Americans are only 75% Black. Adjusting for this reduces the latter gap to 11 points suggesting that for people with HDIs below 0.725, subtracting the HDI from 0.725 and then multiply by 48.9 gives an estimate of how much Raven IQ (taken by people in school) has been supressed by environment.

So the IQs of South African Whites and Indians (98 and 92 respectively) are probably not supressed because their 1991 HDIs were above 0.725 but Coloureds were 0.062 below this threshold, so multiplying by 48.9 suggests their IQs were supressed by 3 points. This would raise them from 82 to 85, the same as African Americans.

Native Americans

According to one study, “by 2001, the American Indian and Alaska Native population and the Canadian Indigenous population had…HDI scores comparable to South Korea or the Czech Republic and Belarus or Trinidad and Tobago, respectively.” In 1991 Czech Republic had an HDI score of 0.733 and Trinidad and Tobago, 0.67. Averaging just those two (couldn’t find 1991 data on the other countries) suggests American Indians and Arctic people had a 1991 HDI of 0.702.  This suggests their Raven IQs are supressed by 1 point. This is consistent with a study that found that several years of foster care in white homes did not at all improve the IQ of these.

The pseudoscience of stunting & wasting

27 Thursday Jan 2022

Posted by in ethnicity, heritability, Uncategorized

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Stunting is defined as being at least 2 standard deviations (SD) below the average of the reference group for your height, sex and age. Wasting is defined as being at least 2 SD below average weight for your height and sex. The reference group is an international sample of socio-economically advantaged breast fed children.

Commenter “Someguy” pointed out that using stunting rates to measure how malnourished a certain ethnic group was is faulty because some groups might be genetically shorter than others. I agree but was unsure if this genetic difference would show up in young children. After all, the World Health Organization (WHO) claims children of all ethnic groups grow similarly when breast fed and born and raised healthy, at least up to age five, and so a single reference group can be applied internationally.

Further, Arthur Jensen stated that (in his population) height has a heritability of 0.95 in early adulthood, but only 0.30 in infancy. With genes having only moderate effects in the first years of life, this made it seem quite plausible that all races (with the exception of pygmies) could use the same growth chart to measure nutritional status.

However even comparing different races in First World countries show large differences in early childhood height. For example averaging across ages zero, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 and 4.5 years, Dutch boys (see table 1) are 1.02 SD taller than Japanese boys (Japanese SD used since the Dutch one not provided).

To be sure this is much smaller than the 1.93 SD height gap that shows up at age 17.5, consistent with the square root of height heritability being almost twice as high in early adulthood compared to infancy.

It is sometimes said that in most ethnic groups, well nourished kids are within half an SD of the WHO growth chart so close enough, but if one population is half an SD above and another half an SD below, that’s a 1 SD difference!

And because small differences in the mean create huge differences at the extremes, a 1 SD gap means the shorter group will show about 7% of their population stunting while the taller group will show only 0.6% despite the fact that both groups have equal nutrition! That’s a little too much error for comfort.

If the World Health Organization is serious about measuring malnutrition, they should invest in getting us better polygenic scores for height. Only then could they say with accuracy that a given population is below their genetic height potential, and thus malnourished.

Dr. Phil was right

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

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Back in April 2020, Dr. Phil went on Fox News and warned about the dangers of the lockdown. After that appearance he was blasted by liberals for minimizing the dangers of the virus and much of the criticism spilled over against Oprah for making Dr. Phil famous in the first place.

Ever since she helped elect Obama circa 2008, Oprah has been far more popular with liberals than with conservatives, but there is a small but vocal minority of liberals that hate Oprah. For if a dark skinned black woman from the lowest social class, can rise up to become one of the richest, most influential, most powerful, and beloved people on Earth, then what excuse do they have?

Some of these liberal keep their Oprah hatred to themselves for fear of looking racist, but whenever Dr. Phil does something wrong, the leap at the chance to bash him but then shift to bashing Oprah for giving us him.

They are attacking Oprah, but because they are attacking Oprah for giving us a white man, they are being the opposite of racist and sexist.

Because without Oprah, a Southern working class overweight bald ageing straight man from the backwoods of Texas would never have been given a talk show.

