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Debating the existence of racial IQ differences is boring because they so obviously exist. Now that we're allowed to talk about it, I find myself not really wanting to. There really is no legitimate debate.
I think a more interesting subject is why these difference exist. Is there any settled science on this? I assume that Ashkenazi have higher IQs due to some sort of selection process that happened in the shtetls. But why are Japanese smarter than Britons, Britons smarter than Sicilians, and Sicilians smarter than Sub-Saharans?
My guess is that these could be relatively recent selections (as in, last 2000 years or so). The British population, for example, underwent a millennium long selection process whereby rich people had many more surviving children than the poor. And, even though class mobility was limited it was not non-existent. Smart people became rich and had more children. Do this for 40 generations and IQ will rise significantly.
On the other hand, Italy had higher urbanization than Great Britain during the Middle Ages. Cities, then as now, acted as IQ shredders. Smart people moved to the city where, due to pestilence, they had sub-replacement fertility.
In the year 500, places like Italy, Turkey, Greece, and Syria were far more advanced than northern Europe. But this very advancement may have led to them gradually falling behind in IQ due to higher urbanization.
This is all rank speculation of course. That's what makes it fun!
I'd also like to hear theories about how the East Asian package (high IQ, low agency) came to be...
What's your evidence that Sicilians are lower IQ? On the country map it's as green as the rest of Italy which is as green as the UK.
One could look around modern day Sicily and note the obvious dysfunction and say well duh, but emigration from Sicily since WW2 has been high.
What country map are you talking about? One can't average the whole of Italy due to it effectively being two countries stitched together. The differences are very big.
Lots of studies show Sicily having an average IQ of about 90 with northern Italy having slightly above 100, with the GDP per capita difference being over 100%
Yes. That's why I was asking. The map in the post OP links to just treats Italy as a whole unit.
Okay. But that's explained by upwardly mobile Sicilians leaving after WW2.
I'm not even disputing it necessarily. Cousin marriage is high in that culture, for example.
It would be interesting to see how diaspora Sicilians test.
And yet when people from other similar regions emigrated in similar numbers during largely the same time period, due to the same incentives, the population iq remained more or less completely unchanged? Only in Sicily did it go down by 10 whole IQ points?
If there is some kind of emigration driven selection effects happening it's been going on for far longer, considering Italian cultural and economic development. Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.
Firstly, don't hold back out of fear of offending me.
Are you sure it's similar? My parents are Sicilian born during WW2 and something like 80% of my extended family in my parents' generation GTFO. Just packed up and relocated to America, whole hog.
In my obviously anecdata view, if you can leave Sicily, you do.
Not to blame everything on colonialism but if you look at the history of Sicily it's conquered over and over again throughout the millenia due to strategic importance to empires since it's in the center of the Mediterranean. My vibe from the place and the culture is that trying to coordinate above the familial unit level is considered for schmucks[1]
This can of course make you relatively retarded if you stick to farming instead of exploring (say) lending and accounting as a profession.
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I think rate of consanguine marriage is a major contributing factor. I haven't read it yet, but my understanding is that this was one of the main conclusions of Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: Europe became a dominant economic power in large part because it had a headstart in banning cousin marriage. If you compare a world map showing the average IQ in each country with a world map showing the rate of cousin marriage in each country they look very strongly negatively correlated.
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I think we need more data to find a convincing explanation. We don't even really know when IQs diverged: has it been that way since time immemorial? Or maybe it was a process that took a millennium? Or maybe it was strong selection over a century or two (something with the Black Death providing a selective pressure for more effective immune systems?)
This doesn't seem like information that's been lost irrecoverably to history, either: looking at modern and ancient DNA likely would make it possible. There just would have to be a social and scientific willingness to open that Pandora's box.
Actually this is currently being investigated quite a lot, there is a massive ancient dna boom and if you can read a little bit between the lines it's pretty obvious from the papers that get published; Short story, a relatively small group migrated from africa to somewhere in the area between the arabic peninsula and the black sea, underwent (historically speaking) rapid evolution (including cold adaption and , um, "neurological changes") and then migrated further into all directions, which resulted in the modern caucasian/asian split. Modern-day subsaharan blacks have almost no ancestry from this group. I'll have to look up the exact time frame again.
But if you want to know more, razib khan also has lots on ancient dna research.
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East Asian iq is not markedly higher than Euro iq. The self selection for exam taking populations like those in china must have obviously caused some issues in the kind of traits they selected for. Besides the notions of fatter tails, there is far more than just iq that is helpful for a lot of tasks in a society.
