Proving the Obvious & Chanda Chisala
Genetics -> Evolution -> HBD
A good rebuttal to anti-HBD “arguments” is, “so you don’t believe in genes?” HBD denial essentially amounts to gene denial, because HBD follows from evolution, and evolution follows from genes. If genes mutate and replicate, then organisms evolve in response to environmental pressures. If organisms evolve in response to environmental pressures, then the reason why different populations with different genetics differ is most likely going to be due to difference in those populations’ gene pools. Africans have different gene frequencies when it comes to sickle cell anemia, melanin genes, skull-shape genes, and nervous system genes (Wu & Zhang 2011). So when they have less efficient cognition than other races, what does evolution imply? Do they have smushed noses because of racism? Does racism cause sickle-cell anemia?
No. The soft statement of HBD is strictly implied by genetics; the hard statement is made highly probable. These are defined as follows: the soft statement is that P = G + E, so P1 – P0 = G1 – G0 + E1 – E0. That is, any difference between sets of phenotypes is going to boil down to differences between the underlying genotypes or environments. In other words, the soft statement of HBD is that it is absolutely possible for one race to differ from another due to genes. This is a possibility that must be taken seriously any time a difference is investigated. For a cause to be environmental, that must be proven, which by definition means ruling out that the difference has a genetic component. The null hypothesis, then, under the soft statement, is that E and G are randomly chosen; the expected value of each is 50%, since there are two. In other words, the null hypothesis is the assumption that for any quantitative gap between races, the genetic component does not significantly differ from the environmental component, and to think otherwise requires positive evidence.
The hard statement, on the other hand, is that where you have two populations that can be reliably distinguished by their gene pools, any phenotypic gap is likely to be essentially genetic in origin. The extent to which environments differ between populations adds to the likelihood of genetic differences, because different environments mean different selection pressures. In the case of race and IQ, Africans are not going to magically underperform Europeans and Asians. Underperformance is evidence that Africa is hostile to intelligence, which is evidence that Africans faced less selection pressure to become more intelligent, which is evidence that the IQ gap is essentially genetic in origin. The hard statement, then, is the reality of evolution weighted with certain other accurate priors. There are a lot of these priors; others include the observation that essentially every racial difference that is not behavioral is totally genetic. Skin color is a nice example. White people can tan; this means that if white people are dropped in Africa, they may actually display an environment-caused phenotypic difference from their Europe-residing brothers. Africans, and the other races, however, are brown wherever they go. This is because the sunny environment favors melanation to an extent that genes for permanent melanin are fixated in their population. They are not secretly white skinned people who just tan a lot due to their environment. If Africa depressed intelligence so much environmentally, what happens to a populations’ intelligence genes when they live there for thousands of years?
All of this is to say, briefly, that when someone thinks they’ve finally pwned HBD, they better think again and think hard, because prior to any studies on the issue, they need excellent evidence that some difference, like the black-white IQ gap, is essentially environmental in nature. In general terms, if there are assumptions under which their evidence can be interpreted which are not impossible or highly improbable given genetics and evolution, and these assumptions render the evidence consistent with a significant genetic component wherever a phenotypic difference is observed, then said evidence is simply not good enough in the face of the broader picture. Said evidence is weak and is only being paraded around due to a narrow-minded, uncritical interpretation based on some degree of gene denial.
As I showed in “An examination of the causes behind the black-white IQ gap,” environmentalists have had millions, if not billions of dollars and multiple decades, alongside the full backing of the Western political apparatus, and have still not produced any evidence that the contribution of genetics in the black-white IQ gap is insignificant. All they have to do is find some black people without the naughty factors and show that those people have a non-depressed IQ distribution. They haven’t, even though this has been theoretically possible the whole time. Meanwhile, when people who acknowledge HBD finally start finding the genes (Piffer 2019), it gets decried as racist. The massive failure to find evidence like that which is shown below on the part of the environmentalists, when said evidence would make its publisher a national hero, is essentially positive evidence that the IQ gap is basically genetic.
All of this is to say that, at best, it would be extremely naïve for someone to parade around black overrepresentation in something, like, say, Scrabble, as evidence that the IQ gap doesn’t exist or is environmental or something.
Enter Chisala Chanda and his followers:
Scrabble Spells Doom for the Racial Hypothesis of Intelligence
What we have in Scrabble is an emphatic refutation of this hereditarian expectation of Black cognitive under-performance, especially when the full picture of African achievement in such mental games is examined, as I attempt to do in this article.
Murray 2003
Obviously right off the bat Chisala is violating the maxim, “In general terms, if there are assumptions under which their evidence can be interpreted which are not impossible or highly improbable given genetics and evolution, and these assumptions render the evidence consistent with a significant genetic component wherever a phenotypic difference is observed, then said evidence is simply not good enough in the face of the broader picture.” The idea that some game no one cares about in the first world is an accurate measure not only of top competitors’ IQs, but their populations’ whole IQ distributions, is laughable. It’s probable that Africans play this game specifically because they think they can actually compete in it, due to its competitive obscurity in the first world. Maybe they even try way harder than people from other places. It’s also funny how trivial the example is in the face of better evidence. Keeping in the theme of observing practical intellectual activities, as opposed to using IQ tests, we have the fact that 97% of scientific discoveries were made by white people, and most of the rest were made by Asians of various sorts. Africa in particular has done nothing. I leave other examples, like chess, go, and Nobel prizes as exercises for the reader.
Sadly, Chisala has more evidence for us to wade through. This is sad, because it’s easier to fling bullshit than it is to clean it up. And cleaning it up is sad. Next up is his bit on regression to the mean.
His first two articles are solely about this topic. They amount to 10,000 words, and in all those words, he cites no actual adult IQ data. Instead, he cites numerous anecdotes, some subject tests (GCSEs), and the CAT.
The CAT claims to be an IQ test by its output, but there are two problems with this data. The first is that the test was used on 11 year olds, and the second is that the CAT has low g-loading. These facts are important because of the Wilson effect (IQ becomes more heritable as one approaches adulthood), and the fact that the black-white IQ gap is higher on more g-loaded subtests (Jensen 1973), respectively. In general, I refuse to use child “IQ” tests as data, but it is interesting to note that, even with noise, the discovered IQ gap is 7-9 points between the whites and the allegedly smart African Africans. Taken at face value, after regression and selection is accounted for (this only has to total to like 6 points combined), the data has no anomalies. It is hardly worthy to be the only “””IQ””” data reported in the midst of 5000 words that supposedly debunk & fact check HBD. Recall the maxim. It’s pathetically naïve and out of touch with the broader evidence to think that a low quality test given to 11 year olds that reveals a 7-9 point racial gap implies anything contrary to HBD. This and all the other pathetic data is exactly equivalent to a flat earther thinking their at-home sight-seeing experiment BTFOs the globe:
That video is exactly equivalent to a hypothetical 40 minute rant given by Chisanda Chala or some other HBD denier about how Scrabble, a few examples of smartish black people, and the preceding data totally wreck the HBD paradigm. In both the link and the hypothetical, the epistemic issue is common: priors are delusional and out of line with the broader context, and consequently, interpreters are not critical enough about their assumptions and the meaning of their ambiguous, low quality data (which, due to bad priors, is not regarded as ambiguous and low quality).
Recent Chanda followers have been posting a 2020 meta-analysis (Pesta & Fuerst) that appears to replicate the child CAT data, finding African blacks to have an IQ of 94 at the age of 40. The overall black mean, however, comes in at 88, despite the apparently large amount of high IQ black immigrants in the sample. So from the abstract the study does not contradict HBD; it has long been recognized that even ethnicities might contain subpopulations with different mean IQs. Take white IQs broken down by religion, for instance:
Episcopalian 109.9
(Jews 109.0)
Lutheran 107.4
Mormon 105.7
Presbyterian 102.3
United Methodists 101.8
Southern Baptists 98.0
Assembly of God 94.5
Pentecostal 92.2
Jews can be distinguished based on DNA, generally the others cannot. Nevertheless, the average Episcopalian outperforms the famed smart Jew. Imagine if a 110 average IQ civilization enslaved a bunch of Pentecostals who had just lost a war or something and then decided race isn’t real when they started getting some Episcopalian and Lutheran immigrants. But they’re all Europeans! From the same country even! It can’t be immigrant selection! Googling “Igbo” is an exercise left to the reader.
In his third Unz article, Chanda explicitly fails to understand this:
Remember our goal. We only need to show that blacks in Africa would have a higher average IQ than native black Americans if they were moved from Africa to America since the African environment clearly depresses IQ, as both environmentalists and hereditarians agree in principle. This result would mean that whatever “problem” the black Americans have that result in such a large and intractable IQ gap with whites and other groups, has nothing whatsoever to do with the genetic evolution of races, especially since they even have more white genes than Africans. It is not their sub-Saharan African (black) genes that are responsible for their chronic academic under-achievement; it has to be a factor that is endemic to African American history.
He says this as he shows a chart that demonstrates a larger difference between two types of Africans than between the worst Africans and the US blacks:
Chanda’s obnoxious over-confidence is not warranted, considering the naivity of his assumptions. To add to this, we see similar IQs to those from the British study, based on the fact that Hispanics have an average IQ of roughly 93:
Interesting pattern from across the seas. Note that the pattern does not imply that black people are as smart as white people on average. Even a very naïve interpretation implies that maybe the African genotypic IQ is around 93 or 94. This implies that, naively barring selection effects on slaves and anti-intelligence evolution during and after slavery, the black-white IQ gap is 40-50% genetic. This is a far cry from genetics having nothing to do with the BWIG. But that’s beside the point. In keeping with the maxim of the hard statement, should selection effects and sub-ethnicity effects be assumed away? Absolutely not. It is extremely likely that there is an IQ filter for immigrants, and probably for slaves, too.
The point of this essay is to argue that it isn’t even necessary to prove the HBD framework beyond the facts presenting in the introduction. Positive evidence that there is immigrant selection is not actually needed. It should be assumed to be a probable possibility until it is disproven, along with its alternatives. Searching for positive evidence of immigrant selection, as if Chanda isn’t simply wrong, out of his depth, and totally disconnected from the broader body of evidence until he disproves it, would contradict the thesis here. Nonetheless, positive evidence that there is selection is available (that was predictable!), and is easily linkable due to the fact that Chanda cites it. It says:
African-born adults were more likely than the native born to have bachelor's degree or higher level of education. … Among those who reported not having obtained at least a high school diploma or equivalent credential, the African born more closely resembled the native born than the foreign born overall.
So there is selection for higher IQ immigrants. But Chanda thinks this evidence supports his hypothesis, saying “Extremely high parental immigrant selection? Refugees from truly troubled countries are not known to be selected for intelligence. Besides, some of these particular groups have the highest number of parents with no high school diplomas.” It’s obvious that he’s citing this part:
Levels of educational attainment, however, vary widely among African origin countries. The majority of immigrants from Uganda (66.5 percent), Egypt (61.1 percent), Algeria (61.0 percent), Nigeria (60.0 percent), Zimbabwe (57.5 percent), South Africa (55.3 percent), Cameroon (54.6 percent), and Tanzania (51.2 percent) reported a bachelor's degree or more as their highest educational credential. Yet more than a third of immigrants from Cape Verde (38.4), Somalia (37.5 percent), and Guinea (35.0 percent) lacked a high school diploma.
Did you know the Somalian illiteracy rate is 60%? Yet only 37.5% of immigrants didn’t have a high school diploma. Curious. This demonstrates excellently just how out of his depth Chanda is. The predictive power of HBD is immense; it predicted this statistic, for instance. Yet Chanda remained ignorant of it (assuming honesty), because his priors are garbage, because he is ignorant of the broader body of evidence.
Sometimes Chanda is hardly consistent with his assumptions, indicating the possibility that this is a racially motivated gish-gallop, wherein the goal is to simply spew erroneous BS, demanding that HBDists expend effort to individually prove each prediction-assumption or debunk bad data.
For instance, in “Towards a Theory of Everyone,” Chanda takes 2500 words to cite some garbage N < 20 data apparently showing that black girls have higher IQs than black boys. In the comments this is corrected; specifically, it’s mentioned that black boys do better on the math SAT than black girls. This is apparently in service of the assertion that blacks are less canalized, i.e. they have more fragile IQs. This fragility, due to the easy Africa environment, combined with redneck genes to produce the low IQs of American blacks (the low IQ of Carribean blacks is explained by interbreeding with low class whites as well). Not only is he saying that the American black-white IQ gap is genetic, he also says:
Although I agree that the case for a cultural transfer from some groups of Southern whites is very strong, I think it is more likely that this “culture” was actually passed to blacks genetically rather than through mere influence and imitation. If that is the case, then it was in fact the presence of relatively strong mutations in that sub-population of whites that was affecting the stranger aspects of their behavior and intelligence, and they passed on the same genetic condition to blacks through mating with the black women.
Yeah. You read that right. Chala thinks difference classes of the same ethnicity can have different frequencies of additive genetics. This guy is a clown and I am done wasting my time rebutting him. I will very briefly treat his remaining posts and then go over some of the numerous rebuttals that were already written before closing.
In his subsequent articles, Chisala mostly harps on Scrabble. Apparently chess is not a good debunker because there are books written on chess. What Chisala misses is that there is also a book required for playing Scrabble. In addition, he points to one black chess grandmaster from South Africa. One outlier, of course, provides evidence for nothing. Chisala misses the broader picture, such as the lack of African science in history. He treats African poverty as a given, doubtlessly due to hateful anti-white narratives (it has been shown by Ryan Faulk that colonization only helped Africans), and not as something to be explained. If Africans are secretly so smart, (remember, Chisala concedes that American blacks are genetically stupid), why have they never invented anything?
To summarize, Chisala has asserted the following:
· High African representation in Scrabble implies a high genetic IQ
· Immigrant data reveals that Africans have a high genetic IQ
· African Americans are dumb due to white admixture combined with lack of canalization
The immigrant data must be adjusted for the fact that it is not a random sample, and that it skews towards African’s more intelligent. Once that is done, the best data suggests that there is roughly a 0.5 SD IQ gap between African immigrant children and white children. Chisala likes to parade around GCSE data to claim that Africans are outperforming whites, but that’s ridiculous based on Africa’s history. Taken together, the data suggest that, on average, +1 SD immigrants are coming from Africa, who are having +0.5 SD children, making the African average about 85 in ideal conditions. Importantly, this will vary between sub ethnicities. As another rebuttal states:
In Europe, which is much less genetically diverse than Africa (or apparently Iran, or a random Indian village), IQ differences between ethnic groups can be up to a standard deviation in size (1 stddev = 15 points). So assuming any fixed value for genetic IQ to hold in all Subsaharan ethnic groups is absurd. In Nigeria for example there is massive affirmative action to boost university participation of the Northern tribes (for example the Fulani), while Igbo and Yoruba have to perform on a much higher level to get a place at a university. The economic divergence between the backward North and the more developed South hints at a IQ difference of at least a standard deviation. This observation alone would justify the assumption that some Subsaharan ethnic groups have genetic IQs at least in the high eighties or low nineties.
Chisala likes to poo-poo selection, based on erroneous assumptions, but when it suites him he uses it (like in the case of the allegedly negative white admixture).
As for the white admixture, assuming they mixed with representative, average whites, it would only boost US black IQ by about 3 points. Maybe the admixture was negative. It would probably still be negligible; it’s hard to imagine the average whites mixing with these blacks being below the about 85 IQ points. Chisala hypothesized that the black gene pool was poisoned with genes that are more deleterious to blacks than to whites, but this is based on reasoning that is at best ephemeral, and is unlikely based on what we see in Africa. At any rate, regardless of posturing, Chisala admits that the American black-white IQ gap is essentially genetic.
Enough has been said here about Scrabble. I will now do partial summaries of other rebuttals before closing.
From https://halfassed.science.blog/2019/12/21/an-answer-to-chanda-chisala/
Chanda Chisala’s two arguments are that a) the world class performance of Africans in the mental sport scrabble rules out a low genetic IQ and b) the kids of some groups of African immigrants outperforming white schoolchildren in the UK does likewise.
As I have already argued in this blogpost [4], to see that Africans can outperform other ethnic groups at the manipulation of words you don’t have to look at scrabble. Rap music would suffice. Not every cognitive task is strongly g-loaded. The evidence seems to show that Africans overperform their IQ in certain types of sequential processing (i.e. verbal and musical abilities, see stand-up comedians, musicians, etc), while NE-asians underperform in these tasks [5]. In many endeavors, being extremely self-confident, quick, having great verbal abilities and a reasonable high IQ will trump having an extraordinarily high IQ.
For the UK schoolchildren the only question is whether the results can be explained by the explanation that explains most seeming deviations from hereditarian expectations: Sampling. Is it plausible that some African immigrants to the UK are so strongly selected, that their children have IQs above 100?
According to statistics unearthed by Greg Cochran roughly 60% of all Nigerian immigrants to the UK had a tertiary education [6]. Given that university students are selected by standardized testing that qualifies a certain percentile of each ethnic group and given that only 2-5% of modern Nigerians manage to qualify for university, this puts a Nigerian university student roughly 2 standard deviations out from the mean of his ethnic group in standardized testing.
If we assume a genetic IQ in the high 80ies or low 90ies for Igbo, Yoruba or other high-performing groups and we take a regression towards the mean of roughly 50% into account, we would expect Nigerian children in the UK to perform one standard deviation above the genetic IQ of their ethnic group. This is easily enough to close the gap to an IQ of 100 and above. Interestingly Chisala puts the average gap compared to natives for all African immigrant children in the UK (not just the high performing ones) at 7 points. If we assume that the selection is equally strong across the board and we add a standard deviation to these 7 points, we are again at a genetic IQ of roughly 80 as a Subsaharan average. So for now, Chisala’s interesting data does little to make me question the hereditarian hypothesis.
From https://www.unz.com/jman/rebutting-chanda-chisala/
It’s hard for me tell if Chisala really believes what he’s saying. Because the truth of the matter is that he’s a bullshit artist, either wittingly or unwittingly. It appears that he has only a superficial understanding of the matters he discusses, and he tries to weave together cherry-picked pieces of information into a seemingly convincing story – at least for those who don’t know any better.
Chisala seems to have no understanding of the concepts of elite samples, founder effects, measurement error, sampling bias, or of basic statistical principles like statistics of small numbers. That’s not even to mention his apparent lack of understanding of the breeder’s equation (but at least there he has plenty of company). He seems to be mystified by apparent incongruities he encounters in his cherry-picked (and often outdated) samples because of his ignorance of these important concepts and many other facts.
I’m not going to debunk Chisala’s claims point-by-point, because, really that’s not necessary (and his piece is much to confused to make that a worthwhile endeavor). Instead, I’m going to point out some key facts make his claims ridiculous.
There are global differences in brain size. Brain size is certainly related to intelligence, both on the individual level (Pietschnig et al 2015) and (even more so) on the group level (though the both the group level and individual level correlations are less than 1.0). In order for Chisala’s idea to work, these environmental insults must also cause certain racial group differences in brain size.
But, as we know, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that environmental insults can affect brain size (see the Zika virus). And sure, sub-Saharan Africa is loaded with pathogens and other environmental insults. But racial differences in brain size are seen between people of European, African, and Asian ancestry in the United States (from Rushton & Jensen, 2010)
Then there is the work David Piffer on polygenetic score. Basically, the known genomic hits to IQ vary in frequency between the different populations highly according to average IQ.
As we’ve seen before, and as Bryan Caplan recounts, the differences between human groups in development goes back thousands of years – such that level of development as far back as 1000 B.C. is predictive of development today.
And finally, there is the fundamental problem that Chisala doesn’t understand either evolution or the formula that guides it, the breeder’ s equation. There is no reason to suspect that human groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments would be the same in all their cognitive and behavioral qualities. In fact, a priori we should expect them not to be, since such equivalence after so many generations of separate evolution is nigh impossible.
From https://counter-currents.com/2019/12/refuting-chanda-chisala/:
Regardless of whatever faults exist or don’t exist with Chisala’s methods or his data, I’m willing to refute him while accepting his arguments at their strongest. I will assume for argument’s sake that the outstanding black African scores had not been inflated or doctored in any way, even though that sort of thing does happen. I will also assume that Chisala is correct about everything he claims and still save the racial hereditarian position. I will do this using three main tacks:
-By presenting a more complete picture by including all blacks taking the GCSE.
-By showing how Chisala sets the bar of success too low to be persuasive.
-By demonstrating that Chisala’s single-minded focus on the black-white gap limits the reach of his arguments and dooms them to fail.
Presenting a More complete Picture
The overall average black score on the GCSE is 343.5. That’s still pretty good, but not nearly as stellar as Chisala lets on, and definitely not higher than that of British whites. Further, if we are going to group all the blacks together, we should do the same with the whites. This will add 1,849 white Irish and 6,312 other whites with average scores of 355 and 359.2, respectively, resulting in a moderate boost of 0.2 to the overall white average. Even including the 122 Traveller Irish, the white average remains 346.6 after rounding. So in fact, “blacks” do not “outperform whites in UK schools,” as Chisala claims.
And speaking of impressive, in order to truly refute the race hypothesis, Chisala has to produce evidence on a scale that rivals the vast volume of psychometric data we’ve been collecting for around a century. He has 6,011 African blacks that outperform British whites on a series of exams (or 15,785 blacks that nearly equal them). On the other hand, the IQ hereditarians in America have millions of blacks who consistently underperform against their white counterparts in standardized tests, and have been doing so since the tests were first administered. And remember, these blacks speak English and live in one of the wealthiest nation in the world. This means we can toss much of Chisala’s environmental concerns out the window when it comes to American blacks. In 2014, it was shown that Black America enjoys the forty-fourth highest per-capita GDP in the world when adjusted for purchasing power. This is only fifteen points and nine thousand dollars below that of the UK and well above countries such China, Russia, and all African nations south of the Sahara. Yet American blacks always do poorly on their standardized exams, and it doesn’t matter if it is the IQ test, the SAT, the GRE, the MCAT, the LSAT, or what have you. Every single psychometric measure we have says the same thing.
Chanda Chisala’s objection to this reminds me of how twentieth-century physicists were able to find minute ways in which Isaac Newton’s laws of motion fail, especially when attempting to predict the position and velocity of electrons. This marked an important moment in the history of quantum mechanics and has kept physicists busy ever since. But this does not mean that physicists should simply do away with Newton in the same way Chisala wants to do away with people like Richard Lynn. Newton might not be able to predict the motion of sub-atomic particles, but he sure can predict whether a football will sail through goal posts.
Remember, though, that we are talking about the phenotypic IQ here. Estimates vary, but it’s plausible that, were developing countries fully developed, they would see an IQ boost of at least 10 points. In other words, even without taking into account considerations about self-selection and government selection, we might expect the average sub-Saharan African IQ in developed countries to be around 85 – similar to the average IQ of African-Americans. Admixture might give African-Americans a boost of a couple of points relative to sub-Saharan Africans, but some have speculatively argued that those who were taken as slaves were slightly less intelligent than average. So, 85 seems like a reasonable number to work with.
An average IQ of 94 is significantly higher than our genotypic IQ of 85 for sub-Saharan Africa. Crucially, though, this can be explained by selection. A combination of higher IQ immigrants choosing to emigrate to the UK and the UK Government allowing only higher-skilled migrants to enter (as it does for those of non-EU origin) can easily explain why the average IQ of Black Africans in the UK is 9 points (0.6 standard deviations) higher than the mean genotypic IQ of sub-Saharan Africans.
At this point, Chisala might give two responses. Firstly, even if we accept that the genotypic IQ of sub-Saharan Africa is 85, wouldn’t the children (and grandchildren) or these immigrants regress to this racial mean of 85? The answer is no, because regression to the family mean is what really matters. “Regression to the racial mean” is useful to consider when there aren’t any more specific data on the population in question, but here we know that African immigrants are going to be a higher-IQ population than those they have left behind in their origin countries. Chisala betrays his ignorance of how genetics works by claiming that the IQs of the offspring of immigrants should necessarily regress to the mean IQ of their ancestral country.
Secondly, Chisala may reasonably ask how a 94-IQ population can be performing as well as a 100-IQ population academically, especially when Black Caribbean students (who also have an average IQ of 94) do substantially worse than both Black Africans and White British students.
In actual fact, courtesy of Robert Plomin and colleagues at King’s College London, we know that it does. This 2013 paper found that the shared environment explains 30-35% of the variance in GCSE results, depending on the specific measure being used. Genetic differences account for around 60% of the variance, in turn. Still, it demonstrates that a substantial proportion of the variance in GCSE results can be explained by the shared environment.
However, the evidence suggests that White British students do significantly better than Black African students when it comes to getting the top grades at GCSE. These pupils, who will disproportionately come from affluent backgrounds, are suffering the least from the anti-intellectual culture that seems to be afflicting White British society.
The Daily Mail has reported on one of the only studies to look at the performance of different ethnic groups when it comes to getting the top grades, which found that 55% of Chinese and 31% of Indian pupils achieved at least an A in GCSE Maths, compared with 16% of White British pupils, 14% of Black African pupils, 13% of Pakistani pupils and 8% of Black Caribbean pupils. In GCSE English, 29% of Chinese and 21% of Indian pupils achieved at least an A, compared to 15% of White British, 11% of Black African, 9% of Pakistani and 8% of Black Caribbean pupils. [Considering white people invent everything, these GCSEs definitely seem largely conscientiousness loaded, based on the massive Asian over-performance].
To sum up everything else 1) Chisala admits the American black white IQ gap is essentially genetic, but blames this on admixture with low IQ whites. 2) Africans are unusually good at Scrabble esque mental tasks, so their overrepresentation in Scrabble is not necessarily g-loaded. In general, no other practical measures of g reflect any sort of African excellence. 3) It is a fact that the black immigrants coming to the US and the UK are selected for intelligence. The level of selection going on combined with a correct understanding of regression to the mean predicts the 94 IQ-average blacks of the UK. 4) The GCSE results are misleading and misrepresented. Africans do not out-perform whites at the tails, and the tests aren’t very g-loaded. At any rate, we don’t have to use the GCSE data because we know the average African immigrant IQ is about 94, and the reason why has been explained.
So Chisala is wrong. Big surprise. The actual point of this essay is that this essay the object-level part of this essay was pointless. From the very beginning, the result of the object-level discussion was predicted from the fact that genes exist. Frequently we saw through other rebuttals that Chisala’s key mistake was being ignorant of the broader facts. Not only were his points necessarily debunkable; when interpreted with knowledge like that reported in Piffer 2019 or that regarding brain size, they become silly. It’s just so ridiculously well-replicated that Africans have a low genetic IQ relative to Europeans that at this point any “evidence” to the contrary is certain to be bull shit.
Remember the maxim: “In general terms, if there are assumptions under which their evidence can be interpreted which are not impossible or highly improbable given genetics and evolution, and these assumptions render the evidence consistent with a significant genetic component wherever a phenotypic difference is observed, then said evidence is simply not good enough in the face of the broader picture.” Environmentalists basically have to show direct evidence implicating specific factors in IQ depression, while demonstrating that these factors depress some group’s IQ enough to explain most of the gap with whites. Trashy, ambiguous GSCE data, N = 8 child IQ tests, tests on filtered Igbo immigrants, Scrabble results etc. simply does not cut it. It doesn’t matter how the words are aligned; this evidence cannot puncture the ironclad armor of HBD. It’s too weak, yet it’s all Chisala has. The rest is 25,000 horribly boring words that try to somehow get something out of nothing, similar to Spinoza and other idiots who thought they could discover the secrets of the heavens from first principles (Carnap 1937). In the end, GIGO wins.
References:
Jensen, A. (1973). Educability and Group Differences.
Murray, C. (2003). Human Accomplishment. HarperCollins.
Pesta, B. J., & Fuerst, J. (2020, May 16). Measured Cognitive Differences among UK adults of Different Ethnic Backgrounds: Results from National Samples. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3txk4
Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for recent polygenic selection on educational attainment and intelligence inferred from Gwas hits: A replication of previous findings using recent data. Psych, 1(1), 55-75.
Wu, D. D., & Zhang, Y. P. (2011). Different level of population differentiation among human genes. BMC evolutionary biology, 11(1), 1-7.