You would think with such stereotypically redneck demographics, Dr. Phil would be racist, but you’d be wrong. Dr. Phil’s freakishly large brain gave him the intelligence and compassion to condemn those who were bullying Arabs and Muslims after 9/11.

And now Dr. Phil has proven right about the lockdown. We can’t keep shutting down the entire economy every time there’s an increase in covid cases. Because unless we’re willing to get the United Nations to convince every army on the planet to triple vax every living human, the virus is just going to keep spreading and keep mutating.

It’s time to open up the economy. Invest in more hospitals, treatments and better pay for nurses and doctors. Let private businesses decide for themselves whether their customers and employees need to be vaxed. And let nature (and the free market) take its course.

mm

The genetic IQ of the Arab World

25 Tuesday Jan 2022

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By 2010, the average IQ of Saudi Arabia on the Raven Standard Progressive Matrices was 84 (UK norms) however as of 2004, the stunting rate in the Arab world was 9.3%. Using a technique I described in my last post, this suggests Arab IQ is stunted by 4 points and that their genetic IQ is 88.

This seems quite low for the people who first invented agriculture and then invented civilization and then produced the most influential man of all time, the prophet Mohammed. However we must believe that generations of cousin marriage harmed their gene pool because of inbreeding depression which attacks all Darwinian fitness traits, from brain size to height. Mixing with sub-Saharan slaves likely also had an effect.

One sign that Arab IQ has declined is the degree to which they are dominated by Jews, despite their much greater population and natural resources. The 9/11 attacks only played into Zionist hands, by dragging the U.S. into Middle east wars.

My favorite thing about the Arab World is shawarmas (yum!), I just wish you could get one with cheese and mayonnaise added to it 🙂

Adjusting South African IQs for malnutrition

25 Tuesday Jan 2022

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By the end of the 20th century, Whites, Indians, Coloureds and Blacks in South Africa averaged IQs of 98, 92, 82, and 69 (UK norms) and malnutrition rates of 5.7, 10.9*, 18, and 32 percent respectively (see table 2.13 below):

From The Global Bell Curve (2008) by Richard Lynn

Malnutrition is defined here as the percentage of the population that is stunted. Stunted is defined as two or more standard deviations (SDs) shorter than comparable healthy populations. In theory only 2% of the healthy reference population should be stunted.

But nutrition is not a discrete variable. In theory there’s a perfect continuum between optimum and suboptimum processing of nutrients and each population has their own bell curve.

So if 32% of South African blacks have sub-optimum nutrition compared to only 2% of well nourished populations, then that tells us that the 32nd percentile (-0.47 SD) on the former’s bell curve equates to the 2nd percentile (- 2 SD) on the latter’s. Assuming roughly equal standard deviations, it suggests South Africa’s black bell curve is shifted 1.53 SD to the left of what was considered optimum at the time.

So the stunted children are just the tip of the iceberg. The average black child in South Africa should be 1.53 SD below his genetic potential in physical growth. What about brain size? Also 1.53 SD below genetic potential? Given the 0.4 correlation between IQ and brain size, this would predict IQ would be 0.4 (1.53 SD) = 0.61 SD below genetic potential. Multiplying by the IQ standard deviation of 15 points, this gives 9 points of impairment caused by malnutrition. Adding this to the IQ 69 of black South Africans gives IQ 78.

I applied the same calculations to all the major groups of South Africa:

It is interesting to compare the estimated black genetic IQ of 78 to the average IQ of 85 for African Americans, a presumably well nourished population judging from the fact that they are virtually indistinguishable from white Americans in height. But genetically African Americans are only 75% sub-Saharan, so adjusting for this, they go from 15 points below IQ 100, to 15/0.75 = 20 points below 100 = IQ 80. In other words, virtually all of the difference between unmixed American and South African blacks vanishes when we adjust for presumably stunted brain size.

Similarly, the IQs of Indians and whites rise to their corresponding levels when reared in the UK (a well nourished country).

*The malnutrition of Indians were estimated from the line of best fit predicting poverty rates in table 2.13 to malnutrition rates in table to 2.13: Malnutrition = 0.65(poverty) – 2.79.

