Below our my best estimates of the genetic IQs of many populations. Given the lack of precision, all estimates rounded to multiples of 5.
As one can see, there seems to be a pretty strong negative correlation correlation between IQ and skin colour. Those at the top of the totem pole are all light skinned. Those at the bottom are mostly dark skinned. This is likely because skin colour is a proxy for how far ones ancestors were able to migrate from the tropics and this likely would have selected for the cognitive ability to adapt to an environment unsuited to our African bodies.
It’s interesting that Arctic people have both lower IQs and darker skin than their ancestral climate predicts.
There also seems to be a negative correlation between antiquity and IQ. For example apes appear in the fossil record 25 million years ago and they average IQs of only 15. Ashkenazi Jews appeared only about 800 years ago and they average about 105.
Back in September I noted that Jewish children in Israel average Raven IQs of about 92 (U.K. norms) but by age 14.5 these increase to 95. Since it’s thought that Jewish IQ increases post-puberty, I take 95 as a good estimate for Israel’s adult Jewish IQ.
Unfortunately the data was not disaggregated by type of Jewish ancestry. An analysis by Hanna David and Richard Lynn found that in Israel, European Jews score about 14 IQ points higher than Oriental Jews though the gap is bigger on verbal tests. For example on the Israeli WISC, the gap was 1.1 standard deviations (SD) (17 IQ points) on verbal IQ but only 0.93 SD on Performance IQ (14 IQ points). It’s unclear what the Raven IQ gap would be more like verbal, performance or full-scale, but let’s split the difference and say 15 points.
Assuming 31.8% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi and they score 15 points higher than the non-Ashkenazi, then what would they need to score for the average IQ of all Israeli Jews to be 95? The answer is 105.
[Update 2022-02-06: Commenter Mug of Pee found a different source claiming 44.2% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi. Applying the same math to this figure put’s the Ashkenazi IQ at 103.]
So it seems at least in Israel and probably Serbia, Ashkenazi Jews have Raven IQs identical to those of East Asians. I can’t find any data on Ashkenazi Raven data in the United States, except for a small group of Ashkenazi prisoners who scored about 19 IQ points higher than the Gentile prisoners.
Just as Ashkenazim score 10 points higher than the average Israeli Jew, there is another group that scores 11 points lower. In his analysis of the Israeli military IQ data, James Flynn noted:
Recall that those not usually tested are predominantly from Orthodox homes of Eastern European origin, and they are known to have a lower IQ profile than the rest of the Jewish population (Judy Goldenberg, personal communication, 25 April 1993). Should there not be a large IQ gap between the usually tested and the usually not tested? In reply, that is exactly what the projection shows…The IQ gap between the usually tested and the usually not tested is a robust 10·7 points
Not usually tested by the military is what Flynn means. He’s referring to those who escape service through pregnancy or religious devotion. However they likely would be included in the age 14 Israeli Jewish average of IQ 95, I assume.
So to summarize there are three types of Jews in Israel: Ashkenazi IQ 103- 105, Middle eastern IQ 88 -90, and ultra-Orthodox IQ 84 (11 points below the military sample, which since it’s 98% Jewish, presumably scored 95). Of course these groups are not mutually exclusive because Orthodox can be either Ashkenazi or Middle easter though the group Flynn describes is of Eastern European ancestry.
[Update 2022-02-06: I crossed out my estimate for Orthodox IQ because I simply don’t believe they score that low. I may have made a logical error: Just because the people who are usually not tested are primarily Orthodox Jews, doesn’t mean the Orthodox Jews are primarily usually not tested, so I can’t necessarily infer the IQ of one from the other]
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.
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.
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.
…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):
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
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.
Pumpkin Person 