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Something that hadn’t occurred to me until reading this comment…
As I understand it, Ashkenazi Jews were a primarily urban population for the past 1,500+ years. Given that cities tend to be population shredders, does anyone have any idea how that may have impacted the Ashkenazim? Did they nevertheless have large families like the Haredim today, or did their birth rate remain pretty much at replacement after the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Or does that data just not exist? (A quick search failed to pull up anything, but I figure others here may have access to better sources than Google).
It's a bit complicated. I think they were urban dwellers at certain times but after the expulsions from western Europe (13-15th centuries) they lived mostly in rural villages in Eastern Europe.
I propose this selection effect for the Ashkenazi:
Until the Industrial Revolution, we know that rich people had more surviving children. A high proportion of Jews were in g-loaded trades where greater intelligence led to riches. These include being merchants, moneylenders, and rabbis. For Jews, more so than Gentiles, a high IQ was associated with more children.
The explanation that I've heard is that Jewish culture in the shtetl selected heavily for verbal IQ as demonstrated by analysis, research and commentary on Jewish holy texts. If you wanted to have lots of kids the easiest way to do that was to be a distinguished rabbi and scholar - which is why the Ashkenazim are specifically advantaged with regards to verbal IQ, but less gifted in terms of spatial IQ. There's also a decent case to be made (though I'm not sure where the current research is on this) that the higher rates of certain mental/developmental disorders among Ashkenazim are the result of this process as well - potentially with a similar mechanism to sickle-cell, where you have an allele that confers a reproductive advantage when heterozygous but negative outcomes when homozygous.
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It's funny how that works, 7 years ago I would have found a post like this cathartic for cutting through the gaslighting of the time and validating my taboo conclusions after reviewing the issue. But now that I've moved beyond any degree of uncertainty and impervious to the gaslighting from the mainstream consensus, these kind of posts just come across as tedious and passe. The time to contribute something interesting to discourse with your platform on this topic was 7 years ago, dude.
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I don't think that Japanese are smarter than Britons. They perform better on IQ tests, but it is clear to me just based on examining Japanese accomplishments and Japanese history that it is unlikely that Japanese have any intelligence advantage over Britons. Historically, Britain has been vastly more innovative than Japan in math, science, and social organization. Of course there are many factors that could explain this other than Britons being smarter than Japanese, but given this discrepancy, it is also hard for me to believe that Britons are stupider than Japanese. IQ tests do not perfectly measure intelligence. For example, obviously one can get better at IQ tests by doing more of them, whereas it is much harder to raise overall intelligence by similar levels through practice.
Isn’t it possible that different populations vary in creativity levels independently of IQ? If so, it could be that East Asians are just genetically less likely to be inventors and entrepreneurs, even as they are genetically more likely to have greater raw computational power.
Of course, their form of government, system of education, and various environmental pressures may also explain the difference. I think some IQ enthusiasts tend to give too much credit to IQ and not enough to other explanatory factors.
As often as it's observed that many of these quantities are correlated, even strongly, I think compressing a notion as complex as "intelligence" to a single axis does a large disservice to the complexity of actual human skillsets. It feels like a very crude metric for what it is. Maybe with AGI approaching we'll gain a better understanding of what "intelligence" actually is, because it still feels pretty poorly-defined to me, even if I can't counter with a better suggestion.
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Yes, the rationalist community is still unable to get past IQ obsession and recognize that thumos is just as much a function of HBD as IQ. The European cognitive profile, like everyone, is much more than IQ. Things like bravery, boldness have a basis in HBD just the same.
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I think you're underestimating how extraordinary recent Japanese history has been. In 1868 Japan was a feudal state with almost no modern technology or contact with the outside world. Within 4 decades it defeated a European great power in a major war. It went from 1200s England to 1900s England in the span of two generations.
Then after the entire country was reduced to ash and much of a generation killed in WWII, within three decades it was the world's second-largest economy. These are the kind of rapid, massive transformations that seem impossible were it not to have happened.
Although Japan and China have demonstrated unprecedented ability to catch up to Western technology, they have not (as of yet) been able to surpass it.
Let's check back in 20 years though. It does seem that China is now pulling ahead.
Edit: And of course China was far ahead of the West during most of the Middle Ages as well. But who knows what national IQs looked liked back then. A lot of selection has probably happened in the generations since.
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Another possibility is that Britain (or Europe in general) has a wider distribution of intelligence than Japan does; more geniuses (which would explain the great feats of innovation) but also a much larger (relatively) low-IQ underclass. Japanese people seem far more clustered around an IQ and personality median than Brits are. If Britain was simply better at unlocking the potential of its small number of geniuses than Japan was, you’d get pretty much the result this theory would predict.
GEVH (Greater European Variability Hypothesis)?
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I think it's also extremely narrow-minded to assume that intelligence will manifest itself in certain expected outcomes, with the benefit of hindsight. Even if one were to toss the notion of cultural and societal differences entirely out the window, from a purely material standpoint Japan and Britain are very different beyond the superficial similarity of them being island nations.
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For why the Islamic lands took a nosedive in IQ, you might want to check rates of cousin marriage- Arab Christians who do not do this at nearly the same rate have much higher IQs.
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Except, northern Italy, where the big attractive cities are and have been for at least a thousand years, have a higher average iq than Britain and England.
Theory busted. Northern Italy, is of course, essentially German. So perhaps the selection happened earlier when Italy was urbanized and Germany wasn't.
As always, shit gets complicated pretty quick when we're talking about huge spans of time and various different population replacements. That's what makes it interesting.
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Is this (historically) true or conjecture?
On the topic of rank speculation, it might be worth pointing out with regards to your analysis of wealth and limited class mobility that firstborns in particularly are supposedly slightly smarter than their younger siblings on average, and under primogeniture rules you would essentially expect successive firstborns to accumulate lots of wealth, which in turn as you mention would allow them to sustain and have more children. I do not know enough about when and where primogeniture is practiced to comment extensively but it was practiced in England during the Middle Ages from what I recall. No idea if the supposed firstborn IQ advantage could be expected to have a genetic component, but since everyone acknowledges that intelligence is partially cultural maybe it's still relevant.
In theory, one could test this in Germany, assuming that there weren’t large population shifts over the past 200 years (probably not a good bet), since some practiced primogeniture while others practiced partible inheritance. I believe some areas even practiced the opposite of primogeniture, where the youngest son received the bulk of the inheritance, though I’d need to do some rereading to make sure I’m not misremembering something before claiming that for certain.
Interesting!
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Harsh winters is the obvious explanation for why light-skinned races (Whites, Jews, Asians) are the smartest while dark-skinned races (Blacks, Indians, Aboriginals) are the dumbest. Obviously, high latitudes select for low melanin that their inhabitants might better absorb precious sunlight and create vitamin D, but whole months without food also select for low time-preference and the ability to plan ahead; you need to work hard most of the year and make sure to save food and wood for winter and avoid eating the seed corn even when you are really hungry. By contrast, tropical jungle environments where there is food year-around which cannot be stored for long before rotting in the heat and humidity inherently select for impulsivity and r-selection. Big brains are calorically expensive; if you don't need them, evolution is not going to make them for you and might even take them away. See Spiegelman's monster and Homo floresiensis.
First of all thanks for sharing the links. Those were interesting.
I wonder. After all, the Inuit aren't particularly bright as far as I know.
And humans originally evolved big brains in Africa. If food was easily available and abundant year around, there would have been no need for big brains in the first place.
So humans evolved big brains, and then underwent additional selection pressure to get to an even higher level of intelligence outside of Africa. I believe that this is likely intra-human selection pressure in a Malthusian environment. Selection came about because of societal pressures. How else can we explain the extreme intelligence of the Ashkenazi?
Greenland has an average IQ of 99, slightly higher than Denmark(lol). I suspect the dominant reason for the lack of eskimo rocket scientists is, firstly, lack of eskimos, and secondly, a culture that doesn't value education because they're still partly a traditional culture and the more urbanized ones are, well, impressively culturally dysfunctional. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
I tried to find a source for the average IQ of Nunavut. Nothing that seemed remotely trustworthy and plausible. Also apparently IQ is an acronym for something different in an eskimo language.
Also the extremely high rate of alcoholism. There are very few rocket scientists who are functional alcoholics.
Yes, I said the urban ones are impressively culturally dysfunctional.
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I doubted you so I looked up the data elsewhere and got a similar result. European admixture is only about 25-30% (source: Claude pulled it out of its butt) so that can't fully explain it either. It would appear that Greenlandic people possibly are much smarter than the average Native American.
Maybe there is something to this northern latitude thing, although I still don't really feel it.
I mean, by that literal statistic, eskimos are slightly smarter than Europeans- northern European countries are mostly clustered around 96-98.
I'd still like to find data on average IQ in nunavut. But I remember reading that siberian tribespeople have similar grades to ethnic russians and are estimated as having IQ like mongolians; eskimos are relatively recent migrants from Siberia IIRC, so it's very possible to me that this is the same gene mutations that led to high oriental IQ.
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A lot of people don’t think it’s true though is the problem. Or at least pretend not to know.
Oh for sure. But they are wrong and either stupid or willfully ignorant. A lot of people believe in astrology too. I have no interest in debating them either.
In any case, the deniers won't be reached by rational argument. Their beliefs will be changed by social desirability bias.
A lot of people think it’s the valid scientific opinion though. It has been spammed since the 1960s.
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