South Africa’s White > Indian > Coloured > Black IQ gap

24 Monday Jan 2022

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[Update Jan 24, 2022: An earlier version of this article incorrectly concluded the students were 13, but with a new chart added to the article, I now conclude they were 14 and adjusted the IQs accordingly]

In their book, The intelligence of Nations, Richard Lynn and David Becker write:

Owen (1992, Table 1) compared intelligence of Coloureds,
Indians, Blacks and Whites from South Africa. The four reported
samples had mean ages of 15.00y and the administered test was the
SPM. Coloureds scored 36.69, which is at the 15.64th GBR-P and
equivalent to an uncor. IQ of 84.86, Indians scored 41.99, which is
at the 30.50th GBR-P and equivalent to an uncor. IQ of 92.35,
Blacks scored 27.65, which is at the 3.96th GBR-P and equivalent
to an uncor. IQ of 73.67, and Whites scored 45.27, which is at the
43.75th GBR-P and equivalent to an uncor. IQ of 97.64. 2.73 had to
be deducted from all four samples for FE-correction, resulted in
cor. IQs of 82.13, 89.62, 70.94 and 94.91.

Here’s the data from the actual study:

Owen, K. (1992). The suitability of Raven’s standard progressive matrices for various groups in South Africa. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(2), 149–159.

For starters, the study never says the students were 15, but maybe they are inferring it from the fact that they are described as Standard 7 pupils.

The same paper was cited by Wicherts et al. (2010) but they listed them as being 16 and mysteriously believe they were tested in 1986 (6 years before publication) giving them a Flynn adjusted IQ of 68.

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., Carlson, J. S., & van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). Raven’s test performance of sub-Saharan Africans: Average performance, psychometric properties, and the Flynn Effect. Learning and Individual Differences, 20(3), 135-151.

Reporting on the same study, Rushton and Jensen believe the students were only 12 to 14, writing:

In South Africa, Owen (1992) found that 1,093 African 12-to 14-year-old high school students solved 28 out of 60 problems on the Standard Progressive Matrices, which is around the 10th percentile, or an IQ equivalent of about 80 (Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998, p. 77).

Rushton should know since he grew up in South Africa, and when I asked two other South Africans, one said 12 to 13, and the other said 13 to 14.

However I found a good source which equates to standard 7 to age 14:

Source

Given the South African Whites, Indians, Coloreds, and Blacks scored about 45, 42, 37 and 28 respectively, these equate to the 45th, 29th, 12th and 2nd percentile of age 14 1979 UK norms (Raven 2000; page 39 to 40), equating to IQs of 98, 92, 82, and 69 respectively.

As we can see from the last row in table 3 below, at age 13.5 to 14.5, the median score in 2008 (50th percentile) is equal to the median percentile in 1979 so no Flynn effect adjustment at this age for post-1979 scores.

Lynn, R. (2009). Fluid intelligence but not vocabulary has increased in Britain, 1979-2008. Intelligence, 37(3), 249–255. 

Diet & the aging process

21 Friday Jan 2022

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David Sinclair seems like a really credible source on slowing down the ageing process because (a) he’s a Harvard professor and Harvard has their pick of the litter, and (b) he looks incredibly young for a 52-year-old. Of course some of his youthful appearance might just be genetics since high IQ people tend to be very skinny and neotenous.

Image found here

One of the reason I like him is he believes in eating only one meal a day which I love because I’d much rather have a big meal while I’m binging on netflix on the couch then have a dozen small snacks that I can’t enjoy because I need to be back at work 10 minutes later. He’s also a huge fan of fasting which I love because it allows you to compensate for overindulging on the weekend which I need to do. He also hates exercise just like me.

He also drinks diet coke! My dad’s always sending me emails about the hazards of diet soda, but I love diet coke because it gets me through my fasting days. I can’t drive a car for any length of time without getting my diet coke fix from the McDonald’s drive through (the best diet coke on Earth, so refreshing with all the ice) but sadly I have to bring my own straw now because they’ve got environmentally friendly with the paper straws.

He also believes plants are healthier than meat. This is reminiscent of Rushton’s r/K theory in that meat build muscles and energy which helps you attract women and leave lots of offspring (r strategy) but plant allows you to live a long life. That’s fine too because I’m loving me Harvey’s veggie burgers and Burger King’s plant based whopper, and I’ve even taken to plant based omelets that you just put in the toaster. This was my breakfast several weeks ago:

Below is a clip from an interview with David Sinclair: