IQ and society

Robert Henderson

Contents

1. IQ and national wealth

2. Racial differences in IQ

3. Is IQ innate?

4. What is measured by IQ Tests?

5. Does an IQ test measure general intelligence?

6. The intelligence of erudition

7. Did Darwin have a high IQ?

8. Reason is not the primary driver of Man

9. Sociological forces 10. How primitive is primitive?

11. Speciation by culture

12. Race and  Man

13. An analogy with computers

14. The more primitive the society the less it relies on IQ related skills

15. Life in more complex societies

16. The increasing IQ demands of  modern society

17. Low IQ behaviour

18. High IQ behaviour

19. Majority and minority

20. The low IQ individual in a high IQ  society

21. The High IQ individual in a low IQ society

22. High status jobs and IQ

23. How the IQ  level of a society rises

24. Why have Asians not dominated?

25. Why have  whites dominated?

26. Blacks: the odd man out

27. A dysgenic future?

28. Conclusion

 

Appendix A White men can run

Appendix B Digital  technology

Appendix C Two high status blacks

 

NB Throughout I use the terms white, black and Asian as synonyms for Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid respectively.

1. IQ and national wealth

In  their books “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” and “IQ and Global Inequality” the psychologists  Richard Lynn  and  Tatu  Vanhanen advance the  theory  that  the  economic  state of a society is to a substantial degree reliant upon  the IQ distribution  within  the population,  with a tendency  for  higher IQ populations  to produce stronger and more sophisticated economies  than lower IQ populations.    But there is not a simple relationship between IQ and economic development, for example, Asians probably (see section 2) have a higher average IQ than whites, yet it is whites who have produced the richest and most economically sophisticated societies to date.  Moreover,  there is no uniformity of  economic development within races.  Lynn and Vanhanen’s thesis is that IQ is a necessary but not  sufficient condition for economic development.  Put another way, societies with a high average IQ  have the potential to progress to a sophisticated economic state but those with a low average IQ do not.

Such a conclusion is unsurprising because it mirrors what happens at the level of the individual – the lower the IQ of an individual the less likely the individual is to occupy a substantial and significant position  in  their  society. This individual tendency is  to  varying  degrees distorted by the amount of inherited material and social advantage an individual enjoys, but even within social groups with similar inherited advantage, the same tendency can be seen:  the lower the IQ the less  significant a position the individual is likely to occupy.  In addition, there are absolute limits to what someone can do with a particular IQ, for example,   someone with an IQ of 150 may or may not take a first in maths; someone with an IQ of 80 will never take a first in maths.

Lynn and Vanhanen’s correlations also suggest that the average IQ of a society will have a significant effect even if a society does not progress to the front rank of advanced states or peoples at any point in time. The Chinese and Japanese did not develop into modern industrialised  states of their own volition, but even at the pre-industrial stage they had much more sophisticated  economic systems  than populations with lower average IQs, for example, compare China and Japan with sub-Saharan Africa at any point before China and Japan were  forced into widespread  trade with the West in the mid nineteenth century and began to industrialise.

If Lynn and Vanhanen are correct, they have achieved something much more profound than simply discover a relationship between economic development and  IQ  because  the  economic state  of  a  society  has  fundamental implications for its social structure and social structure for the culture of the society. A more  advanced economy necessarily requires a more sophisticated social organisation than a less advanced economy because the social relationships needed to produce it  are inherently more complex. An industrialised state requires  large scale urban development to produce the concentrated population required to man factories. Urban development allows greater division of labour and increases the opportunity for a wider range of occupations, including greater scope for those which are not utilitarian such as the arts. Large conglomerations of people require extensive public administration and works.

What Lynn and Vanhanen are actually arguing for is a link   between average national IQ and general social organisation:  the higher the average IQ, the greater the opportunity for social complexity is the implication of their work.  If this is true then the general nature of a society  will be governed by the IQ distribution of its inhabitants.  Societies will share certain fundamental structural similarities because IQ distribution sets limits to what a society may be, although that does not mean societies with a similar IQ distribution will match each other in the detail of their respective cultures. Take as an example two tribes of hunter-gatherers, one in South America and one in Africa.  They will differ in their tribal rituals, the weapons they make, their marriage customs and the means by which they hunt and so forth, but they will share the same general social arrangements which allow them to survive:  a high degree of group dependence, the general means by which they live (hunting and gathering), the division of labour between men and women, a nomadic life and so on.

The evidence on which Lynn and Vanhanen base their theory   is substantial.  In IQ and the Wealth of Nations they examined nearly two hundred IQ studies from around the world to obtain average national IQs for 81  countries.  For those countries where the data is lacking Lynn and Vanhanen extrapolated their national average IQs from nearby countries with similar racial populations for which data does exist. For example, country A  with no test data has two  neighbours B and C with racially similar populations to country  A. Countries B and C  have  test data which allows their national IQs  to be measured  at 85 and 87 respectively. The national IQ of country A is given as 86, the mean of B and C. Objections were made to this form of estimation by critics but Lynn and Vanhanen  found a  very high correlation of 0.91 between the 32 countries which were estimated in their first book  from neighbouring country IQs but  calculated  from measured IQs in their second  book.

In “IQ and Global Inequality”, Lynn and Vanhanen increased the  number of countries for which  they were able to calculate national IQs from test data from 81 to 113. The correlation between IQ and per  capita income for 2002 (0.68) was the similar to  that in “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”.

For their second book Lynn and Vanhanen managed to calculate national IQs for all other countries without test data, thus obtaining national IQs for all 192 countries in the world. They found a correlation of 0.60 between IQ and per capita income for 2002 for the 192 countries. The correlation is close to that in their first book.

Lynn and Vanhanen have probably done as good a job as can be done with the available data in justifying their hypothesis by the correlation of data. However, it will not convince everyone, not even all of those who are not ideologically opposed to their ideas. Is  there another method by which their hypothesis can be bolstered?  There is – by taking the sociological/ anthropological/ historical and the commonsense route of appealing to what any individual can see for themselves in their everyday life.

Such an approach has the advantage of making the subject accessible to the general public, or at least to the intelligent and  educated lay reader. This is a vitally important consideration, because the implications of research such as Lynn and Vanhanen’s are as political as it is possible  for academic research to be.   By definition it is a subject which affects everyone and consequently should be  made accessible to as many people as possible.

I have a second end in view, namely, I want to explore the implications  of Lynn and Vanhanen’s  work if it does represent reality.

2. Racial differences in IQ

The largest difference is between blacks and Asians, or possibly if the white/Asian gap is not accepted, between blacks and  whites and Asians. Lynn and Vanhanen estimate the average of IQ  of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa at 70. Startlingly low many will think. I have more  to say on this  subject in section 26.

Estimates of black IQs elsewhere are problematic because so much of the evidence comes from the USA where there is a substantial white admixture within the black population.  The consensus amongst academics is that the American  black population has an  average IQ of 85.  Interestingly, this is similar to the average IQ found amongst the mixed race population of SA which was traditionally  known as coloured. This is strong  circumstantial evidence for a large genetic component to IQ.

Logic would suggest that if genetics is  the prime mover in determining  IQ,  the part of the black American population  without any  white admixture would have an average IQ similar to that of the sub-Saharan black population.  I have not been able to locate any study which attempts to sort the IQs of the “black” US   population by  racial composition, but Lynn and Vanhanen’s  calculated IQs for  countries  outside Africa which  have  overwhelmingly black  populations and  whose blacks have little white admixture support such a  view, for instance,  Jamaica  with an average national IQ of 72.  (IQ and the Wealth of Nations p76).

The difference between whites and Asians is much less stark, if it exists at all. The majority of studies support such a difference, although a few such as that of  Harold Stevenson suggest otherwise. Stephenson  “administered  a battery of mental tests  to elementary   school   children   in   Japan,    Taiwan    and Minnesota…Stevenson  and his colleagues  carefully  matched   children  in  socioeconomic  and  demographic  variables.  No significant difference in overall IQ was found and  Stevenson and his colleagues concluded ‘This study offers no support for the  argument that there are differences in the general  cognitive functioning of  Chinese,  Japanese and American children.” (The Bell Curve p274)

The authors of the Bell Curve, Murray and Herrstein  reviewed the literature thoroughly and  concluded: “In our judgement, the balance of the evidence supports the proposition that the overall Asian mean is  higher  than  the  white mean. If we had to put a number on it,  three  IQ  points currently most resembles a consensus,  tentative  though it  still  is (The Bell Curve P276).

Lynn and Vahanan  (pp  74-77 IQ and the Wealth of Nations)  give   average IQs  of China 100, Japan 106, North Korea 104,  South Korea 106.

However, IQs are not of a piece. For example, men and women score similarly but women have a narrower distribution than men, that is, fewer representatives at the extremes of the distribution. Similarly, there are differences in IQ configurations for blacks, whites and Asians.

Blacks score more strongly on verbal questions than the visiospatial; whites are best balanced between verbal and visiospatial, while Asians show slightly less strongly on verbal questions and significantly more strongly on the visospatial than whites, viz:

“East  Asians  living  overseas score about the same or  slightly  lower  than whites on verbal IQ  and  substantially  higher  on  visiospatial IQ.  Even in the rare  studies  that have  found  overall Japanese or Chinese IQs no  higher  than  white IQs (e.g.,  the Stevenson study of Japanese,  Taiwanese   and Minnesotans mentioned previously) the discrepancy between   verbal and visospatial IQ persists.   For Japanese living  in  Asia,  a 1987 review of the literature demonstrated  without  much   question  that  the verbal-visiospatial   difference   persists  even  in  examinations thoroughly  adapted  to  the Japanese  language and,  indeed,  in tests developed  by  the   Japanese themselves.” (The Bell Curve  p300).

That is the broad picture. It is important to realise that there are significant variations amongst the broad racial groups. In “IQ  and Global Inequality”  the “East Asian countries (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) all have IQs in the range of 105 to 108. The 29 European countries all have IQs in  the range of 92 to 102. The 19 countries of sub-Saharan Africa all have IQs in the range of 59 to 73. Much of the rest of the world has IQs in the 80-90  range.

The position of many of the  world’s states  is complicated by the existence of  very racially mixed populations. For example, India’s calculated national IQ is 81, which is below that of US blacks. But despite  such a paltry  national average India manifestly  has a very large  component in their population of the intellectually capable, a fact attested by their growing international importance in  the  area of intellectual  property. A low or mediocre overall national IQ does not necessarily equal no chance of social and economic advancement. What seems to be important  for  movement to a more sophisticated society is  that there is a sufficient weight of IQ related ability  rather than that all members of the society must be part of  a higher IQ  group (although if the number of low IQ individuals is larger than it would be in a homogeneously higher IQ population it will impose costs on a society).  What that sufficient weight is problematical, but clearly there must be sufficient people throughout the IQ distribution to do the more demanding IQ tasks, whether they be jobs needing an IQ of 100 or  jobs needing an IQ of 150. The necessary  number of people with IQs of  140+, is probably quite small. There is almost certainly  a  growing need for people  with  IQs in the range 110-140 because of the demands made by modern technology.

3. Is IQ innate?

In June 2005   Prof  Rushton and University of California psychology professor Arthur Jensen published a  60-page study in Psychology, Public Policy  and Law  in which they concluded: “Neither the existence nor the size of race differences in IQ are a matter of dispute, only their cause”.  Rushton revisited Andrew Duffy The Ottawa Citizen October 1, 2005 http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=6c9fe76b-f1 bd-4cfb-baa8-5d006efdf650&page=1

What is the cause? Is it nurture or Nature? That of course is the question that makes  the very notion of  IQ as a meaningful  measure of  mental ability anathema to most white liberals, which means most people with power and influence in the West today.

Liberals dislike the idea of IQ  tests  because it goes against the belief which underpins modern liberalism, namely, that no meaningful distinctions can be made between people as a group. A liberal may allow  that a  particular person may be good bad or indifferent in some respect but not the group. Many liberals in practice go beyond the repudiation of  group distinctions and apply the idea to the individual, claiming (or at least  implying by their behaviour)  that if someone is deficient in some quality it is merely a matter of  circumstances and upbringing.

The liberal would not necessarily be keen on IQ testing even if  IQ could be shown to be entirely the product of  the environment, because  that which is the consequence of upbringing may be as fixed as  that which is innate.  Unless it could be shown that IQ could be altered radically at every stage of life the liberal would be left with the awkward  problem  of what to do with those whose  IQ is already fixed. The liberal would have the further problem of how to alter society  to prevent future disadvantage due to the environment  If some magic genetic engineering  bullet  or other artificial means  such as   cybernetic enhancement  could  not be found  do  the job,   the only plausible means to improve IQ would be to radically reduce the differences in the  environments   in which children are raised.. If it was material differences which mattered that would be difficult enough, but what if it was found that the primary  causative agent of the development of IQ was  the influence of  family and peers? How would the child of  parents who lacked intellect  or  parents who had little interest in their child  be compensated for a poor environment?  As for material differences, it is noteworthy that  modern liberals show very little practical interest in reducing material inequality.  Indeed, most have bought into the free trade, free market ideology where property is sacrosanct.

There is a further problem for latter-day liberals: the fact that it is blacks who have the lowest average IQ.  Blacks are the ultimate politically correct group for  white liberals. If it was whites who had the lowest average IQ it is doubtful that liberals would be so utterly hostile to the idea of IQ as an innate quality.  Indeed, it is probable  that liberals would use the fact to bolster their  claims that on average blacks have poor social outcomes  compared with whites and Asians  because of  racism.

It is not only white liberals who have  an emotional problem with IQ as an innate quality. Most of the developing world (essentially  everywhere but those countries with Asian populations) has a problem because their  national IQs are substantially lower than those of the advanced nations. No people  are going to take kindly to the idea that they are as a people  innately inferior in some important respect.

What applies to nations applies to any member of a low IQ group anywhere, most particularly blacks because their average IQ is so   much lower than any other broad racial group. Such people will naturally resent being categorised as belonging  to such a group, regardless of the fact that group IQ says nothing about the individual’s IQ (although a person’s race will increase the probability of what his or her IQ is likely to be.)

The ideologically committed  nurturists  should reflect on  the  implications of what they are saying. The only way  mind could be divorced from natural selection  is if  it was not a product of  biology. But of course that is not what  the nurturists  think, for they  are  generally materialists who are normally more than happy to accept that mind is simply a product of brain. Consequently, what the  genetic determined IQ deniers  are in effect saying  is that natural selection does not operate on the  brain,  while they allow it operates on all other parts of not only Man but of the Natural World generally.

Interestingly, liberals  have no problem with  some genetic racial differences.  For, example, sickle cell anaemia is happily acknowledged by liberals  to be much more common in those of African ancestry  and   dNA tests which can predict with a high degree of probability  a person’s  race pass without comment.

The reason why white liberals normally have no problem with such genetic differences is twofold:(1)they do not  say anything about the human being as  a  human being because they have nothing  overtly to do with mind and(2) there is hard scientific evidence to say the differences exist – it would be literally absurd for a liberal to claim that sickle cell anaemia is not more prevalent in blacks.

There are other issues  which  are not so clear cut. A favourite  argument of those who support the idea of  racial difference in  IQ is  to invoke the  claim that blacks are on average innately more gifted athletes than whites  (there are considerable  evidential difficulties with this claim and I examine the difficulties in appendix A “White men can run“ ) and hence it is  not irrational or even unexpected  to find other differences between races such as those uncovered by IQ testing.  White  liberals  have a problem with this: they  are torn between  extolling an area of superiority   for blacks and the realisation  that if  genetic superiority is conceded  there  the absolutist nurturist argument for IQ  is weakened. This being so, they  normally  attempt to ignore the point, whilst allowing themselves to snigger in exquisite masochistic fashion about how “white men can‘t run“.

For those who are not hardline nurturists the  question is how large  a role genetics plays in IQ.  Most  psychologists  who accept that there is a genetic component to IQ estimate it at anything between 40 per cent and 80 per cent. There are good reasons to believe it is at the upper end of those estimates, even  plausibly above 80 per cent.

A child born in the most fortunate circumstances with every advantage of material  advantage, health  and education  may have an IQ of 80:  a child from the bottom of the social heap living without such advantages  may have an IQ of 160. That this disparity  between  environment and IQ can happen – and of course it  happens less dramatically all through the IQ distribution –  points to IQ being largely genetically  determined, perhaps even entirely determined by genetics, for why should high IQs be found  amongst the poor and low IQs amongst the rich if this was not the case?

There are plenty of examples of  men and women with little social advantage  excelling in demanding jobs. Take the case of James Brindley. Brindley was the eighteenth century engineer who built the first great canal in England for the Duke of Bridgewater. The man was  barely literate and came from a most unpromising background. Notwithstanding that he solved many utterly daunting engineering problems, problems which he had to solve from the bottom up because they were engineering challenges no one in England had previously solved. Clearly he was a man with a very healthy IQ, yet he had very little by way of education  and none by social advantage.  In fact many of the engineers of the Industrial Revolution were men of rudimentary education and poor  backgrounds, men such as John Harrison the watch and clock maker and George Stephenson of railway fame.

The great variation of IQ amongst any population is in itself a powerful argument against IQ being wholly or largely culturally/environmentally determined.  IQ is distributed within racial groups in a good approximation to the bell curve. Why should this be if  the cultural/environmental element is  dominant in determining IQ? Surely if it was dominant, the distribution of IQ would vary erratically according to the various circumstances of individuals, not merely differences in wealth but also  the propensity of  parents to drive children intellectually. Of course, there is a correlation between class and IQ but the average difference  between the classes is not  massive.  The fact that such variability does exist and that the distribution of IQ (although not IQ scores) has remained broadly constant over the century in which it has been measured strongly suggests that   IQ  is overwhelmingly determined by the  genes.

That IQ distribution varies not only between the broad racial groups but within  each racial population can be fitted into both the genetic and nuturist arguments. Sub-populations of the same race which are reasonably discrete would be expected to  vary because natural selection would operate  differentially on each sub-population, not least because societies will differ in the  mental demands they place on their members. For instance, a genetic explanation for urban dwellers scoring better than rural dwellers could  simply be that those who migrate to towns are both selecting themselves by making the decision to move  (with the implication that they  may be those with a higher  IQ  will self select themselves disproportionately)  and then when they get to the town they will be further selected by their  differentially  successful  breeding in their new circumstances.

More generally, if IQ is wholly or predominantly culturally determined, the sophistication of a society would  be the cause of varying  IQ distributions  within  and between races and any advance in social complexity would be not the result of increasing  IQ but simply  an emergent property of the organic structural development of  a society,  a  Lamarkian rather than Darwinian process, that is,  people would  be able to do more intellectually demanding things because  society demanded them and IQ would be improved. because they  were forced to do them. (The Lamarkian anaology breaks down at the point of inheritance).

Although halfway plausible nuturist explanations can  be produced  for IQ  differences  generally, they cannot be found for racial  differences. If  IQ is predominantly the consequence of nurture it  is very difficult to  see how a  nurturist explanation  could be given for  why  racial IQ difference is,  broadly speaking,  stable regardless of the nature of the society  in which a race lives. For example, why  should South Koreans, who were living in a  pre-industrial society until  very recently,   have a similar IQ  profile to those of Korean parentage  born and raised in the USA? There really  is not any  plausible non-genetic explanation for such uniformity. Indeed, it would be difficult to construct any nurturist argument, plausible or otherwise,  to explain it because  the differences of the two societies are so great. The best the nurturist could do is construct a wildly improbable scenario whereby different social pressures produced the same result.

If IQ was really radically changeable by improving social circumstances and by direct attempts to improve IQ  test  scores, the gains should be large not a few points, nor should they be seemingly temporary. Yet that is precisely  what is  found in  the  considerable number of attempts  to bolster  children’s  IQ  by placing  those from poor families in materially and culturally  superior circumstances.  Even the gains claimed  by the enthusiastic supporters of programmes such as Head Start in the USA (mostly in the range of 4-10 IQ points)  are significant but not startling. Nor do the gains  normally last  but are subject to “fade out” after the initial uplift, until a few years down the line nothing is left of the improvement. Those who are interested in the  detail of  both attempts to  raise IQ and sustain the improvement  will find a review of the academic literature at chapter  17 of The Bell Curve.

It is also true that apparent gains in IQ from enhancement programmes   occur at the lower end  of the IQ  distribution. Why is that those who start with an IQ of 150 do not make similar gains to those with IQs of 90?  The same applies to the “Flynn Effect”  which charts apparent rises in IQ generally  throughout the century in which IQ tests have been used.    The overall IQ increases but most of the increase is  found at the lower end of the IQ scale.   The most probable explanations for the Flynn Effect is that whatever cultural bias that existed in earlier tests has been  gradually squeezed out, secondary school education has become the norm at least in the West and the  diet and health  of  the poor has radically  improved.

It will be interesting to see whether the Flynn Effect continues in  advanced countries now that the material circumstances of the vast majority of the  population are  sufficient to  remove  the possibility of  inadequate diet or healthcare  being one of the reasons for depressed IQ and the vast majority of people in such societies live in urban circumstances. (There are already some suggestions from Scandinavia – “A long term rise and recent decline in intelligence tests performance: the Flynn Effect in  reverse”  Teasdale and Owen –   that the  rise in IQ scores is  diminishing or may even  have already ended.)

Tellingly, the proportionate IQ differences between races have also remained broadly similar despite the  “Flynn Effect”,   The black  psychologist   Thomas Sowell has attempted to explain   away   the black/white difference by  pointing out that ostensibly the black IQ scores of today are equivalent to the white scores of 50  years ago and by referring to the similar gap between whites from poor rural backgrounds and  urban whites when IQs were measured fifty years ago. Sowell’s attempt fails because the black/white gap has proportionately remained as great.  As black scores have risen, so have white scores. Consequently, it is difficult to see how the rise of black scores can be attributed to changes in culture or the environment.  I emailed Prof Sowell and had this exchange with him:

“Dear Professor Sowell

I  have come across your thesis that the black/white gap of one standard deviation is not abnormal there being other examples within a race, for example, between white rural communities and white urban communities. You also point out that black scores have risen over the past 50 years or so to that of whites of 50 years ago. “I see a problem with this argument:  the black/white gap has remained the same over the period, i.e., white scores have improved proportionately. If the lower black IQ is only a cultural/environmental phenomenon,  why should that be?”

Prof Sowell replied:

“As to changing IQs over time, James R. Flynn has written a number of things on that. As to how the black-white gap could remain the same if the difference is cultural, that seems less difficult to explain than substantial changes in IQ over time if IQs are hereditary. Incidentally, Professor Flynn has a book coming out on all this in the summer. The title doesn’t come to mind immediately but it will be published by Cambridge University Press.”

Frankly, his response to the problem is no answer at all. What the rise in   black and white scores does suggest is that the “Flynn Effect” either does not exist but rather is, as mentioned above,  simply a product of the changing nature of IQ tests etc. – the  modern concentration on culture-free tests could  be responsible for almost all  of the Flynn Effect IQ gain is on the visiospatial tests – or else all races are being subject to the same selective pressures which raise their IQs by a similar proportion, a proposition  which is on the outer edges of improbability.

Finally, here is a commonsense reason to disbelieve the nurturist argument. If it was possible to radically improve IQ by changing the environment or through training, as sure as eggs are eggs the rich would have long ago availed them of such knowledge to ensure that their children had high IQs.  The mass media and internet would be as full of adverts for IQ enhancement as for diets and cures for baldness. That this has not happened means there is no such magic IQ bullet or that at least no magic bullet which is known.

The primary evidence for some environmental influence is the fact that hose from  the same racial group tend to score less well on IQ tests if they come from a rural environment than those  from  urban environments, although that may be simply the consequence of inferior diet, healthcare  and generally harsher physical  conditions of life.

Personally I would be delighted if it could be shown that IQ is  entirely  or predominantly the result of nurture and could be enhanced through improving a person’s circumstances. Genetic engineering,  surgery  the use of cybernetics or  drugs  to enhance IQ is a another matter,  because they  would almost certainly produce populations with radically different IQ distributions. This could be dangerous.

A population with IQs genetically  or surgically enhanced to a high level – say, everyone  had  an  IQ  of  150 or better and  the  breadth  of  the  IQ distribution was between 150 and 200 – could carry the seeds of its own destruction.   After all who would do all the menial jobs? in a society in which everyone had a healthy IQ? Would  most people with such   high IQs even   are able to tolerate fewer menials but still relatively intellectually undemanding jobs such as technicians and junior white collar posts? A wide distribution of IQ is probably necessary for any human society to function.

Cybernetic  enhancement is less clear cut. It is possible to imagine a world in which people simply plugged into cybernetic intelligence boosters only where the person needed to perform higher. However, it is  unlikely that cybernetic use would be restricted to such modest and utilitarian  purposes. More probably, cybernetics would be used to permanently assist  mental  performance, not least because  an individual would have to lead a schizophrenic existence otherwise: bright in one part of their lives, not so bright in another.  A similar scenario would exist with drug enhancement.

4. What is measured by IQ Tests?

The general mental skills which IQ tests cover are the skills involved in   problem solving   which   rely   on    as    little    learned knowledge/behaviour as possible, the so-called culture free tests. These skills are those needed to deal with the unfamiliar, unfamiliar in both the sense of being pedantically novel and in the sense of  being absolutely novel.

Pedantic novelty is where a problem is truly novel, that is, it has never been  encountered before in this exact form but similar problems have been encountered. An example would be using a key you have never seen before to undo a lock you have never seen.

Absolute novelty is where the problem is something completely beyond the experience of the person. The individual has not encountered the exact problem in the pedantic sense of it being an identical problem and they have no similar experience from which they can extrapolate a rational solution to the problem they are encountering.  An example would be a Briton going on safari in Africa who has no experience of Africa and suddenly meeting a lion six feet away.

Modern IQ tests are designed as far as is possible to be absolutely novel. It is true that a person will encounter similar general types of problems if they take more than one supervised test or  rehearse  IQ questions.  But a general type of IQ problem does not provide a similarity sufficient to allow extrapolation to solve a particular problem of the type.   For example, in tackling IQ problems which involve spotting the odd shape or pattern in a sequence the solver knows what they have to do in terms of what result is required, namely, identify the odd man out, but that knowledge gives no hint as how they are to find the odd man out.

An IQ test is different from any other test, because every other type of test either permits subjective judgments or is deliberately knowledge dependent to a greater or lesser degree.   Even other psychometric tests seek the person’s opinion of their feelings or perception of some physical event, there being no right or wrong answers.  Exams dealing with specific subjects   allow candidates to score reasonably well without necessarily engaging in any high level intellectual activity – even someone taking a maths course can get a fair way simply by mastering functions which can be   applied mechanically (the more advanced the exam the less this tactic can be employed). An IQ test is different because ideally there is no knowledge  of inert facts, such as historical dates, speculation, matters of opinions or mechanical functions such as the rules of arithmetic which can be applied blindly.

Another way of looking at the demands of IQ tests  is to consider the long term effects of knowing both what a particular set of test   questions were and the correct answers to those questions. Suppose a group is first given an IQ test and afterwards provided with the correct answers, ostensibly to mark their own tests. They are allowed   ample time to study the answers but are not able to retain them in any written form.  Afterwards they are  told that they will  be called back for further tests in one year’s time.  When they are re-tested   the subjects are  asked to re-sit the IQ questions they first tackled a year before but without any indication that it was the same test.   Even if the subjects realised that they were taking the same test again, which not all would do,   it is improbable that many would be able to recall the answers from twelve months previously.  The only  way to answer correctly  with certainty would be re-solve the problems.

Those who claim that IQ tests only test how good people are at taking IQ tests are saying nothing useful, for any test of whatever nature on any subject by definition only  tests how good people are at taking the test.  The important question to answer  is whether what is tested is of value. IQ tests would appear to have value  because there is a strong correlation between IQ scores and life outcomes. This persistent correlation can be explained in two ways:  either it is merely the most colossal and continuing set of coincidences  or   IQ   tests are  measuring  abilities which  are  either  applicable  to  life in general or are abilities  which correlate strongly with other abilities which are generally applicable to human life .

5. Does an IQ test measure general intelligence?

Although IQ tests undoubtedly measure a wide range of mental ability and are valuable tools in predicting  whether someone is likely to be fitted for a particular job or academic course and are predictors of social outcomes.  But identifying useful  mental qualities is one thing, assuming that the qualities constitute the totality of intelligence  quite another. From early in the history intelligence testing psychologists have attempted to establish that the tests measure a quality of general intelligence  which they call “g” – the British psychologist Charles Spearman was the originator of the idea in the  early years of the twentieth century. The problem is that there is no absolute proof  that “g”  exists or that IQ tests measure it.  However, what IQ tests do plausibly measure is a general ability  which applies to a wide range of mental tasks for there is a strong tendency for individuals to perform similarly across the spectrum of tests which make up an IQ score, for example, a high IQ individual will score strongly on all IQ problems, although not with an exact evenness of performance.

But there is  an alternative explanation  for why individuals score similarly across the range of IQ tests. This  is that what is measured by such tests is a catalogue of different abilities, each  dependent on some structural quality of the brain, and that the normal development of the brain is such that each structure from which an ability derives develops in concert with all the other structures and, consequently,   the various abilities are kept roughly in step.  Put another way, a person with a high IQ scores highly across the range of tests because the brain can only develop in  a way which produces structures which are roughly equal in ability.

This is not quite as improbable an idea as it might seem at first glance because   normal organic development   displays  just such behaviour, for example, the growth of parts of an organism are normally proportionate to the individual organism’s size.  If this alternative explanation is correct, the practical effect of such a brain would be the same as a brain governed by some general principle of intelligence.  An analogy would be with computers which have programs designed  to  tackle  the  same  tasks  but  which  have    qualitative differences in power and scope. The case of idiots savants with high level specific abilities,  which in any other circumstances but those of the idiot savant  would be considered high IQ activities, could be accommodated within the hypothesis that intelligence is a conglomeration of separate abilities rather than being a single entity, for it could be that normal development is arrested in most areas and enhanced in  one or two. Indeed, high performing idiots savants provide a serious problem for those who wish to claim that “g” exists and the type of explanation offered by those in the field  – that the abilities of such idiots savants are talents  rather than intelligence – is scarcely convincing.

Against the idea of discrete abilities forming a suite of intellectual tools which give the impression of a single quality of intelligence is the fact that those with innate deformities and deficiencies of the brain  or damage to the brain utilise other parts of the brain to perform functions normally associated with  the deficient or damaged parts.

There is the further problem  for  the idea of ‘g’, namely, that there are clearly some forms of what would be considered high level intellectual activity which do not seem to fall into the obvious realm of IQ tested abilities, for example, literary talent, historical and sociological insight. It is true that those who excel in such fields will probably  have a healthy IQ, but it is not obvious how the abilities tested by IQ relate to the abilities displayed in such work. It might be thought that this is evidence for “g” and that performance in subjects such as history and sociology is simply an expression of “g”, that is, “g” is being tested by other means than an IQ test. The problem with that argument is that people with similar IQs, both in overall score and in the shape of the IQ, do not display equal facility  at intellectual tasks across the board and the difference in particular abilities cannot be put down to simply differences in upbringing or of temperament.

6. The intelligence of erudition

There is phenomenon which anyone who has gained a substantial knowledge of a subject may  recognise:  it is the point at which a qualitative change in  understanding appears to occur, where connections are effortlessly made between disparate pieces of data and a   general understanding of the whole emerges.   This is not a conscious process but an emergent property of the  accumulation of  information.  Is that IQ ability  driven?  It is clearly different from the type of ability  quantified from the exercises which comprise IQ tests, but equally it is not the simple application of  learned information to solve a problem.   Moreover, the phenomenon arises with all types of data. Einstein could not have developed his theories without his learned knowledge of the way the physical world worked both at the level of his personal experience and through absorbing the scientific discoveries, thoughts and mathematics made and developed by others. Similarly, the mechanic develops an “instinct” for what is wrong with an engine through the experience of tinkering with many engines.

Of course  the nature  of the intelligence of erudition  varies  from individual to individual, from the person who ends  up with  a mass of  data  and no clear overall  understanding of the data  (we all know people who display “a ghastly erudition”)  to the individual who clearly  sees not only  the wood from the trees but identifies  the important trees within the wood. Nonetheless, even the person who has no clear overall understanding of the data will generally have a better grasp of a subject than someone with a slight understanding,  no matter how intelligent that person should be.

There are interesting differences in the way this phenomenon develops and is sustained.   Mathematicians,   philosophers and physical   scientists frequently produce their best work when young,   after which they spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture their youthful intellectual zest.  Other intellectuals  such as historians and sociologists are notorious for producing their best  work when in middle age,   by which time they have ingested vast amounts of information  about both their subject and the way human beings behave generally, and have allowed whatever unconscious process occurs considerable time to organise, connect and elucidate what they have learned.   This suggests that erudition is  more useful in some areas than others, although it does not necessarily follow  that IQ  related ability is more important in subjects  such as maths and physics  than in history or  sociology – this would be so  even if it could shown that as a matter of contingent fact mathematicians and physicist  have higher average IQs than historians and sociologists (they probably do. It could be that once a certain  level of intellectual adequacy is reached people are drawn to subjects  by their personality rather than IQ related abilities.

To what degree is high ability in subjects such as history, sociology and literary criticism  IQ  ability  dependent? As mentioned above they do not obviously call on the qualities  measured by IQ tests. However, looked at more closely it is plain that these   disciplines rely on IQ dependent abilities such as the recognition of contradiction or the construction  of methods of quantifying social phenomena and, of course,  they  can involve the mastery of the indisputably high IQ subjects such as maths, physics or philosophy  where that is the subject matter to be studied within the context of another subject, for example, the  history of science or philosophy. But what do we make of  the ability of the historian to  concisely interpret a vast amount of data or the literary critic to see within a text echoes of other  writers and ideas?  Are those  abilities   IQ dependent in the same way as  understanding  a complicated  equation is IQ dependent?   There is a good case for saying that they are,  because what the   historian and the literary critic are doing is sifting material and assigning values  to it.  That is a form of pattern matching, although a very complex and diffuse one.

Let me take the cases of the chess players Garry Kasparov and the Polgar sisters to illustrate two aspects of the intelligence of erudition. Kasparov has an IQ of 135, good but not outstanding, yet he was able to become world champion at an activity considered exceptionally intellectually taxing. It was not solely or arguably predominantly IQ which made him world champion for there will almost certainly be many topclass chess players with substantially higher IQs. So how did he become world champion?  To become a  very high performing chess player requires not merely natural talent but the  building up of  a vast catalogue of games in one’s memory.  From that comes the emergent property of the intelligence of erudition to go with the IQ based abilities. Bearing in mind Kasparov’s relatively modest IQ and  the many higher IQ players he was competing with, plausibly it was the intelligence of erudition which was probably the prime determinant of his success.  Of course, other qualities not obviously IQ dependent come into play with high level chess such as courage and sheer physical stamina (I am assuming that the support staff and technology  available to any grandmaster will be much of a muchness) but understanding born of great familiarity with played chess games must have been by far the prime determinant.

The two Polgar sisters demonstrate another aspect of the intelligence of erudition. Their father set out from the early days to  deliberately produce two chess prodigies. He did this to substantiate his belief that particular abilities, including intellectual abilities could be instilled by training (shades of J B Watson).   He succeeded. The sisters both became grandmasters. That they did not become world chess champions  – an objection often made by those opposed to his ideas – is neither here nor there. The fact that he was able to take two babies and turn them into very high performing chess players – a very select band – is  persuasive evidence for the power of inducing intelligence in specific areas of expertise.  Of course, one cannot draw firm conclusions from a single instance such as the Polgars,  but it is food for thought when the question of intelligence is considered.

What happened with the Polgars is really no more than the age old trait of children following their parents into the same work or being put to an apprenticeship at an early age. Many societies have operated on the basis of  children following their parents’ occupations by law. Many of those occupations can plausibly be linked to IQ related abilities, especially visio-spatial ones, for example, those required of any craftsman. One could argue that genetic inheritance plays its part, but this is not  plausible where many generations are involved, both because the genetic inheritance of someone with an innate ability is diluted rapidly through the generations and also because presumably genetically related abilities generally suffer from reversion to the norm.

What would be interesting is a study of  how easy or difficult it is to induce the ability to undertake activities which would be considered IQ dependent. I have a  sneaking feeling that if those engaged in programmes designed to enhance IQ concentrated instead on programmes designed to enhance the intelligence of erudition  they would find it a more fruitful activity.

How valuable is  the intelligence of erudition  when compared with IQ related ability? Obviously, learned   ability  is fundamental to  all human societies, from the hunter-gatherer upwards. Most of what we  consciously do is guided by  our own  experience or the experience of others,   although of course knowledge is only valuable when it can be applied, whereas IQ related problem solving ability  in principle  can get you through  a very large number of possible  situations, both novel and familiar.    There is also a clear distinction between knowledge which can be applied  without  the need for any  external assistance and that which requires external assistance. For instance, knowing how to  use a calculator is useless without a calculator: knowing how to do mental arithmetic is a   skill always available.  But what of  really high level intellectual ability?  In its outcomes can erudition compete with innate IQ related  ability? Can someone without a startlingly high IQ make as profound a contribution  to intellectual  history as  those with such an IQ simply through intellectual application?  Step forward  Charles Darwin.

7. Did Darwin have a high IQ?

Charles Darwin is widely recognised as one of the most important intellectuals in history.  A strong case can be made for his theory of natural selection being the single most influential idea ever,  because not only did it profoundly change the intellectual relationship between man and his perception of his place in existence, its influence has stretched far beyond biology.  It might even be said to be of universal application because all natural repeatable events, circumstances and ongoing processes are subject to selection. Just as organisms compete to  survive so do inanimate objects and processes, whether natural or man-made.  A pebble  on the seashore made of granite will outlast one made of sandstone;   war machines will compete in  an arms race; ideas will clash and be selected or not according to their intellectual and emotional  power in a particular situation.   Today his idea  is applied increasingly  to design generally  using  computer programmes which mimic evolution  on projects  as diverse as  discovering the most efficient  phone network  and the design of new anti-bacterial drugs.

But Darwin’s importance goes far beyond a single idea. He contributed greatly to other parts of evolutionary theory including the descent of Man  and the development of emotions in Man and animals.   He was also a good guesser. Frequently  his hypotheses  were untestable in his own lifetime because the knowledge needed to test them were not available but have been given Further credence by later discoveries, for example, his belief that modern Man originated in Africa, an hypothesis which is widely accepted today because of DNA analysis. It is difficult to think of a man who has had a more profound intellectual effect on the world.

Darwin was obviously exceptionally intellectually capable in the sense that he produced very important work, but is there anything in his life and work which is suggestive of a genius level  IQ?  He did not show any noticeable aptitude for the traditionally high IQ subjects such as maths and philosophy, nor is his life before his voyage on the Beagle suggestive of any great intellectual power.  It is true that the young  Darwin  showed a strong interest in the natural world, both in biology  and geology, but this interest  was more that of a gentleman dilettante rather than of a serious scientist.

Even after returning from his voyage on the Beagle Darwin retained something of the gentleman dilettante, although he was very hardworking and persistent  in his interests. He spent more than twenty years toying with the idea of evolution through natural selection and engaging in other work which was largely a matter of observation. When he came  to publish his work on evolution he only did so because he is afraid that his ideas would  be trumped by the publication of Wallace’s very similar theory. (That he suddenly rushed  to publish gives the lie to the commonly retailed idea that he had withheld   publication for fear of a hostile   public   reception, especially from the devout.)   The most plausible explanation  for the delay is that Darwin simply did not have the motivation to make the intellectual effort to finish his great work until he was threatened with being trumped Wallace. It is only from that point onwards that Darwin   begins to produce the work for which he is chiefly  remembered today. He was no feverishly intelligent, intellectual  personality bursting to put his ideas before the public as soon as possible.

But although Darwin took a long time to get to the point of  publication,  he  undoubtedly  spent an immense amount of time and effort   assimilating information about the Natural world from his  teenage years onwards. By the time he  finished the Origin of Species  he had developed the intelligence of erudition to a very high degree.

Darwin’s working method was to create a mound of evidence on which he built sustained argument.  (Ironically, the critics of The Origin of Species frequently complained that he lacked powers of reasoning when in fact the book is one sustained immense argument).  The data he worked upon was not inherently difficult to master being primarily a question of observation by Darwin or others.   Anyone of normal intelligence could master it with sufficient application.   Where Darwin differs from the vast majority is in the tenacity with which he assimilated facts and the use he put the data   to after he had assimilated it.   What Darwin had was an  abnormally sustained concentration of thought .

So what are we to make of all this in the context of Darwin’s IQ? Obviously he had to have the mental wherewithal to  allow him to handle large amounts of data and construct coherent arguments from the data.  He needed to be able to see not only the wood for the trees but to see the important trees in the wood. The question is how he managed to accomplish such tasks.  Was it  primarily IQ related  ability or is it a consequence of learning? The material he dealt with suggests the latter, that he had the intelligence of erudition in spades.

Based on the content of Darwin’s work and his failure to display any  aptitude for indubitably high IQ subjects such as maths, there is no  reason to believe  he had a very high IQ. He needed an IQ high  enough  to  allow  him  to  undertake  the  tasks  of assimilating   essentially   simple information and engaging in a sophisticated analysis of it. Perhaps an IQ in the 110-120  range would have fitted the bill for those tasks.

8. Reason is not the primary driver of Man

Man, at least in his modern secular First World  form,  has the illusion of free will. That is unsurprising  because he  is a highly intelligent and self-conscious entity with a discrete personality and an ego and it is natural for such a being  to think that the choices they make are  free choices insofar as they act without overt constraints from  other people, their biology  or  brute circumstances.  In fact, free will is an illusion  not as a  consequence of  the constraints of human  biology or  the nature of the universe Man  inhabits but s a consequence of  the  fact that  the concept is a logical nonsense.

Imagine the most powerful entity  which can exist: the omnipotent, omniscient god. Such a being can not have free will because  it  must have a discrete intelligence which is conscious of its existence, in short a conscious mind.  Any  such  mind  will require  motivation otherwise it would never act, it must have desires, it must have what we would call a personality. Consequently, the omnipotent, omniscient god  would be in the same general existential position as a man, that is, bound by  its  own mentality.

Of course  Man is in  vastly more constrained  circumstances than the omnipotent, omniscient god. Human beings  live within the general constraints that applies to every other organism.  We copulate, eat, drink, and sleep, fight, respond to weariness perform our bodily functions in the same way  that an animal does, without any great thought. We feel desire or necessity and act on impulse.

Within our bodies a great system of checks and balances – repair mechanisms and the automatic systems needed for an organism to function – continue without our conscious control or even our awareness of the functions being accomplished.  Hormones and enzymes control not only essential functions but our emotions and desires.  Physical illness or wellness determines how we behave.

What we experience in our minds is a very different thing from what actually comes through our senses. All we can perceive is what our biology and experiential “programming” allows us to perceive.  We can only see or hear within certain  wavelengths of light and sound.  Our senses change in their efficacy throughout life. All external  stimuli are filtered through our brains and are the brain’s best guess at what has been perceived,  hence the ease with which we mistake things either through insufficient data (for example,  something seen in shadow) or through the brain matching sense data with something we already know, for example, when we see a man’s face in a cloud.

Our mental world is  subject to congenital differences which affect behaviour. These range from differences in mental capacity and special talents to brain defects and injuries. Someone born with Downs Syndrome, severe epilepsy or   autism perceives the world very differently to someone born without such conditions.   Their   capacity for rational behaviour is much reduced because their level   of understanding   is reduced.    The most severe example of   innate disablement of the rational are those people born without   the development of the frontal lobes, the acephaletic.  These unfortunate individuals occasionally survive and behave in a manner which seems to be entirely without conscious reason.

We also know from much experience that injuries to the brain or the effects of disease or ageing can have the same effect as innate abnormalities.   Those who suffer brain injuries   sometimes   develop behavioural traits which are completely different from what they had before.  They may become more violent or more subdued, lose their initiative or develop new talents or inclinations such as artistic impulses.   Frontal lobotomies subdue behaviour.  Age leads to declines in rationality ranging from loss of short term memory to full blown senile dementia.

In our brains   we store a myriad of   memories which act as both primers for action and the means to take action.  We see someone we do not like and respond with open hostility or caution.  We meet a situation which appears to be dangerous because we have previously met it or a situation which resembles a danger we have imagined and feel  fear and act accordingly. We see someone we love and act favourably towards them. Of course,  our memories do much more than provide immediate or particular behavioural responses for they  also shape our general character within the confines of the basic, genetically determined personality.

What constitutes a learned response?  Not a simple thing to define. Keeping your hand away from fire after you have been burnt is obviously such.  Going from A to B along a familiar route is another.  Putting a cake in an oven at a particular heat for a particular time a third.  But suppose I   master the philosophy of Kant.  If I explain his philosophy without commentary to someone that might reasonably be described as a learned response in the sense that I am merely regurgitating what I have learnt.  Yet it is also true that the act of comprehending Kant goes beyond mere memory and the effort of remembering what Kant’s philosophy is after it has first been learnt is a very different thing from recalling a piece of “inert data” such as the date of the Battle of Hastings.

Mental calculation is, of course,   more than prolonged self-conscious intellectual consideration.  It is what happens when someone calculates the distance to throw a ball or how to place pieces in a jigsaw or spontaneously comes up with a clever pun, as well as the sustained mental thought  which led Newton and Einstein to develop their physics or Aristotle his logic.

Somewhere in between lies the great mass of considered utilitarian mental   calculation such as computer programming and applied  mathematical   computation and the everyday    ability   to   see contradictions and connections   and to generally engage in   logical reasoning.

We function as organisms at various levels.  We do some things without conscious thought: we breathe, produce hormones and enzymes, and circulate the blood, digest food and so on.  Our biology produces basic states of mind such as hunger, fear and sexual desire over which we have little control although we are conscious of the states of mind.  Then come conscious choices which are designed to give us pleasure or at least satisfaction; we decide on an activity which we know will produce pleasant sensations or avoid unpleasant ones.   Finally, we have rational thought designed to solve particular problems.

Man, or at least Man in advanced modern societies,  flatters himself that he is a rational being whose behaviour is the consequence of consideration. (Even without free will, a self-conscious being could still operate rationally within  the confines of  its existential circumstances).   In fact, most human behaviour is not rational in the sense of being self-consciously decided after having weighed the pros and cons of what to do or of trusting what we perceive to  be  the  rational  decisions of  others,  whether  by  engaging  in self-decided emulation or through the suggestion or order of another.

Most of what we do falls into three classes of behaviour:  the repetition  of rational behaviour which has   previously   proven successful, or at least not harmful, what our biology tells us to do, for example to drink, or as an unconsidered response which is a consequence of whatever constitutes an individual’s basic personality, for example, traits such as timidity, aggression, affection.  Even when we self-consciously decide on future action,  our  decisions are  mediated by our  knowledge of what has happened before, our biology and our  personality traits,  both innate and developed.

Men are frequently faced with conscious decisions which they are unable to decide rationally because they lack the knowledge or intellect to do so. Sometimes they fail to make a decision because of fear. In all these circumstances the individual does one of three things: (1) he makes a decision simply to make a decision, (2) he follows the herd or (3) he allows himself to be manipulated by another individual.

Most of this (to various degrees)  automated behaviour is at worst harmless and at best positively desirable – it would be an impossible world if we had to seriously  consider every deliberate action before acting, not least because it would be utterly exhausting.  But it can be damaging.  Even when acting self consciously, humans are quite frequently  in the grip of  ideas which are in themselves objectively   wrong or at least has no certain truth. Moreover, those afflicted with such ideas often  know at some level their  beliefs are suspect – the reason that believers in religions or secular ideologies are generally very keen on suppressing any questioning of their beliefs is  because they know in their heart of hearts that they will not stand up to questioning. Yet men adhere to such ideas and act upon them   even though their reason tells them that they are questionable or even plain wrong because they are emotionally satisfying in themselves or they are group values from which the individual gets emotional satisfaction from sharing in the group experience.

Alternatively, group pressure may produce a state of mind whereby the individual does not actually believe something but is conditioned not to question it because at some level the mind has marked such questioning as dangerous or inappropriate.  In our own time political correctness produces such feelings in many.

Where a set of ideas form an ideology the effect is particularly pernicious, both because of the multiplication of error and because the tendency to adopt a religious attitude towards the ideas is heightened, for to deny one part of the ideology is to question its general veracity.  (By an ideology I mean a mental construct which consists of a menu of tenets  which the adherent applies without regard to their  utility or truth). The  observance of the ideology becomes an end in itself.  All ideologies are inadequate to a lesser or greater extent,  because they are menus of  ideas which are (1) incompatible and/or (2) based on premises which are objectively false or at least  debatable.

An example of (1) is the attitude of libertarians to immigration. On the one hand they complain of the illiberal consequences of mass immigration – political correctness, laws which discriminate against the majority, restrictions on free speech and so on  – on the other they advocate an   open border immigration policy.  The two policies   are self-evidently incompatible.

An example of (2) is Marxism, whose claims of objective truth were routinely and consistently demolished by reality, the consequences of which were ever more fanciful revisions of Marxist theory to fit the evolving non-Marxist world.

9. Sociological  Constraints

Man is constrained by sociological laws  of which  he is only dimly aware.  When a general election is held in Britain  Members of Parliament are elected  for one of  646 constituencies  on the very simple basis of  who gets the most votes in the constituency.  There is no multiple preference voting, just a single vote for one candidate. As a platform for the study of human behaviour it is splendidly uncluttered.

Because  people are voting for an individual  it might be thought that  the voting pattern throughout the country would vary tremendously because  people would be  voting on  the record of the government and opposition in the  previous four or five years, the  parties’ stated policies if they form the next government,  local  interests, how the sitting  MP has performed and  the perceived quality of the other candidates in the constituency.  In fact the voting pattern is  always remarkably uniform throughout the country. If the swing from the  Government is on average 5% throughout the country, there will be few if any constituencies  which show  a swing of less than 4% or more than 6%. This uniformity  does not  vary greatly  with the size of turnout.

It is impossible to supply any plausible explanation for this behaviour  based on the idea that Man is rational. One could see how a small population might be influenced by peer pressure and word of mouth but not a country of sixty million.  Nor is it  the consequence of  modern mass media because the phenomenon  predated television and the Internet.  If I had to hazard an explanation it would be this:  different personality types  are distributed throughout populations in certain proportions as the consequence of natural selection working to ensure that human society functions. Each  personality type will tend to behave in the same way. Hence, the aggregate  societal effect in response to a particular stimulus  will  be relatively stable. When people vote in a General Election  they produce  similar voting effects because  the personality types are distributed similarly throughout Britain and consequently people  throughout the country respond to circumstances in a similar fashion.   In other words, personality traits trump reason.

A less obvious example is the trade cycle. There is no certain explanation for why such a cycle should exist, but it  is  possible  to provide  plausible explanations  for the  ebb and flow of  economic activity, for example,  that there comes  a point in the trade cycle whereby  most individuals have purchased everything they want within the constraints of what they can afford and  consumption lessens  which in turn reduces economic activity which creates a further  impetus to reduced consumption as people worry about the future. Equally, it is plausible that when the down side of  the cycle  has gone on for a while demand increases because goods need  replacing and as consumption slowly grows confidence increases triggering further growth.

What is not so easy to provide  is a plausible explanation of why the population acts  uniformly enough to regularly create such a cycle. How could it be that  the large majority of  a population routinely respond in the same way? The answer again  probably lies in a stable distribution of  personality within a population.

What evidence is there for personality being so distributed throughout a population? Well, from our own everyday experience we all know that there is a range of personality types who are met in  any reasonable large group, but quantifying such knowledge in an objective manner is  to say the least problematical.  Whether we have any  “objective” statistical evidence  at present largely depends how much credence is placed on psychometric tests  which supposedly determine personality.  Having seen them used to select people for employment I  am  sceptical of their  predictive power,  because all too often their assessment of personality  fails to match the person‘s performance. More trustworthy although less focused is the information from psychological experiments. Many psychological experiments  show personality differences obliquely, for example, the famous experiments of Abrahams  in the 1950s on peer pressure  and  The Stamford prison experiment of the early 1970s.    They showed  recurrent  patterns of  obedience and disobedience and  of a willingness to abuse and  to accept or resist abuse.

10. How primitive is primitive?

If the current estimates of hominid evolution are correct, the variety classified as modern Man has a surprisingly short geological history, the upper estimates being a paltry 200,000 years.  Nor is that history a simple progression.   The remains of the older examples of modern Man normally have more ancient features than the younger examples, but occasionally younger remains displaying ancient features are found. This  is  a more significant fact than it might seem because fossils of Man are very rare  and hence it is telling that even a few should show ancient features at the “wrong date” for it suggests that the more archaic forms of Man might not only have lasted a long time but in substantial numbers.

How little is still  known about human evolution is illustrated by  the recent discovery of  remains  by the Koobi Fora Research Project   in the  Ileret region, east of Lake Turkana. in Northern Kenya  which appeared in Nature magazine. (nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7154/abs/nature05986.html) These suggest that  Homo habilis and  Homo erectus  co-existed for half a million years. The significance of this is that it makes the generally accepted descent of Man from Homo habilis to  Homo  erectus to  Homo sapiens improbable, vis:

‘”Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis”, explained Meave Leakey….”

The fact that they stayed separate as individual species for a long time suggests that they had their own ecological niche, thus avoiding direct competition,” she added. ’Fossils put new branch on human family tree Daily Telegraph   09/08/2007.

There is truly no point in the past at which it can be said here is the origin of modern Man. Darwin put the case nicely before there was any significant hominid fossil record: “Whether primeval man, when he possessed but few arts, and those of the rudest kind, and when his power of language was extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be called man, must depend on the definition we employ. In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term ‘man’ ought to be used.  But this is a matter of very little importance. So again, it is almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated, or are ranked as species or sub species; but the latter term appears the more appropriate.”  (Descent of Man – chapter The Races of Man).

At what point can  Man be said to be acting in a qualitatively different  way from other animals?  Here is Darwin once more:   “I have seen, as I dare say   have others,   that when a small object is thrown beyond the reach of one of the elephants in the Zoological  Gardens, he blows through his trunk on the ground   beyond the object so that the current reflected  on all sides may drive the object within his reach. Again a well known ethnologist, Mr Estoppels,  informs me that he observed a bear in Vienna making with his paw a current in some water as to  draw a piece of floating bread within reach.  These actions of the elephant and bear can hardly be attributed to instinct or inherited habit, as they would be of little use to an animal of nature.  Now, what is the difference between such actions? when performed by an uncultivated man, and by one of the higher animals?” (Darwin: The Descent of Man – chapter Mental Powers.)

Darwin concluded that there was little difference in the general approach of the higher animal and man in his primitive state, although he allowed that “There would no doubt be this difference between  him [the savage] and one of the higher animals, that he would take more notice of much slighter circumstances   and conditions, and would observe  any connections between them after much less experience, and this would be of paramount importance.  I kept a daily record of the actions of one of my infants, and when he was about eleven months old, and before he could speak a single word, I was continually struck with the greater quickness, with which all sorts of objects and sounds were associated together in his mind, compared with the most intelligent dogs I knew.  But the higher animals differ in exactly the same way in this power of association from those low in the scale, such as the pike, as well as drawing inferences and of observation.” (ibid)

If Darwin is right – and there is as so often with him, plausibility in his reasoning – it  might seem  reasonable to classify human beings by behaviour, they only being accepted as full members of homo sapiens when they have reached the point where their behaviour is clearly qualitatively different from that of animals.   Obviously such a  judgement would  be extraordinarily contentious because of its social and   political ramifications, but  stripped of that difficulty could criteria be formulated which would be definitive?  It would not be simple.  For example,   a reasonable criterion might seem to be  to pose the question does  this or that population of Homo Sapiens   go  beyond the fundamental behavioural imperatives of other animals which are to obtain food,  breed and raise young?  The difficulty with that approach is that it is possible to  explain all human behaviour in such terms, that is, all human behaviour ultimately serves such ends: a  man does something which displays exceptional ability: he is enhancing his  biological fitness by advertising his desirability as a mate: a  woman shows an abnormal facility for  handling children: she demonstrates her desirability as a mate and so on.

The old favourite for defining humanity, tool use,  will not get us far. Animals use tools.  It is not even possible at the most primitive observed human level to  point to a  large  library  of  tools  or artefacts let alone tools and artefacts of any great sophistication – the Tasmanians (indubitably part of the modern model of humanity at the physical level) at the time they encountered Europeans were reckoned to have a minute number of tools, viz: “So far as we can ascertain, their entire tool-kit at the end of their history consisted of a mere eighteen items – digging sticks, some very basic  stone implements, spears, grass rope, baskets, hides (from which to ambush prey) and traps (for birds). In short, a list that is not so different in size or content from the accredited list of tools for modern chimpanzees. If we make allowances for qualitative differences in the toolkits   of chimpanzees and those produced by modern humans, there are really only two things in the Tasmanians’ toolkit that the chimpanzees do not have   – containers for carrying things (such as baskets and gourds) and structures (things like hides and traps).” Robin Dunbar The Human Story p150.

It  might  seem obvious  that all tools and artefacts are the  consequence   of  human  imagination,  yet  how  far   they   are independently  imagined  and  how far the  simple  consequence  of  the observation of accidental behaviour and its translation into  something more  permanent  and  sophisticated is a moot  point, not merely in the world of the hunter-gatherer but in pre-industrial  societies generally. Some  troops  of chimpanzees will use sticks to get termites out of a termite hill. This behaviour presumably originated because an animal in the  band  was poking  a termite hill with a stick – a  perfectly natural activity  for chimps  which are very curious animals – and noticed that termites  ran up  the  stick and the animal  continued to use the trick which  in  turn  was copied by other members of the band. (That this behaviour is not innate is  shown  by  the  fact that different chimpanzee  populations   vary  in  their behaviour  in  this and other instances of tool  using  or  exceptional behaviour,  that is,  some  do it, some do  not  and  different  chimp populations   will  use  variants  of  the  same  tactic).  It  is  not unreasonable  to suppose that most early  human advances were  made  in much this way, the observation of the accidental consequences of  behaviour followed by their imitation.  Is  the creation of tools and artefacts in such a manner really imaginative or is it simply a function of  memory. The organism does something and remembers the consequences of doing  it and  associates cause and effect.

If not tools what about the production of artefacts (defining artefact as a physical object deliberately produced  by  an  organism by radically altering its components’ natural state)? Failed again I’m afraid  – think birds’ nests and otters’ dams.

What about behaviour which seems to go beyond mere immediate utility?, For example, do not  all modern humans perform rituals to appease or conjure gods or spirits or at least engage in behaviour we define as magic to alter the world?  Probably, although the sophistication of such ideas vary greatly from society to society.  But where is the dividing line between behaviour which is repeated and self-conscious ritual?  After all many animals display behaviour which might well be described as rituals if they were seen in Man.   Nor  is such behaviour  limited to the obvious realm of courtship, for example, chimpanzees  ‘perform “rain dances” to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning during tropical storms, and one of their most outlandish performances  is the “carnival,”   when as many as thirty individuals come together for a period of fantastic noisemaking which may last several hours.’ (The emergence of Man John E Pfeiffer p 276).

It might seem that the system of complicated signalling we call language is qualitatively different from anything an animal does, but even here the distinction is not absolute because animals use sound to communicate specific messages, for example, threat calls,   warning calls, courting calls. Human language obviously goes far  beyond that in terms of its scope,  but is there a qualitative difference in the basic function performed by the use of animal vocalisation? It is difficult to see human language as fundamentally different in terms of basic function, although the range of information transmitted is massively greater and more varied.

Nor is all human language equal in its functionality. Consider the case of the Piraha, an Amazonian tribe with several hundred members.   They have been in contact with Brazilian culture for two centuries or more, yet they display some very odd traits one of which is to have no sense of number? An American linguistic anthropologist Daniel Everett has studied them from 27 years.  Apart from their innumeracy, Everett reports that “the Piraha is the only people known to have no distinct words for colours. They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations.  They don’t sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day. Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children…    They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech. They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are. They do not believe that outsiders understand their language even after they have just carried on conversations with them. They have no creation myths tell no fictional stories and have no art. All of their pronouns appear to be borrowed from a neighbouring    language.” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LA C/200408 20 NUMBERS20/TPScience/ – Friday, August 20, 2004)

The Piraha’s innumeracy is particularly interesting.  ‘Their lack of numbering terms and skills is highlighted in a report by Columbia University cognitive psychologist Peter Gordon that appears today in Science.    Intrigued by anecdotal reports that Prof.  Everett and his wife Karen had presented about the matchlessness of Piraha life, Prof. Gordon conducted a number of experiments over a three-year period.   He found that a group of male tribe members — women and children were not involved because of certain cultural taboos — could not perform the most elementary mathematical operations.    When faced with a line of batteries and asked to duplicate the number they saw, the men could not get beyond two or three before starting to make mistakes.    They had difficulty drawing straight lines to copy a number of lines they were presented with.  They couldn’t remember which of two boxes had more or less fish symbols on it, even when they were about to be rewarded for their knowledge.    A significant part of the difficulty related to their number-impoverished vocabulary.    Although they would say one word to   indicate a single thing and another for two things, those words didn’t necessarily mean one or two in any usual sense.  “It is more like ones and twos,” ‘  according to Gordon.

‘Prof. Gordon said the findings are perhaps the strongest evidence for a once largely discredited linguistic theory.   More than 60 years ago, amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that learning a specific language determined the nature and content of how you think.    That theory fell into intellectual disrepute after linguist Noam Chomsky’s notions of a universal human grammar and Harvard University professor Steven Pincer’s idea of a universal language instinct became widely accepted.    “The question is, is there any case where not having words for something doesn’t allow you to think about it?” Prof.  Gordon asked about the Piraha and the Whorfian thesis. “I think this is a case for  just that.”     Prof.   Everett argues that what the Piraha casedemonstrates is a fundamental cultural principle working itself out in language and behaviour.’ (Ibid)

If the Whorfian theory is correct, or at least describes a quality which profoundly affects the way the world is perceived, other  behavioural divisions  between  the various populations of  Man  must  exist.  (The ideas of a universal grammar and a universal language instinct are  not necessarily  incompatible  with  the idea that  a  particular  language determines thought for there could be a basic language template that is then  altered by experience.  Moreover, it is conceivable that  natural selection  creates  subtle  brain differences  between  populations  to accommodate differences in language).   To any  Whorfian differences in populations  may be added the vast differences in cultural  expression, some  of which could be laid at the door of linguistic  determinism  of thought.

That leaves us with culture. Here Man does indeed seem to stand alone. He  undoubtedly  creates culture in a way that no other organism does, both in terms of the depth and the variety of  the cultures created. A case can be made for some animals, for example, chimpanzees, having a capacity for culture, but  at best their  cultural activities  such as termite  fishing are very rudimentary  and few in number.  Most importantly, Man uses culture to distinguish between  different populations of humans, even if  the populations are biologically similar.

11. Speciation by culture

If the argument  for Man’s special place in Nature is moved to  the ground of culture,  Man’s position as an organism with unique qualities which differentiate him from all other organisms  undoubtedly becomes  stronger,  but at the cost of  threatening  his  position as a species as traditionally defined.

Objections have been raised to the conclusions  of  Everett and Gordon,  primarily  in terms of  their interpretation of  their observations,  but  assuming there is a fair degree of  objective truth about their data, it is reasonable to ask are the Pirana   teetering on the edge of what counts as fully human if behaviour is the defining  criterion? It is  the wrong question to ask. The  right question to ask is can  homo sapiens be meaningfully designated a species as a species is defined for every other organism?

Because Man is differentiated profoundly by culture, the widely accepted definition  of a species – a population of freely interbreeding organisms sharing a common gene pool –   is  unsatisfactory,  for  clearly Man is  more  than  an  animal  responding   to   simple  biological   triggers.  When   behavioural differences  are perceived as belonging to a particular group  by  that group  as differentiating  members of the group from other  men,    they perform the same role as  organic differences for  they divide Man  into cultural species.

It  is worth adding that the traditional concept of a species is far from secure. It is a man-made classification which is often found wanting. For example,  the North American Ruddy Duck and the  European  White-Headed Duck are classified as separate species.  The introduction of the Ruddy Duck  to  Europe has resulted in widespread interbreeding  between  the supposedly  separate  species to the extent that  conservationists  now fear for the survival of the White Headed Duck.  It is also true that a growing  amount  of   traditional  taxonomic  classification  is  being overturned by DNA analysis.

Another  interesting  trait  is that  members of a  species  will  have different  breeding  propensities  across its  distribution,  that  is, members of the supposedly single species will breed differentially with different parts of the total species population.  For example,  take an animal  which is common to Europe and bring individuals from  different geographical parts of the continent together and it may be that those found in the  East of  the distribution  will be less likely or refuse altogether to  mate with the those in the West.  These barriers to breeding are clearly not purely due to major differences in physical biology. Probably there is an element of behavioural difference which reduces the propensity to breed.

Animals use various triggers to breed: aural, chemical, condition of feathers  and so on. These are seemingly automatic processes whereby one individual responds to another without conscious thought. Even behavioural triggers such as mating rituals can be viewed in the same light. Man, although not divorced entirely from  such triggers, adds conscious thought to the process of mate selection. Does that not put Man in an entirely separate category to all other organisms, namely,  the one organism who can potentially breed freely across the entire species population?  Potentially yes, but in practice no for Man’s capacity for conscious thought and decision making does not mean  his breeding is not constrained by the triggers which control other organisms, especially behavioural. For example, most people choose mates who are of the same race as themselves even when they have ample opportunity  to do otherwise.

Even at the level of biology I wonder if Man is quite as  discrete as he imagines.  To the best of my  knowledge no  one  has  tried to create a cross between a human and  a  chimpanzee  or a bonobo  –  I sincerely hope no one ever does.  But  putting  aside  any natural  revulsion,  would  it be so surprising if  such  a  cross  was possible?  Would  it be any more of a intra-species leap than  say  the production  of  a mule or a liger (lion/tiger) through  the  mating  of different species?  I would not wish to bet against it.

As  for the future,  genetic engineering may break  down  distinctions between  species,  for  example,  by   genes  from  one  species  being implanted into another.  Lastly,  genetics and/or cybernetics may  lead to  modifications of human beings so substantial to create what are  to all  intents and purposes unambiguously separate  species of Man with vastly differing abilities. There may come a point where the concept of a species becomes redundant.

12. Race and Man

The most potent of human behavioural triggers are racial differences for they exercise the strongest control over the group in a territory where different racial groups exist. Race trumps ethnicity where the ethnic clash is one of people of the same race but different ethnicities.  Place a significant population of a different race into a territory where ethnicity rather than race is the cause of unrest and the ethnic factions of the same race will tend to unite against those of a different race.

Nothing  demonstrates the  natural tendency  of human beings to  remain racially distinct than the remarkably low rate of inter-racial breeding even  in circumstances  where there is every opportunity for  it,  most particularly in the great cities of Western Europe and  North  America, where the populations are increasingly varied and the prevailing  elite ideology positively encouraging of such liaisons.

Even   societies which have had very racially mixed populations for a long time  display a  remarkable  ability to maintain retain racial distinctions over  very long  periods  of time – Brazil is an excellent  example of  this,  with social class being very much graded by skin colour. To argue that racial difference is  not important to the choice of a mate is as absurd as arguing  that the attractiveness of a person is irrelevant to the choice of a  mate.

In  Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner  cite a study made of a  US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84).  The site is one  of the  largest  in  the US and the data examined  covered  30,000  people equally  divided  between San Diego and Boston.   Most were  white  but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.

The  questionnaire the  would-be  daters had to  fill  in  included  a question  choice on race as “same as mine”  and “doesn’t matter”.   The study  compared  the responses  by white would-be  daters  (those  from non-white were not analysed) to these  questions with the race of  the emails  actually  sent soliciting a date.   The result  in  Levitt  and Dubner’s words was:

“Roughly  half of the white women on the site  and  80  percent  of  the white men declared that  race  didn’t  matter to them. But the response data tell a different story  The white men who said that race didn’t  matter sent  90  percent of  their e-mail  queries  to  white women. The  white women who said race  didn’t  matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

“Is  it  possible that race really didn’t  matter  for  these  white women and men and that they simply  never  happened  to browse a non-white date  that  interested them?”

Or,  more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter  because they wanted to come across  especially  to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?” In short, around 99% of all the women and 94%  of all men in the sample were  not  willing  to  seek a  date of a  different  race.   How  much stronger  will  be  the tendency to refuse to breed with a  mate  of  a different race?

Another  way  of testing the desire to remain racially separate  is  to look at social class and inter-racial  breeding. The higher up the social scale a  person is the less likely they are to have a partner of a  different race – if you doubt this try to find examples of the rich and  powerful who  have  a  partner of a different race. Those who  have the most choice overwhelmingly choose members of their own racial type, despite the fact that they have the protection of their wealth and position  to shield their spouses and children  from the effects of racial discrimination.

The experience of imperial Rome nicely demonstrates   racial exclusiveness  as a historical phenomenon.  Despite the racially  mixed population,  all the evidence we have suggests that  Romans  of  higher  social status (the only Romans we have any substantial knowledge of  as individuals) rarely took  non-white mates  (the  same  applies today:  in white-majority countries the higher the status of whites,  the less likely they  are  to have a non-white partner.)  Even the Bible has the story of Moses choosing a black wife and meeting with resistance on the part of his people. (Numbers chapter 12)

If sexual desire will not commonly override the natural disinclination to remain racially separate nothing will.

The  fact  that  humans  have external  racial  differences  which  are sufficiently distinct to allow  people throughout the world to  broadly categorise an individual into categories such as  white and  black is in  itself  indicative of the innate human tendency to  breed with those who are racially similar, even though for several thousands of years large human populations of different racial types have existed in close proximity. If  human beings did not have an innate preference for those who racially resemble themselves, humanity  would have bred itself  into something approaching a uniform racial type, at least in those parts of the  world  which  were not very isolated – different  races  have  had regular  and  numerous  contact  with each other  for  at  least  three thousand years. The alternative explanation to an innate tendency is the truly fantastic one that Man everywhere spontaneously developed cultural barriers to breeding which had nothing to do with any innate tendency. If anything is a social construct it is not race but the liberal idea that Man is a single species.

Race is  much stronger as a mediator of who to mate with than ethnic (cultural) difference – think of the very  high proportion of those in Britain who have Irish/Welsh?/Scottish/English mixed ancestry. Nonetheless, ethnic differences are culturally potent amongst racially similar populations. For example, on either side of the England/Scotland border,  the inhabitants  born and raised close to the border retain Scots and English accents even though they may have lived their entire lives only a few miles apart.

Because the tendency to mate with those of a similar race is so strong  and universal,  both in place and time, it is reasonable to conclude  that the  behaviour  is innate and that cultures  necessarily include  the requirement for a member of the society to be of a certain racial type. The  consequence of this is that someone of a different racial type  is effectively precluded from full integration because one of the criteria for  belonging has not been met.  That is not to say,  of course,  that many  of the habits of mind of an alien culture may not be  adopted  by someone  of  a  different race.  What is withheld  is  the  instinctive acceptance  of the alien and his or her descendants  as members of  the society. Just as no human being can decide for themselves that they are a member of this or that group, no individual can decide that they belong to this or that nation because it is a two-way process: the other members of the group they wish to join have to accept them as a true member of the group. (Stephen Frears the English  film director once wryly remarked that he had known the actor Daniel Day-Lewis “before he was Irish”).

There  are  also other plausible reasons why inter-racial  breeding  is rare. There is a widespread  biological behaviour  known as assortative mating.   Members  of  sexually reproducing  animals  select  mates  by certain criteria.  In that much loved laboratory animal,  the fruit  fly drosophila,  this may be the number  of sternopleural bristles;  in Man it  includes  many criteria including racial type.  Other  human  prime assortative criteria are size, intelligence, education and class.  Some of  these criteria such as education and class are more clearly  linked to  nurture  than  Nature,  but even they can be  direct  or  indirect expressions  of   qualities which are at least largely innate  such  as intelligence. I  say  direct  or  indirect  because  the  beneficial qualities  may not be in the individual, for those with  superior education and high social class may lack the  innate qualities of their parents  or earlier ancestors and their privileged position may  simply be a residue of the superior innate abilities of their parents or other ancestors.

For the purposes of inter-racial mating, size,  intelligence, education and  class all come into play. There are clear average  differences  of size  between the three major races:  blacks largest,  whites  in  the middle and Asians smallest.  This would mean that on average members of one  racial  group  would be less likely to choose  another  member  of another racial group. The differences in IQ would have the same effect, with  blacks  being far less likely to mate with the  other  two  races because their IQ is further removed from them than  they are from  each other. Differences in IQ will also be reflected, directly or indirectly in  educational achievement and social class and hence in  mating, for example,  if a minority population of blacks amidst a  majority  white population  have proportionately  more people of low education and  low social  class than the white majority,  something which  should  happen other  things  being equal because of their inferior  IQ  distribution, they are less likely to mate with members of the white majority simply on the grounds of education and class.

What about genetic diversity the reader may be asking themselves,  should  not the great benefits of that drive people  of different races to mate whenever they can?  This  widespread view is unsurprising because as far as the  layman is concerned one of the great “truths”  of modern biology is that diversity is good because genetic diversity within a species reputably  protects the species from the  effects  of harmful  recessive  genes by reducing  the  chance  of both  partners  in a successful mating  having a  particular  recessive gene, while  general organic  diversity in an environment is  supposed  to ensure  the stability and endurance of  the environment.

One does not need to have any deep grasp of genetics to see there is  a logical  problem  with  the  idea that  genetic  diversity  within  a species is a  sine qua non of evolutionary success. The genetic relatedness  of   breeding pairs in many species must  of  necessity be  close because the opportunities  to  breed  are limited.  In the case of Homo Sapiens this has been true of most  human beings  throughout history.  Man in his primitive state lived in  small nomadic bands  which were sparsely spread across the landscape Tribal peoples   commonly  exchange members (normally women)  between  tribes, but  again that is a local exchange.   Even in more advanced  societies most  people  have lived in small settled communities and  have   mated  with people who come from the same locality. Very closely  related human beings are substantially  more prone to genetic disaster if they mate, but the level of genetic diversity required to reduce the number of genetic disasters to a level in which they are not seriously harmful to the group is clearly not vast.

A small gene pool may even have advantages. Ashkenazi Jews  come from what was originally a  small  population group (some estimates put it as low as 500)  which married almost entirely within the group and continued to do so down the generations. They have an abnormally high average  IQ    –  six times as many Ashkenazim as Europeans have IQs of 140+. In June  2005 the Journal of Biosocial Science carried a paper by a team at the  University of  Utah which put forward the theory that their exceptionally  high average IQ exists   because  of  natural selection. They argued that Ashkenazi  Jews had   had been selected them for high IQ because  historically Jews in Europe were denied  many opportunities for employment  and they were driven into high IQ occupations such as  banking. Rushton Revisted http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=6c9fe76b-f1

That racial type should be a requirement for inclusion within a “tribe” is unsurprising.  All social animals have to have boundaries  to  know where the group begins and ends.  This is  because a social animal must operate  within a hierarchy and a hierarchy can only exist where  there are  boundaries.   No boundaries,  no hierarchy, because  no  individual could  ever  know what the dominance/submission situation  was  within their species or at least within those members of the species with whom they interact.

Where  does  “must operate within a hierarchy”  come  from?  First  the observed facts:  all social animals do produce hierarchies –  although these  vary  considerably  in form – and  human beings  always  produce hierarchies,  whether they are hunter-gatherers  or people populating a great modern  city.

Why do social animals always form hierarchies?  For animals other  than Man  the answer is I think simple enough: only by forming  hierarchies can social groups cohere.   This is most probably because animals  vary considerably  in  their  physical and mental  qualities.  Observe   any animal,  even  the  simplest  single cell  organism,  and   differences between individuals within the species will become apparent.  Some  are more vigorous than others,  some larger, some,  more adventurous and so on. Individuals will also vary by age and, in sexually reproducing species,  sex.

In a solitary animal the practical consequences of differences  between individuals will be decided by  direct  competition,  most commonly  by the  formation of territories and the attempted monopoly of  mates  and food  within the territory,  with the best endowed animals  on  average being more successful.

When an animal is social, differences in individual  quality have to  be resolved  by something other than the methods used by solitary  animals such  as  scent marking of territory boundaries  and  serious  fighting because the animals have to live in close proximity.   Competition  for desirable goods still occurs, most notably  competition for mates,  but normally  within behaviours  which   are  not fatal to other members  of  the  group  or behaviours which are so disruptive as to threaten the survival   of the group.  The  upshot of this social accommodation is  the  formation  of different social  niches into which individuals fit.

Group behaviour is a compromise between the immediate advantage of  the individual   and the diffuse advantages derived from   group  activity. The  compromise is given structure  by hierarchies,  whether that be  a fixed  biological distinction by sex or caste (for example,  social bees)  or  a transient  one due to the age of an animal.   Hierarchies are built  on the differences between individuals and the more rigid the hierarchical structure  the  greater  will be the  selective  pressures  to  produce individuals in the right  proportions to fill the various social niches within the group.

Consider what would happen if hierarchies  did not exist.   There would be constant conflict within the group because  no individual would have cause  to defer to another except from fear of physical harm  and  such fear is a blunt and very limited instrument of social control,  whether it  be  of  humans or animals.  It is a strategy  more  suited  to  the solitary animal than the social one.

Hierarchies  also  make  sense in terms of the  development  of  social animals.  Social  animals  are ultimately descended  from asocial animals.   The movement from asocial to  social animal  is  presumably  akin to the  evolutionary   process  whereby  a parasite  is  converted  to a symbiotic partner.  It is  a  process  of gradual behavioural accommodation.

Social  animals on the bottom rung of the social animal  ladder may  do little more than associate together at certain times.  The next rung up and the animal frequently associates with others of its kind.  One more step and the animal forms more or less permanent groupings.  And so  on until we reach the ultimate social animal: Man.

The  gradual evolution of social behaviour of itself points to the need for  hierarchy,  because  at each stage of the  evolution   the  natural overtly  selfish  behaviour of the original solitary animal has  to  be modified.  That modification will only come through  natural  selection working   on   behavioural   traits   which   favour    more   complete socialisation.

What about human beings? Are they not capable of breaking the biological bounds which capture animals?  Does not their  immense intelligence and possession of language place them  in another category of being?  Could Man  not simply decide not to behave in a non-hierarchical manner?  The fact  that  human beings have  never done so  is of  itself  sufficient evidence  for  all but the most ideologically  committed  nurturist  to decide that human beings  cannot do it and to conclude  that the forming of hierarchies is part of the human template.  However, to that fact can be added another, the dominance/submission behaviour which every person witnesses daily not merely in positions of formal dominance and subordination such as the workplace,  but in every aspect of social life.

13 An analogy with computers

In assessing what Man is, an analogy with computers can be made. As hardware,  a particular model of  computer is  practically identical to every other computer which  is classified  as  the same model.  But the  software available to every computer of the same model is not identical.   They may run  different operating systems, either completely different or different versions of the same program. The software which runs under the operating system is different  with different versions of the same program being used.  The data which is input to the computer varies and this in turn affects the capabilities of the computer.

It  clearly makes no sense to say every computer of the same  model  is the same even if the computer is loaded with the same software.   But of  course  not  all  computers  are  of  the  same  model.  They  vary tremendously  in  their  power.  The same software  will  run  at  very different  rates  because of this.  Storage and memory size  also  vary tremendously. Some computers cannot run programmes because the programmes  are too large.   We  may call all computers computers ,  but that is to say little more  than that  all  animals are animals,  for  computers  range  from  the immensely  powerful super computers – the homo sapiens  of  the computer  world  as it were – to the amoeba of the  simple  chip  which controls  lights  being put on or off in a room  depending  on whether someone is in it.

Are the circumstances of computers  not akin to those of  Man?  Do  not the racially based  differences in IQ correspond to the differences  in power  of  older  and  newer computers?  Do not different  languages  represent different operating systems? For example, think how different must be the mentality of  a native Chinese speaker (using  a language which  is entirely  monosyllabic)  to that of a native English speaker  (using  a polysyllabic language) simply because of the profound difference in the structure  of the language. A language will not merely impose limits on what  may  be  expressed it will effect the  entire  mentality  of  the individual,  from aesthetic appreciation to  social expression. Is not the experiential input analogous to the holding of different data?

14. The more primitive the society the less it relies on high IQ related skills

The  evidence  of  palaeontology (the  scarcity  of  hominid  remains), of archaeology  (the absence of evidence of  large scale human  settlement anywhere before about 7,000 BC),  of  anthropology (studies of extant  hunter  gatherers), extrapolations  from  non-human  primate behaviour and the practical implications of being a  very large  animal, (within the top 5 per cent of land animals by size.)  make it certain that  Man’s  roots lie in small groups  of hunter  gatherers. Man’s  natural group “in the wild”  is that of the small band of  perhaps  25-100 people.

Hunter  gatherer  societies are based primarily on knowledge not reasoning. To survive the individual members have to know a great deal about the world about them but they are not often called upon to solve absolutely novel problems.  They live in a world which remains  broadly stable.  Once  something  is learned it will  normally  remain  useful throughout  an  individual’s life, for example, the behaviour  of  an animal species will remain the same in its general aspects.  That  is not  to say life in  such societies is undemanding – as Stephen  Pinker puts it in his “How the mind works”,  being a hunter gatherer is akin to enduring a lifelong camping trip without mod cons or rescue services  – but the demands made are different from those arising from other  forms of human society.

Survival  in  such circumstances requires a detailed  knowledge  of   the animals  and  plants  in the habitat –  their  appearance,   behaviour, locale  and uses,  including the medicinal and the usefully toxic  such as    curare.   Close familiarity with the terrain within  the  group’s range  is a must,  as is a  knowledge of the weather and  the  seasons. To be an efficient member of the group the male hunter-gatherer   will need to learn to stalk game and have the courage and ferocity to deal with dangerous animals and other hostile groups of humans.  To aid direction finding,  some knowledge of the  stars will probably be acquired.

That is just the start. The hunter-gatherer will also need a number of manual skills ranging from those needed for hunting –  spear throwing, arrow shooting, trap setting, the making of fire and so on  – and for the manufacture of all artefacts which cannot be found in nature  – clothes, bows and arrows, spears, fish-hooks,  baskets and suchlike.

The  female members of the tribe,  in addition to needing many  of  the skills  required  of  the men,   will have to deal  with  the  problems arising from  childbirth and maternal care.

To be fully integrated into his group the  hunter-gatherer will need a deep  knowledge of the  accumulated  customs, ceremonies  and beliefs of his tribe or band and also  a knowledge of other neighbouring  groups  to  be  able to participate in the  resolution  of  inter-tribe disputes within the confines of the belief system of the tribe.

This  might seem a tremendously demanding  catalogue of learning, but  it  is not  onerous  in  reality  because the information  and expertise is acquired over a long  time and  under  the most propitious circumstances.  The child learns in the easiest way  by  directly  observing how others do it and by tuition which   is  either one-to-one  or  given  in  a   small  group.

Nor  is  the  required knowledge very intellectually demanding. It is almost all concrete information. Even  knowledge of the  group’s myths can be no more than the  acquiring of concrete data  because the myths  can be treated as  a set of narrative  stories which  are  simply passed down from generation  to  generation  without causing intellectual enquiry. Indeed,  questioning of the myths will almost  certainly  be  seen as mortally dangerous and be discouraged  by severe punishment  because it will be deemed to risk angering either a god  or  gods or  cause some other form of cosmic disturbance  such  as creating bad karma.

Of course,  building up such a suite of skills and knowledge means that an  individual has, or a group of people have, at some point  originated the  acquisition of the various skills and elements of  knowledge,  but the  large  majority of those skills and knowledge  can  plausibly  be ascribed  to  the  normal process of  finding  solutions  to  immediate problems raised by the environment rather than to individuals  looking beyond the obvious. It is the difference between devising a simple trap to  catch  an animal based on observation of the animal’s  behaviour  – which  gives  the basic information  needed to devise the  trap, for example, dig a pit here  –  and working  out that fibre can be gathered from  an animal  and  converted into cloth,  a process which requires an act of  imagination beyond the information supplied by observation.

Regardless   of  the  origin  of  the  skills  and  knowledge  of   the hunter-gatherer, the individual hunter-gatherer will be able to acquire them  simply as learned skills. There will be no necessity  to  change things.  Indeed, as mentioned above, it will probably be dangerous for the  individual member to try to innovate because the tribe as a  whole will view any deviation from tried and tested ways as  dangerous. Such a  brake   on innovation is almost certainly  a valuable  attribute  at the  level of the hunter-gatherer tribe  which is necessarily very reliant on social cohesion.

The nearest the hunter-gatherer gets to an intellectual life is in the creation of tribal myth, especially the explanation of the tribe and the  world’s  origin  and the assignment of animate  qualities  to  the inanimate, spirits in volcanoes, the sky, rivers and so on. That Man should create myths  is  natural for   a self-conscious being  will  necessarily  wonder about such things  as  mortality  and existence. Of course, the creation of  myths is an exercise of the imagination,  but it is difficult to see that  it makes   any   heavy  intellectual demands. There is a  world of  difference between a creation myth which simply asserts that this or that happened (for example,  Genesis) and the theological/philosophical consideration of what existence entails (for example,  Aquinas’   attempts  at  a  proof  of  God).   The  former  is  simply storytelling to provide an  answer,  the latter an attempt to use reason to  provide  an  answer  from  the  observed  and  necessary  facts  of existence.

Change generally will be tend to be seen as dangerous. What is known to work  through long usage  is safe; that which is novel  is  potentially dangerous. To that may be added the fact that it is simply psychologically easier to do what you already know. Learning new things is mentally demanding.

The fact that Man spent hundreds of  thousands of years (including most of his “modern Man” period of the past 200,000 years or so) with  precious little cultural change is powerful circumstantial evidence of  the very strong  innate reluctance  of  human  beings  to depart from customary  ways.  Even  in historical  times  we know that change has often  been   extraordinarily slow in societies which were the most advanced at the time, for example, the stereotypical artefacts of ancient Egypt which change very little  over several millennia or  the dress of the Chinese which was  much the same in 1,800  AD as it was  in 1,000 AD.   Even those living  lives in  advanced societies today show a strong reluctance to alter their ways,  although their ability   to resist change is increasingly limited (see appendix B).

The concentration on concrete thinking probably underpins a reluctance  to change because the understanding and acceptance of radical change  requires abstract  thought. The individual has to think through the consequences, construct a mental model of what will happen.   Someone  may stumble by accident on a  simple  new behaviour which advances Man’s ability to control his environment,  for example, that a prey animal is attracted by a particular bait or that a plant has medicinal effects. But no complex advance, for example, the invention  of the wheel, is going to occur by simple observation  and copying because it requires someone to go beyond copying and visualise something which does not exist.

The  physical senses of  people living  as hunter gatherers are much heightened compared with those living in modern industrialised urban societies.  This is scarcely surprising because the  hunter-gatherer  has to concern themselves with the natural world in the same way that  an animal in the wild does: both must be on constant guard against predators or other forms of danger and be alive to the opportunities for obtaining food  and other materials.  The heightened senses and the  need to concentrate on the present may effect how people think by  either training the mind in that direction or by selecting  individuals with such innate traits.  Perhaps it is impossible  for a  mind  to efficiently perform radically different functions such as a concentration on the immediate and concrete and deal with abstractions. If so, this could either be a consequence of innate difference or a difference in experience which programs the mind.

The fact that the life of a hunter-gatherer is very physically  demanding, both in  terms of  simply surviving and in the manual  skills  which must be routinely exercised, may have an effect on  intellectual development. Perhaps a concentration on  physical activity may  dull the intellectual processes even if the brain is equipped to potentially do far more intellectually, or to put it another way,  the brain is programmed to do manual work by the demands of the society in which the hunter-gatherer lives and has  less inclination  for  intellectual activity because of that programming. The hunter-gatherer will also have his concentration on potential  dangers from  predators and other bands of men, just as  a prey  animal will be constantly  looking out for danger.

In summary, the hunter-gatherer has a large suite of skills and  knowledge  which allow him to deal with circumstances as they arise, but there is little or  nothing  which  requires high level reasoning  or  invention.  The knowledge  of  the group is passed from generation to  generation  with little change.

What  is  required  in  such  a society  is  a  very   strong  memory, especially  as such societies are pre-literate (it has long been  noted that people in pre-literate societies frequently have extraordinarily  powerful memories and  good powers of recall), and the ability to  readily  access and apply the knowledge.

The  implication of all this is that a  hunter-gatherer  society  will require  a substantially smaller aggregate intelligence than more  complex  societies. Alternatively  it could be argued that a lesser aggregate intelligence  is what is actually required in less complex societies, that is,  it is optimum  state for the ecological niche into which they naturally  fit. Increase the  average IQ of the group and the society  will  have  the potential to develop different behaviours, for example, it may  become less socially cohesive because there are more individuals who  require less social support to  cope  or whose greater intelligence leads  them to  innovate. That could reduce the fitness  of  the  hunter-gatherer group because higher IQ behaviours are inappropriate.

None of this  means a simple society is biologically unfit per se. They fill their niche in the Natural world successfully,  indeed, have  filled it for most of the vast stretch of hominid existence. In parts of the world they fill  it to this day. Their evolutionary fitness is only called into question when they meet more complex societies with which they cannot compete. When they do this can have the most traumatic effects. Take the case of the Australian Aboriginals who  have  a   large  experience  of living   in state-sponsored    reservations.     The    amount of aboriginal self-determination  has varied over the years,  with the general  trend being  towards  ever  more  self-governance. This  trend  is  now  being reconsidered because of its ill-consequences, viz:

‘Releasing  a  new  report into the nation’s health,  Mr  Abbott  [Tony Abbott,   the   Australian  health  minister]  said  the   system   of self-governing   Aboriginal  communities  created   “appalling   living conditions”  where problems such as petrol-sniffing,  domestic violence and child sexual abuse were rife…

‘The report said Aboriginal health was declining at a time when that of the  rest  of  community  was  markedly  improving.   Death  rates  for indigenous  infants  are  three  times  higher  than  for  the  general population.

‘Mr Abbot’s audacious plan proposes giving administrators  wide-ranging powers to organise basic services such as water, transport and sewerage –   and   reverse   what   he   calls   the   pervading   “culture   of directionlessness”  in remote Aboriginal settlements.’ (Daily Telegraph 22/06/2006).

A  plausible explanation for  this state of affairs is that the Aborigines are  being asked to live a life for which they are not equipped. and that at least part of that unfitness is  down to Nature.   The nurturist will of course argue that the  present state of Aborigines is simply a consequence of the  destruction of their traditional way of life, which in one sense is true. What the nurturist does not and cannot explain is why  populations adapt to meeting more sophisticated  cultures  with differing degrees of ease. It is never an easy or pleasant thing to put aside old ways which are comfortable, but  the experience of  white and Asian societies in adapting to new , more  intellectually demanding circumstances is utterly at  odds with that of  peoples such as the Aborigines.  Europe and its  colonial offshoots such as the USA industrialised quite rapidly when shown the way by Britain; Japan took up the industrial banner  in the 19^th century and China almost certainly would have done if it had not been emasculated  by foreign powers.  Korea and China itself have shown since the second world war how readily they can create an industrial society.  Most tellingly whites and Asians adapt to more intellectually demanding circumstances regardless of where they are. This is almost certainly because  of their superior IQ distribution.

15. Life in more complex societies

The  more  complex a society the greater the need  for  high  IQ. As the  number of humans living in social proximity  increases  more sophisticated social structures  are required. A settled way of life amplifies this need further. The variety of occupations  increases and, most importantly, the amount of stored knowledge becomes both larger and, once writing is available, more stable. Social organisation becomes  looser and informal social support lessens. In place of a single world view competing ideologies vie for supremacy. Change and innovation become much more probable.  There is so much more to potentially think about and learn, although any  individual may  actually  have to know less than the hunter-gatherer to survive because  of division of labour.

The  individual in such a society  is  required to both learn more complex  and  less  immediately obviously  practical  skills  and knowledge and to deal with a greater  range  of human  personalities  and ideas. A man’s  life contains less  physical activity. As he works with his brain rather than his hands, his focus of attention  changes.   Knowledge becomes  obsolete through innovation and  consequently the need to learn throughout life  increases. There is  less  certainty  and  fewer simple  cultural mooring posts. The individual has  to make more intellectually demanding decisions.

To live in  a more complex society requires a qualitative change in mental abilities.   There is an ever increasing shift from  learning  that  which is concrete  to that which is abstract, both in terms of understanding the whys and hows of the  natural world at a level beyond mere surface observation, for example, the extraction of  metal from ores,   and in contemplating the organisational problems posed by  larger  associations of human beings. Much of what is  to be  learnt  has no connection with the  natural world and consequently no innate interest for Man who has to persuade himself  intellectually that such  things should be learnt because  they lead to  useful  outcomes.

The existence of writing enhances such behaviours but it does more than that. The  storing of information in a stable  form means that  information can be disseminated more widely and  more certainly. Oral traditions inevitably  result in  variation. So of course  do  written  records but  they are  far less prone to change, especially  where   moveable type printing  exists.   Moreover, a written record is a permanent statement of what was thought or claimed  at one time. It can be compared with later written or oral accounts of the same subject in a way that  a society with a purely oral tradition can  never compare past and present accounts. In addition, written  documentation  allows not only a vast increase in what can be handed down from generation to generation but also  much more complex information. It also greatly extends the time over which information may be transmitted.  According to Plato,  Socrates lamented the use of written records because he believed they  stifled  the intellect, but  what would we know of Socrates today if  no written records had been made of his thought? The answer is nothing.

As societies become more complex the way in which people learn changes. Instead of invariably learning by personal instruction and example, human beings often have to learn  without direct human assistance, for example by reading,  or by listening to the spoken words of others without any practical demonstration. This is because in  modern industrialised societies the number of people who really understand the  technology which is in general use is seriously inadequate. This means that people are  routinely expected to use technology without  a proper understanding of it because there is no one to instruct them in its use.

16. The increasing IQ demands of  modern society

Take a simple everyday example of how  everyday life has rapidly become more complex in our own society.  Fifty years ago if you looked in the pockets of  the ordinary working  man  you would find a  wallet  which  probably contained  money and the odd photo or a scrap of paper on  which  notes had  been made:  the pockets of  a middle class man would  contain  what the working man’s contained plus  probably a cheque book and possibly a driving licence. Today the pockets of most people will contain cash,  a wallet  a  wide  variety of credit,  bank and  store  cards,  a  driving licence and  a mobile phone.

All the person, whether working class or middle class, had to worry about  fifty years ago  was not losing any of the things they  carried. If  they  did lose them, the most that they  were  likely to have  to  do  was cancel  their  cheque book and get a new licence. Now most people have to not only worry  about what the person fifty years ago had to worry  about,  they also have to deal with  a great deal more. They must remember passwords to use their cards and, should they lose any of  them, they not only have to cancel the  cards and get new  ones   but have  the  added  worry  of   identity  theft.

That is just a one example of what the modern industrial society demands of its members.   It does much more.  Vast numbers of laws are passed which no person however conscientious can be expected to master (that includes lawyers) and the state imposes  hideously  bureaucratic procedures for  everything from applying for a passport to  gaining  welfare benefits.  The modern state  even in in its most  benign forms also increasing  interferes actively through attempts to micro-manage the lives of those who come under its sway, whether that be  congestion charging, the sorting of rubbish  for environmental  or  the imposition  of highly intrusive surveillance practices such as high-tech ID cards.  More generally, it imposes  ideologies  such as political correctness on its population  through the use of political propagandising and the passing of laws to make dissent  difficult or simply  illegal.   That is what the benign form of  the modern state does: its more malign incarnations  do the same things but in a more extreme  manner. All of this is mentally  demanding and exhausting for any person to take on board and of course most people do not even try let alone succeed in knowing and observing every new law or de facto official custom.

But it is not only the state which makes increasing demands on the emotional and mental resources of its people. Partly because of technology and partly because of the demands of ever widening competition as national trade barriers are lowered,  large private companies have joined the complexity party.   Customers are expected to increasingly serve themselves, whether that is through the use of websites, automated telephone systems, onsite computer such as ATMs and  checkout machines in supermarkets.  It is increasingly difficult in many of the ordinary spheres of life to  engage directly with another human being.  (I examine the implications of  computers  in more detail in   Appendix B)

A nasty question arises from this increasing complexity: are  the demands made on humanity by  the advanced modern state such as to distract them from  learning things which previous generations learned. Do people today know much more about processes but have far less general knowledge  than they once had? My feeling is that this is precisely what has happened. Does this make  people on average less intelligent  because the intelligence of erudition  is reduced?  If so, does this imply that populations as a whole are becoming less intellectually competent or merely intellectually competent in a different way?  I suspect it is the former because the intelligence of erudition is the main source of human competence.

There is also the worrying prospect that technological advance may be proceeding so rapidly that the demands it makes on people in general may eventually outstrip the society’s  general IQ capacity.  At the least the additional demands are leaving  millions of people  in an increasing precarious position – an IQ of 80 is the point at which most psychologists would  say that  a person  begins  to  struggle to live an independent life  in  a  modern advanced society such as Britain. Approximately ten per cent of the population of  Britain have IQs of 80 or  below. That is six million people.

17. Low IQ behaviour

Low  IQ  individuals are not monsters,  they are simply people  with  a more  limited range of behaviour than the common run of  homo  sapiens, just  as  children  display a more limited range of  behaviour  than  a normal  adult.  In particular low IQ individuals have  difficulty  with abstractions.  This has implications both for problem solving  and  the empathic understanding of other people.

A low IQ means that its possessor will find it difficult to  deal  with the demands of an advanced society because such a society will  require a  good deal of abstract thought,  knowledge acquisition which  is  not related to the natural world, constant learning as information  becomes outdated or additional information has to be learnt.

Of course the  problems associated with a low IQ are not restricted only to the racial groups which possess an inferior IQ distribution In a country with an average IQ of 100 approximately  a quarter  of the population will have an IQ of 89 or less. Approximately ten  per cent of such a population will have an IQ of 80 or less. But there  are two  important differences between such a society and a  low IQ community.  First,  in a high IQ society  the number with IQs which make  them unfitted to live independent lives is  comparatively  small. Second,  those  with low IQs can rely on the help of  the  much  larger group  who form the  higher IQ majority, the exact reverse of a low  IQ society.

Because of the way human beings generally behave,  favouring those most like themselves, it is probable that that  the more ethnically/racially homogenous a  society  is the  more likely  it is for the low IQ individual to  receive help  from higher   IQ  individuals  because  of  the  enhanced  sense  of   group solidarity. (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism edited by Frank Salter  provides substantial statistical evidence that  as the diversity of a society increases  support from the majority population for social provision falls).

18. High IQ behaviour

High IQ behaviour is more complex than low IQ behaviour for the beautifully  simple reason that the high IQ individual  has a wider range of intellectual competence  than the low IQ individual.

A high IQ  will, other things being equal, give its possessor  an advantage in  any occupation which relies significantly  on IQ related skills. This does not have to be a high status occupation.  For example, someone with an IQ of 160  will  tend to be a  more expert  machinist   than someone with a low IQ.

The higher the IQ the more people will tend to earn and the higher status job  they will tend to occupy. However, when it comes to making  a fortune (as opposed to inheriting it or gaining it through good fortune such as a win on the lottery), IQ  is probably  not the prime determinant. At best it might be a necessary but not sufficient condition but even that is dubious.  Think of all the highly intelligent academics whose material circumstances  are modest  and the many  people of little education and no  obvious  unusual intelligence who end up as multi-millionaires. The  making a fortune would seem to be more a question of  personality –  having a risk-taking personality – persistence and circumstances. It is noteworthy that most successful  entrepreneurs have quite a few attempts before  succeeding. This suggests  that a large part of their success is simply the willingness to keep trying and a disregard for the social harm they cause while failing.  It may also be that because a high IQ is more likely to  lead to higher intellectual activity, those with a high IQ are simply more interested in that activity rather than making money or building a company (entrepreneurship is not only about money).

19. Majority and minority

Ethnic  minorities  have a built-in insoluble  problem – the majority population will invariably resent their presence if the ethnic population is of a size which allows them to effectively colonise a territory – and that territory may be as small as a few streets – and to be visible as a distinct group.

Where this happens  the  majority population will normally   not feel any  ethnic  solidarity with the minority, while the ethnic minority will keep itself to itself.  This will severely limit any assistance at the purely social level the majority gives to the ethnic minority populations. Where the minority is of a lower average IQ than the majority population they will not benefit from the help of the higher IQ majority in the  same  way that the lower IQ members of the high IQ majority are helped  by  higher IQ  members  of  their own group.

The  larger  the  minority group the more  extreme  its  position  will become  because the larger it  is the easier it is for a member of the minority to live without having social inter-action with the  majority population. This will make the  majority population even less inclined to offer aid to members of the minority.  As mentioned previously (Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism), there  is  also solid evidence  that the more racial and ethnically divided a society is,  the less  willing are its members, and particularly those of  the  majority group, to  provide for social goods such as welfare or healthcare.

Because the low  IQ  minority  has inadequate access to aid from those with higher IQs,  as a group  they  will display a  disproportionately  high  level of antisocial behaviour because they  are less  able  to cope with the practical and psychological demands  of  a high IQ society . Being a low performing minority in a high IQ society also feeds the paranoia and victimhood  of the minority,  who  tend to attribute their   failure   to  succeed  in  the  society   to   oppression   and  discrimination  by the majority.  They will make this attribution  even when other higher IQ minorities in the society  do succeed.

A higher IQ minority amidst a lower IQ majority is a much rarer phenomenon. The examples involving black majority populations  are mostly restricted to colonial situations, whether past or extant, the most notable example being South Africa which is kept afloat as the most advanced state in  black Africa by the white created infrastructure and continuing large-scale white involvement in the country.

Minorities of Ashkenazi Jews and  Asians  in  Western countries  have  higher average IQs than the societies  in  which  they live,  but there are two important differences between  their  position and  the position of whites in SA and their  majority black population.   The first  is the fact that  the  difference  between Ashkenazi  Jews and Asians and that of the  US majority  population is nothing like as great as that between US blacks and whites .  The  second difference is that  the white  average IQ of 100 is adequate to  create and sustain an advanced modern society.

20. A low IQ individual in a high IQ  society

What does an individual do when faced with a situation which is  beyond their experience or capabilities?  Generally they panic at some  level; at the least the person becomes very uncomfortable.  The low IQ  person placed  in a society  which is best suited to those with  substantially higher  IQs   is potentially  at  risk  of suffering such stress  far more often than the higher IQ individual.  Most dramatically, low IQ  is  associated with mental illness, viz:

“Many people with psychiatric disorders appear to have a lower than average level of intelligence prior to developing mental illness, study findings suggest.  Dr Erik Lykke Mortensen, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and colleagues therefore suggest that poor performance on cognitive tests among psychiatric patients could reflect low intelligence rather than the effects of the mental health disorder.   For their study, the researchers identified 350 men in their late 20s who had a range of psychiatric disorders, all of whom had completed an IQ test when 18 years old.   In all, nine different groups of psychiatric diagnoses were represented: schizophrenia and schizotypal disorders, other psychotic disorders, mood disorders, neuroses and related disorders, adjustment disorders, personality disorders, alcohol-related disorders, other substance use disorders and other diagnoses.   All the psychiatric disorders, with the exception of mood disorders and neuroses and related disorders, were associated with a low IQ score, with scores for patients with the average scores for patients in the other psychotic disorders group 8 points below average, while they were 13 points below average for those in the substance use disorders group.   Neither the social status of the parents nor the presence of psychiatric illness in the parents could explain the low IQ scores seen in the men.“ Low intelligence linked to a range of psychiatric disorders.

http://www.patienthealthinternational.com/ncm.aspx?type=news&param=9145  11 November 2005

It is conceivable that the stress low IQ people experience in a high IQ society may  be in part the cause of this  greater incidence of mental illness. That could explain why blacks in Britain  are massively over-represented in  the  mental  health system while in countries such as Jamaica the incidence is not abnormally high. I say could because the difference between the incidence in Britain and Jamaica could be simply a reflection of the  vastly different  mental health resources in the two countries.  There may also be an issue of racial discrimination: the Black Londoner’s  Forum claims   African Caribbean’s are 44% more likely  to be sectioned, 29%more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more  likely to be placed in seclusion and make up 30% of in patients on medium  secure psychiatric wards, despite having similar rates of mental illness as  British white people.

The  behaviour of a low IQ individual in a high IQ society will  largely depend on  two  things:  the opportunity to live a life within the  limits  of their  intellect and the extent to which their lives are controlled  by the group in which they live.

A low IQ individual with a secure job  asking little  by way of  skill or intellect but paying enough to allow the individual to marry and raise a  family, can live  a life which is neither socially disruptive nor  unfulfilling for the person or those associated with him.   The stability of  such a person’s  life  will  be  increased by support  mechanisms  such  as  a closely integrated community, civil society institutions such as unions and  friendly  societies  and  the universal state  provision  of  such necessities  as  education,  healthcare  and welfare.  If  the  low  IQ individual lives in a community with those who are of generally  higher IQ,  their  behaviour  can  assist the low IQ individual to exist  by offering assistance through direct help, example and the fact that the higher IQ individuals  create a more secure and efficient society through their  general behaviour and abilities. In  addition, such  a  community   can directly  shape the behaviour  of  the  low IQ individual by setting socially beneficial  standards  and norms which  would  be less likely to exist in a community of  low IQ individuals.

Where a high IQ society removes or diminishes the opportunities for those  with low  IQs   to  live  comfortably  their   behaviour  will  become  more anti-social. For  example,  policies such as mass immigration and  “free trade”   diminish the quantity of work and the level of wages available to  the lower IQ individual through  increased  job competition  within the domestic market and the export of jobs.  In addition, immigrants increase competition for community provided social goods such  as healthcare  and this bears most heavily  on those with low IQs  because  they are disproportionately found amongst the poor.   In such  circumstances those with low IQs  will be more prone to crime, unemployment,  welfare dependency,  poverty and social alienation.

The propensity for anti-social  behaviour is enhanced where the elite inflates the sense of victimhood of a minority group which has a weak IQ profile. The trait has  four  strands:  first, there is the overt promotion of  the group’s  victimhood by the  elite; second,  there  is the removal from public debate of criticism  of  the group, third,  the operation of double standards  when dealing  with the “victim” group  and the rest of the population and fourth, the creation of  formal privileges (affirmative action) and covert  privileges (equality laws).

American blacks are a prime example of what happens when a low IQ ethnic group exists within an advanced society and the reins of the high IQ majority are slackened.  They have a  much higher rate of anti-social behaviour now,  especially in areas such as illegitimacy and single parenthood,  than they did before Lyndon Johnson’s  “Great Society”   legislation, a  time  of  overt segregation   in  the  South  and  widespread   racial   discrimination everywhere.  The anti-social behaviour of blacks on average was higher than that of the majority white population even before the legislation in the 1960s, but their natural tendency to produce antisocial behaviour was restricted by the white majority behaviour which neither fed a sense of victimhood nor diminished the number of jobs most blacks could do by allowing vast immigration, increased imports and  outsourcing. Nor was there the vast panoply of publicly funded  support, both at the federal and state level, to make not working a viable  proposition.

Regardless of race, the lower the IQ the more dependent a person is on the support of  the group.  Modern advanced societies,  especially those  in  countries such as Britain and the USA, provide an ever  weaker system of  social support  as  the natural support  groups from the family to  a person’s  social class  are  actively undermined by the trend  towards  greater  general affluence  and the increasing withdrawal of the state from the  control of economic activity through their elites’  commitment to  “globalism”, which   is   a  curious  hybrid  of  the  laissez  faire   version of internationalism  which extols the free movement of goods and  services and  people and the Left Internationalist ideal of humanity as a single social  entity. This elite commitment, seen in its most extreme form in Britain over  the past quarter century, undermines the opportunities for  those at the lower end of the IQ distribution to gain and hold a job which is within their capabilities which will  provide them with an income which will allow them to live an independent life.

The  opening of national markets to imports from lower cost  countries such  as  China  destroys home  based  manufacturing,  which   however efficient cannot compete with producers who pay a tiny fraction of what a Western employer must pay  both in terms of wages and in meeting the other  bureaucratically imposed costs such as those relating to  social security and health and safety.

Added to cheap imports are the mass immigration of cheap labour and the export of jobs such as call centre posts to low cost countries such  as India. (Generally,  employers who have to compete globally are ruthless in  cutting  staff).   Finally,  in the name of  removing  protectionist behaviour,   governments  are  prevented  by  the  treaties  they  have themselves signed from subsidising employers in their own countries.

The  other  side of the disadvantage coin is the movement  towards  the dismantling  of the Welfare State on the ostensible grounds that it  is “too  costly”.   In  reality,  this mentality  is  the  consequence  of globalism,  which has greatly  reduced  democratic control in the First World   by   weakening the position of labour through the  lowering  of protectionist   barriers  and  the  cheap  labour  produced   by   mass immigration  and  by the committing of nation-states  to  international treaties which restrict national action and impinge upon  the sense of ethnic solidarity.

Mass  immigration  provides not only immediate   increased  competition for  scarce  social  goods,  but causes a weakening of the  will  of  the majority to support social provision because  there is a reluctance  to fund social goods for those who are seen as ethnically different.

The  upshot  of  the  weakening of social  provision  and individual ethnic help  is, of course,  an  increased inability of the those with weak IQs to live  comfortably or fulfilling  in an advanced  society. At best they risk being reduced to permanent pensioners of the more intellectually able members of their society.

21. The High IQ individual in a low IQ society

Insofar as  the person’s life  makes calls upon IQ related abilities the higher IQ individual will enjoy  an advantage.   However, such an  individual  could be at a  considerable  disadvantage  simply because  he  will  be  abnormal.  The  society  will  value  particular knowledge  and skills and discount the value of  intelligence.  Indeed, intelligence  may  lead  to behaviour which  is  viewed  as  dangerous  because it is  innovative.

Even  if   his high IQ  does  not   result  in behaviour judged to be “dangerous”, the  high  IQ  individual  will  find   his intelligence to be of far less use and advantage than it would be in  a high IQ society because the range of problems  to which the person’s intelligence  can be harnessed  are much more limited than they would be in a high IQ society.

The exception to this rule is where the high IQ minority is the controlling elite, either because they hold formal power (various Latin American countries) or because the country is de facto dependent upon them to maintain the society (South Africa).

22. High status/high IQ jobs

Some jobs by their nature  require a strong IQ,  for example,  you will not find people with  low  IQs working as physicists or mathematicians. Anyone  who  has to master a complex technical job such  as  flying  an airliner  will have a healthy IQ.

But not all  high status jobs require the  mastery of a particular skill or ability that can  be  objectively measured  and there is good circumstantial evidence that in  many  high status jobs an individual can get by  with only a mediocre IQ. It is also true that job status is strongly class-dependent.  Some jobs which are considered to have  relatively low status in the context of a society as a whole because they are mostly done by those drawn from the lower social levels may require a strong IQ, for example,  the skilled mechanic, the rank-and-file police detective.

Jobs also have status within their social stratum. The skilled mechanic will enjoy high status within the working  class;  a brain surgeon will trump a bank manager in  middle class circles.   A few  occupations are beyond class,  for  example, those who exercise serious political power or, in our celebrity obsessed world, the likes of film stars.

The  status of a job and of a person’s position within a  work  hierarchy can play an important part in disguising incompetence, as can political ideology. The  Bell Curve identified an interesting trait in US  society:  blacks and  Latinos  are over represented in reputedly high status jobs  such  as doctors, lawyers and teachers,   the over-representation plausibly being the consequence of an ideologically driven policy, namely,  “positive” discrimination: —

“We have obtained SAT data on classes entering  twenty-six of the nation’s top colleges and universities. In 1975, most of the  nation’s elite private colleges and  universities  formed the  Consortium on financing Higher Education (COHFHE, which amongst other things,  compiles and shares information on thestudents  at  member institutions, including SAT  scores. We have  obtained these data  for the classes entering  in  1991 and  1992…  In addition,  the figure includes data  on  the University  of Virginia and the University of  California  at  Berkeley in 1988.” (The Bell Curve p451).

“The  difference between black and white scores was less  than 100 points at only one school,  Harvard.  It exceeded 200 points at nine schools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288 points).  Overall, the media difference between the black and white mean  was 180 SAT points,  or conservatively estimated, about 1.3 standard deviations.” Ibid p451

For US graduate schools Murray and Herrstein found that  in Law school only 7 per cent of blacks had scores  above the  white mean.  The figures for medical schools were  similar to those of the Law schools, while the  arts and  sciences  were slightly stronger. The Bell Curve pp455-8.

As for teachers, affirmative action in the workplace Teacher competency exams showed whites passing at twice the rate of blacks in three of the four states cited  – California, New York and Georgia – with Pennsylvania the  odd man out with a white/black pass rate of 93/68. The Bell Curve P494

It is difficult to conclude anything other than that the intellectual  quality of blacks  working in medicine, law and education  is on average substantially less than those of whites and Asians and that this inferiority will manifest itself in a  reduced  ability of blacks to do the job   However, many blacks  manifestly do survive  in such jobs. How do they do it?  The answer is a mixture of  the subjective nature of  the subjects (even the law allows  many interpretations), status and political correctness.

Take the case of medicine. It is  far  from being  an  exact science.  Consequently,  many mistakes remain   hidden because  an error can be explained away as being a  reasonable  opinion which  just  happened to be wrong,  misdiagnosis would be  the  classic example of this behaviour.

To this “get out of jail free card” can be added the natural  respect that a doctor carries for most people, including  other medical staff,   the ignorance  of the general public on medical matters and  a very  strong reluctance on  the part of medical staff to make a complaint about other medical staff.  All this   makes  people  generally  reluctant to question a doctor’s  behaviour.  Where the doctor is from a  group which is  protected by political correctness these natural barriers become amplified.

The power of all these traits can be seen from the frequent  cases  of  unqualified people successfully impersonating  doctors  for long  periods  of time.   There have even been a few  cases  of  people successfully impersonating surgeons for years.

But there is another reason why those with low to mediocre IQs get away with being doctors:  medicine  is not the most intellectually demanding profession  (it used to be known as the stupid profession). To be medically competent a doctor needs a powerful memory – to master  the very large amount of information presented to  him  during training and ongoing post-training experience – and personality  traits which allow him to  both judge patients and  be able to inspire trust and  confidence in them.  What it does not require most of the time  is very high level problem solving.

Despite  the limited  intellectual demands of medicine it is accounted a high  IQ  profession nowadays,  at least by implication, and the academic entry requirements for  medical school grow ever more stringent.   Why?   There  is  great competition to enter the profession because it has high status and pays  well.   This means that higher IQ candidates for  medical  school will,  other things being equal,  be preferred to those with lower IQs. In  short,  medicine  today  is  probably   burdened  with   higher  IQ personnel than it requires.

But  over-qualification  applies  only  to  those   who   are   not beneficiaries of “positive” discrimination and lower IQ candidates come from  the groups who do benefit from such favouritism.  Because of  the reasons  given above,  they can survive because the job does  not  make intellectual  demands  which  unambiguously reveals   their  inadequacy.  In addition, those who benefit from “positive” discrimination will tend to generally benefit from  political correctness,  for this will drive those outside the protection of political correctness – in the developed world  white doctors, nurses,  technicians and  administrators-   to  cover up the inadequacies  of  the  low  IQ politically correct  protected doctor.  Ironically,  the higher than necessary IQ of those doctors outside the politically  correct fold will assist  in the process of  covering up because they will tend to  be more competent at doing so  because of their higher IQ and  greater competence.

What is true of medicine applies to many other high status jobs. People with  low to mediocre IQs can  and survive  for  long periods in  positions which   are  patently  beyond  their competence (this of course applies to all races not merely blacks).  There is far more to competence than  just  IQ, but  often  the  incompetence is ascribable to  a  lack  of  IQ-related problem  solving ability – the Dilbert cartoon strip deals  brilliantly with both the question of incompetents in high places and the different qualities required by people in different jobs.

Even more fundamental to understanding how low IQ individuals survive in high status jobs is the fact that having an incompetent in a  high status  job  does  not automatically mean that  the  operation  of  the organisation  or  unit  they work within  is   dysfunctional.   If  the incompetent  person  is a senior manager the people under him   will compensate for the person’s incompetence by quietly ignoring  what the  manager says should be done, by using  their intelligence and experience    and by following  standard   rules and practices.  Organisations  of  any size but the very smallest have  an  in-built functionality which  transcends the individual.

The larger  and more complex the  organisation is the less important the position of a senior manager becomes,  because the  larger  the  organisation  the greater  the  in-built  functionality  and  the  less  the  effect   an individual can have on the organisation, try as they may.   Anyone  who doubts  this  should examine the careers of those who have risen to  be chief executives of large public companies which they have not  founded (entrepreneurs  who create their own businesses are a different  kettle of  fish).   Their   careers are almost invariably  patchy:  they  have success at one company then fail at another.  But once they are on  the corporate  CEO gravy train it is the  devil’s own job to get them  off. Like  high profile Premiership football managers,  no matter how  often they fail there is seemingly always another big job waiting for them.

What applies to private business applies in spades to public  servants, both because there is no bottom line (the  taxpayer pays regardless of outcome)  and because those ultimately responsible  are  the  politicians who misuse their power to cover up mistakes where possible, and where it is not,  to pretend that a monumental piece of incompetence is  nothing of the sort.  They get away with it in the main because most so-called democratic systems (in reality elective oligarchies)  are tightly controlled by an elite which manages  to bar  by  one means or another (sociological inertia, control  of  the media  and  so on) any new political force from gaining power  or  even influence. Even where a new party does gain power,  it  is  almost always comprised of the same class of people who held power before. The electorate  is left with no meaningful choice and the politicians as  a class  are literally irresponsible in such circumstances.

Positions  of  authority  generally  offer  the  low  or  mediocre   IQ individual a great deal  of latitude, because such people are protected from an objective examination of their performance  by their status  and because  they  can call upon the ability of others to do  the  high  IQ work.  They can also take the ideas of their subordinates for their own and place the blame for failure on their subordinates.  The higher  the status of the job,  the greater the ability of the low IQ individual  to hide their inadequacies, both moral and intellectual.

Much of what those in positions of authority do is little more than the exercise of personality plus the acting out of learned positions.  This is particularly obvious in the case of politicians who commonly operate simply  on the recitation of learned statements rather than  responding intelligently to questioning or the demands of situation.  Often   when politicians are forced by circumstances to make a serious attempt at explaining  something   they make  a  frightful  hash  of it because they do  not  have  any  proper understanding of the subject.

The case of George W Bush is an extreme example of this behaviour. When presented with a prepared speech which he has rehearsed extensively and with the use of a teleprompt,   he can speak fluently, although even in these  circumstances he will get some of the phrasing of  his  delivery comically  wrong by placing stresses where there should be none. But put Bush  into a situation where he has to answer questions without any prior  knowledge  of  what is to be asked and  his speech  takes  on  a chaotic form  with stretches of hesitancy followed by passages   where he suddenly becomes fluent for  a sentence or two,  although the fluent passages  often   have  no  direct relevance to  the  question  he  is answering – this, of course, is a common politician’s ploy, but Bush does not use the tactic as a means of avoiding the question but to fill the space with words, any words.  This behaviour is easily explained:  Bush cannot deal with questions on the hoof.  This leads him to stutter and hesitate until he remembers  something he has learned parrot fashion which he  then  trots out.  Once this is delivered he is back to not knowing what to say  and the stumbling hesitancy re-surfaces.

What  applies  to  politicians has application to not  only  people  in authority  but in some degree to any person.  For much of any  person’s life,  both  social  and working,  the individual can  get  by  without needing to exercise higher intellectual functions.  For a large part of the  population  their  lives  can be  lived  without  ever  having  to exercise  high level  intellectual functions because,  contrary to  popular opinion,  most jobs  in a modern advanced state are as they have always been: mundane.

The  high status people who cannot easily hide their  incompetence  are those who undertake jobs which can be judged objectively, most commonly those involving a technical ability such as an engineer or scientist. Bluff there will not carry you through, well, not unless you are a cosmologist.

Tellingly, although the black middleclass has increased massively in the USA  over the past 50 years, the distribution of  blacks across  the full gamut of middleclass occupations is uneven. For example,  black academics have become much more common in the USA in the past fifty years,  but there are  few in the indubitably  high IQ subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry. I was tempted to include philosophy but that is a subject which is difficult to define. It is indubitably a high IQ subject when done well, but it can also be done badly and still get an academic  hearing in a way that work by  an incompetent physicist could not. Hence, quite a few blacks have entered philosophy departments but what they produce is more social commentary  and political polemic than  analytical philosophy in the Western tradition. Certainly, no major black philosopher in that tradition exists. Where blacks do appear in great numbers  in academia is in “black” studies, an  area in which they can rule the roost  with virtually no academic challenge because of political correctness.

23. How the IQ  level of a society rises

How natural selection works on the  mind is still uncertain,  but if the attributes of mind are substantially genetically determined then they must be subject to natural selection.  If this is the case then natural selection would favour  differences in  mentality  which are suited to particular environments.

The mechanics of a rising average IQ would seem to be simple. If IQ is genetically determined, in part or whole, it will be subjected to natural selection.  If a higher IQ is advantageous in an environment it will be preferentially selected. That will result in an increase in the average  IQ  within  the group.  From that  increase  will  arise   the possibility,  but not the necessity,   of more complex social arrangements. If such  arrangements occur, natural selection will favour ever more strongly the high IQ  which in turn will provide the opportunity for a yet  more  complex society.  And so on ad infinitum or at least to the limits of what  can be achieved within homo sapiens.  (Of course, it may become possible for Man to go beyond what natural selection can achieve by means such as  cybernetics or genetic engineering.)

The  ability  of  a  racial  group  to  naturally   evolve  into   more sophisticated  societies  is  not a certain or rapid  thing.  The  vast periods  of time in which, from the palaeontological and  archaeological evidence we have, little social change  appears to have occurred  are testimony to that. More certainly we know  that throughout  historical times different human populations  have lived in very different  stages of social evolution. Even today we  see people living around the world in  every social state from hunter-gatherer to the  most  sophisticated form of  the modern industrialised society.

What  we are talking about is the potential to evolve  socially.   This potential may lay untapped for tens of thousands of years, perhaps even hundreds  of  thousands,  because the  point is not  reached  where  an increase in average group IQ coincides with an  environment favourable to  utilise the  potential of the increased  average group IQ.

Social evolution could  also be delayed if the move from a simpler to a more complex society requires a certain average group IQ to be reached, a critical mass if you will. For example, imagine that a group of hunter-gatherers starts with an average IQ of 50 and this gradually rises. Imagine further that to become a settled community indulging in farming requires and average IQ of 70. Of course,  such  radical  cultural change is unlikely to ever have  been so brutally direct or mechanical for any hunter-gather  group will have moved by degrees from hunter-gathering to farming, but the general principle holds good.

It  is noticeable that the major racial groups have  reached  different degrees  of social evolution.  It is not that any  single racial  group has reached  a uniform  level of social evolution,  rather that  the different  racial  groups seem to have an upper limit to the  level  of general   social   and  cultural   evolution  each  can  achieve.   For example,  no  black  society created a system of writing as far  as  is known and nowhere outside of Europe did forms of government which went beyond monarchical  autocracy evolve naturally – countries outside Europe  have  of course   mimicked,   at  least  in  form  if  often  not in content, non-autocratic  systems after contact with Europeans.

Another  way  of judging whether racial type places  limits  to  social evolution  is  to  look at how  the various major  racial  groups  have responded to the example of more sophisticated societies.   Whites   in Europe  and their descendents abroad  have shown a general  ability  to imitate  the  leaders in social evolution,  whether that  be  Rome  and Greece  in  the ancient world,  Italy in the  Renaissance   or  Britain during the Industrial Revolution.  Asians have  shown themselves capable of  rapidly copying  the white   example in  some  respects at least, most notably by  industrialising.   Blacks are  the odd man out.  Nowhere is there a black majority society  which has  managed to  modernise by its own efforts.  Indeed,  it  is  not possible  to find a black majority society of any size which has  been capable  of modernising successfully even with a great deal of  outside support from the First World.

24. Why have Asians not dominated?

Why have Asians  not dominated human cultural evolution?  How can it be that  the   racial group which has the highest average IQ is  not  that which has  reached, to date,  the greatest cultural achievement, wealth and power?

Before I answer that question, let me debunk some of the Western myths about  China so that we start from the proper  historical and  cultural place  when  assessing Asian  achievement and development.  (The  Asian population  is  of course  more than China,  but  China  by  population represents  most  Asians and Asians at their most  culturally  advanced throughout history  until perhaps the last century,  since when Japan has arguably taken the lead).

Insofar  as people in the West think about China’s place in  history  – and  most  do not think about it at all – they  normally  believe that  China has  long been  a unified state sharing a  single   culture and   a  single  language with a  continuous  history  stretching  back thousands  of  years (thus making it unique)  and that  it  was  always culturally and technologically  in advance of the West until  relatively recently,  the “relatively recently” being anything from 1500 to as late as  1800  AD depending on which authority you choose to follow.  Joseph  Needham  in  his  monumental  Science  and Civilisation  in China is the  prime example of someone propagating  this myth.

The  reality  is  that  the history of China  has  been  as  politically messy  and fractured  as  that of Europe,  arguably   more  so  because their territory is  larger and their population throughout history has been  substantially greater than that of Europe.   The country  was not  even  nominally unified until the third  century BC  –  under  the short  lived Chhin  dynasty (221-207 BC) and has spent more than  half of the time since being split between competing dynasties, for  example, the  Northern and Southern Sung 960-1126,  times of general  warlordism (5/6th  centuries AD)  or subject to  foreign invaders   such  as  the Mongols (1279-1368) and the Manchu (1644-1912). Moreover, even at times of  supposed  unification  the actual amount of control  exercised  by Emperors  was  necessarily small compared with that  achieved   by  the modern   industrialised   state  because  the  means  to  govern   vast territories and large populations was minute in the past compared  with our own day. China is also  so far from being a single racial/ethnic entity  that  today it contains within its borders approximately  100 million people who are in modern Western terms ethnic minorities.

As  for the supposed cultural unity, the spoken language is  very   far from being a single tongue  understood throughout China.  The  division between Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese is reasonably well known in  the West,  but the fracturing of Chinese goes far beyond that. For example, the  erstwhile  Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping spoke with such  a  heavy accent  and dialect that his daughter had to translate for him when  he spoke  in public.  Nor is  the  written language  a single  language similarly  understood by all literate  Chinese  –  different  characters  are  used in different parts of the country  and the same character  may have different nuances depending on the origins  of  the reader.

In  short,  it makes no more sense to speak of China  as  a  continuous state  or  single civilisation than it does to  speak of  Europe  as  a continuous state or single  civilisation.

Nor  is  it  true  that  there  is  a  special  antiquity  to   Chinese civilisation.  In  matters such as writing and the use of  metals,  the Chinese   were at best no earlier than the civilisations of the  Middle East   and  Mediterranean,  and arguably  behind  them,  especially  in writing.

The  claim  that the Chinese  were  throughout  history  more culturally  advanced  than Europe until fairly recently is especially weak. It  is   only necessary  to reflect on the archaeological and historical  evidence  of the  cultural  achievements  of the Egyptians,  those  in  the  fertile crescent (Assyria,  Babylon), the Cretans, Mycenaeans  and  the immense achievements of  ancient  Greece and Rome to realise that the China of antiquity was not superior in terms of their physical control of the world. To take one striking example,  few Chinese buildings pre-dating the Ming era (1368-1644) are extant;  most buildings, including those of the great,  before that date being of timber. Compare that with the  great stone  buildings of the European and Mediterranean ancient world, the magnificent  castles, abbeys, cathedrals and churches of the European   mediaeval world and the amazing architectural  diversity  of the European modern period.

Of  course,  it  is  very easy  to  cherry  pick  particular material accomplishments at particular times and places,  but fail to place them in  their general historical context by posing questions such was  an invention  followed through and  did it become generally used? Such  a failure  gives  a wholly unbalanced picture of the relative  merits  of cultures.  It is true that before the modern period (say 1500 AD) the Chinese can be shown to have had certain inventions before Europe but the opposite also applies, for example,  the  Chinese had the compass before Europe,  but Europe boast priority  with  the  Archimedean screw.

Even  where  China produced an  invention before  Europe and then  Europe introduced  it at a later date,  it does not follow that Europe  copied that invention  from China or the experience of using the invention was  the same  in Europe as in China.    The classic example  of this is  printing with moveable type.  China and Korea had  moveable type many  centuries before  Gutenberg  printed his great Bible in the  15th  century,   but there  is no evidence that Gutenberg was influenced in any way  by  the far Eastern example. Discrete invention of the same thing or process in different cultures  is common.   Not only that,  whereas moveable  type printing  never gained widespread use in China it very  rapidly  became the  norm in Europe,  most probably because written European  languages are   based  on an alphabetical system  with a  few  characters   while written  Chinese  is  an  ideographic   language   with  thousands   of ideograms, each of which requires a single block of type.  Since 1700 at the latest,  European technology has utterly dwarfed  the achievements of the Chinese.

There  is  of  course  far  more to  civilisation  than  its   material consequences.  The  intellectual and social  science,  philosophy,  art, political structure  and so on. Here China also falls well short of  Europe.

China  never managed to develop anything worthy of the name of  science. Throughout their  history  the Chinese have been  very inventive when it comes  to producing artefacts and  practical  solutions to particular problems but have  displayed  a remarkable  lack of interest in developing theory from those  practical solutions to provide general explanations of the world.

It  is also noteworthy that although the Chinese produced many important inventions  such as gunpowder, they commonly failed to exploit them  either at all  or  to  develop them substantially.  When Europeans  began  to  make regular  contact with China in the seventeenth century the guns of  the Europeans  were  much superior to those of the  Chinese  despite  the latter having invented gunpowder.  Looking at the  frequent failures to develop  inventions  the suspicion arises that often an  invention  was produced  to amuse or serve the interests of a powerful  person  rather than  with  the idea of making it a commercial proposition  or  from  a simple  interest  in  the  challenge  of  making  it  and  subsequently understanding how it could be improved. Lord McCartney,  who headed the first official British diplomatic mission to China in 1793/4 noted   “Most  of  the  things the Chinese  know  they  seem  to  have invented  themselves,   to  have applied them  solely  to  the  purpose wanted,  and  to  never have thought of  improving  or  extending  them further”   (A  Journal  of  the embassy to  China),  while  Adam  Smith commented in the latter half of the 18^th century  that “China has been long one of the richest,  that is, one  of the most fertile,  best cultivated, most industrious and most  populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have long been stationary. Marco Polo, who  visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation,  industry and populousness ,  almost in the same terms in  which they are described by travellers in the present  times”.  (The Wealth of  Nations Penguin edition p 174.)

Philosophy  as  we would understand it in the  West,  that  is, analytical thought examining the nature of reality with in  theory  at least  an  absence  of ideological baggage clouding  the  issue,  is virtually    missing  from  Chinese  history.    Traditional    Chinese philosophy  never  divorced  itself entirely  from  religion and  was predominantly concerned with how society should be ordered. Its primary purpose was  social control.  It is more a series of maxims than an exercise in philosophical enquiry. The let-everything-be-challenged  method found  intermittently  in Western philosophy from at  least  the  sixth century   BC   onwards   appears   foreign   to   the   Chinese   mind. Interestingly,  they  were  great  compilers of   what  we  would  call encyclopaedias.  They  delighted in recording what was already  known  or thought, rather than investigating what was not known or might be thought.

A similar resistance to change can be seen in Chinese art and fashion. Look at contemporary depictions of Chinese and the dress of a Chinese in 1000 AD is much the same as the dress of a Chinese in 1800.  Chinese art shows a similar stability over the same period, being for the most part heavily constrained by artistic conventions.    Where there is a deviation from such academic artistic discipline it is mainly found in periods where foreign invaders gained power, most noticeably under the Mongol emperors who imported craftsmen and artists from   here, there and everywhere.  Looking at Chinese fashions and art over time is similar to viewing Egyptian artefacts which show a   remarkable stability over several thousand years. This is the direct antithesis of the general European   cultural experience which consistently shows change in fashion and art.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Chinese is their political and social development.  Politically, the Chinese never really  moved beyond the rather primitive state of believing in an absolute ruler who was a god or  a man directly in touch with gods and warlordism.  There were attempts to introduce more rational and less absolute forms of government, but these were invariably short lived. Ideologies such as Confuscianism attempted to lay down moral rules for rulers, but that was about the limit of any sustained attempt to restrain emperors with anything short of violence. Ideas of constitutions restricting what government may do, representative government or direct democracy were simply alien to Chinese society.

State administration is often lauded as an area of great Chinese superiority, with the Mandarin system put forward as evidence of this, appointment by examination having begun as early as the 7th century AD. But was it really superior to that of the Roman Empire, which pre-dated it by centuries, or more impressive than that of the Catholic church at the height of its power?  Arguably, the Mandarin system was primarily an expression of the general trait of Chinese society to control and categorise rather than a system designed to meet a particular need, as opposed to the administrations of Europe which developed to serve needs such as the management of money.

Below formal government it is difficult to discern in Chinese history anything    which   could be described as   civil society, those organisations and relationships which perform a civic social function but which are not part of the formal political structure, for example, charities, clubs, the co-operative movement and trade unions.   Chinese life has traditionally revolved around the family – including a strong dose of ancestor worship – with any social organisation beyond that being the province of those in authority.  There is nothing which resembles the corporate charitable concern for the poor found within the Catholic Church let alone a formal legal obligation such as the English Poor Law of 1601.

A society which leaves the vast majority of a society in abject penury and a small elite with immense wealth is a primitive form of social organisation. It is a form known since the beginning of history unlike the settled societies which have spread wealth more evenly, which are all of  more recent growth. Left to its own devices Chinese society never went beyond the great disparity  of wealth state.   When Europeans began to gain first hand experience of China from the  seventeenth century onwards a common observation was the tremendous disparity of wealth.   Here  is Adam Smith again:  “The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe” (The Wealth of Nations p174), but “the rich, having a  superabundance of food to dispose of beyond what they can themselves consume, have the means  of purchasing the labour of other people.  The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly  is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than the richest subjects in Europe” (The  Wealth of Nations p310).

This brief de-bunking of the myth of Chinese cultural superiority carries within it suggestions of why Asians have not achieved cultural supremacy despite their superior IQ distribution.  IQ is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cultural advance.  What is missing from the Asian mentality to have hindered  their advance?  Could it simply be that a combination of sufficiently propitious circumstances have never arisen to drive them beyond a certain point, that Europe surged ahead simply by luck rather than any innate difference?  This would seem to be most unlikely because of the length of time during which China has been   a sophisticated society with substantial technological and organisational achievements.

Why did China never make the jump from by-guess-and-by-God technology to true science? Why did China show so little interest in analytical philosophy? Why did China never develop a political system more sophisticated than that of the god-Emperor when Europeans ran through just about every form of political organisations there is in the past 2,500 years, most of them before the birth of Christ? Why was the idea of political participation,  so widespread in Europe in both the ancient and the late mediaeval world, absent in China?  Why was there an absence of civil society in China?  These differences would seem to be more than culturally determined,  to be the cultural expressions of innate tendencies in behaviour.

IQ is far from being the only measurable innate difference between races (insofar as IQ is innate). J Philippe Ruston in Race, Evolution and Behaviour lists several dozen race-dependent variables under the headings of Brain size, Intelligence, Maturation rate, Personality, Social organisation and Reproductive effort.   Under Personality are listed the following:  activity level, aggressiveness, cautiousness, dominance, impulsivity, self-concept, sociability.  On all of these except cautiousness blacks score higher than whites who in turn   score higher   than Asians.  With cautiousness the position is reversed with blacks scoring lower than whites who score lower than Asians. It is not unreasonable to interpret these differences as the Asian personality being less enquiring or adventurous than that of whites, less sociable and more submissive.

The ascending ranking of black-white-Asian is steady throughout almost all the variables  described  by  Ruston – the odd men out are administrative efficiency and   cultural achievement which Rushton ranks as simply “higher” for both whites and Asians than for blacks.    Arguably, those are the two variables most open to subjectivity and, judged by the  entire sweep of human history, it would seem to be stretching a point to put whites and Asians on  the same level in these two areas.  As previously  mentioned, whites managed an industrial revolution from scratch, created  modern science, developed analytical philosophy and  very  early  on  evolved many  varied  forms  of  political  life, including direct democracy.  Before  European examples were put before those, Asians   never advanced much    beyond   by-guess-and-by-God technology, had nothing moderns would describe as science, possessed no analytical philosophy and did not develop a political system more sophisticated than that of the absolute monarch.)

When they are a minority in high IQ societies Asians tend to fill technical posts – which favour higher IQs – or engage in business, much of which is conducted within their own racial group.  They make surprisingly little headway in areas which require the highest level “people skills”, such as formal politics or interest groups. Whether they as a minority live in high or low IQ societies  Asians  display an extremely strong tendency to  keep within their own communities, but unlike  many other minority groups they generally do not engage in much overt antisocial behaviour   – their  crime tends to be directed at other members of the racial group – and display little overt ethnic  aggression such as portraying themselves as victims of racism or by demanding racially based  privileges for their group. This behaviour also fits the Asian personality template  described above.

There is a further consideration. IQ is not of a piece.  Although Asian IQ is higher than white IQ overall, it is not higher in all respects. Asians score substantially higher than whites on non-verbal tests but are significantly inferior to whites on verbal tests.   They score particularly strongly  on spatial tests.  These differences in the quality of racial IQs fit neatly into the differences listed by Ruston and to work such as Freedman’s. The inferior verbal ability of Asians fits with the idea of reduced sociability.  The greater aptitude on non-verbal tests could be plausibly be interpreted as meaning that the Asian mind is adapted to solving what I would call bounded problems, that is, problems which have objective boundaries such as how do we build this canal?  rather than problems without such boundaries such as what is the good? and what is art?

The limitations of the Chinese intellect can be seen in their adherence to an ideographic form of writing.  If one set a genius and a dullard the task of developing a system of writing, the genius would come up with an alphabetical system and the dullard some form of pictorial representation.  The genius would produce the alphabetical system because he would see beyond the obvious and immediate and eschew the literal representation of a thing or idea,   while the dullard would see only the obvious and immediate way of representing a thing or idea. The genius would go for the less obvious because he would see that it was both more economical and powerful a means of representation because it required only a small number of signs to express  infinity of things and ideas. The dullard would merely see a need to keep on adding to the number of  signs.

Of course the Chinese went far beyond crude pictograms which each literally depicted something, but by retaining   a pictorial system in which each thing or idea had to be represented by a particular sign or group of signs they retained the problems associated with a non-alphabetical system, namely its lack of economy and flexibility, there being several thousand characters associated with   written Chinese.   The sheer number of characters makes the learning of written Chinese a monumental task, especially for those learning the written language as an adult. Many, probably the large majority, of foreigners who speak Chinese cannot read and/or write it.  Nor is this purely a non-Asian trait.  When the Chinese communists attempted to create a literate China in the 1950s they found that many pupils simply were not up to the task – there was a spate of suicides at the time amongst those being forced to learn to read and write Chinese.  The Chinese met this difficulty by introducing a system of 1,000 simplified characters and a 25 letter Roman alphabet was introduced into Chinese primary schools in 1957 to help with pronunciation.

Why did the major representatives of the group with the highest IQ not only start down the dullard’s path with a written language but continues on that path today despite its very obvious disadvantages? Perhaps the answer lies in their IQ and other psychometrically measurable traits.   If Asians have minds which are orientated toward the visual, perhaps it is natural to prefer a  pictorial system of writing. Nonetheless it is strange that such an obviously cumbersome system  should have been retained for so long by the Chinese – the racially similar Koreans adopted an  alphabetical system of writing in the 15th Century.  Of course, literacy in China was very restricted and it  may have been retained simply because it was the system known to the elite (who were its prime users) and cultural inertia  became the controlling force.  It also had the advantage for the elite of naturally  restricting literacy,  because of the  considerable mental demands the written language makes on the individual when they are learning it.  However, such an advantage in the past is a positive disadvantage today and has been since the Chinese first had to compete with modern advanced societies.

We have the experience of  more than a century of  industrialisation and Westernisation  in Japan and several generations of  such behaviour in South Korea and Taiwan. China has  gone down the industrialising road  intermittently for over a century and full-bloodedly  for   the past quarter century. These societies have  had the example  of the white experience of industrialisation, science  and general cultural heritage  before them.   Despite  this and whatever their economic success,  and that  is patchy vide Japan‘s post-1980s stagnation and the oceanic gulf between coastal city China and the vast Chinese interior,  compared with white societies  there  has been in Asian societies  since their opening up to the West  remarkably little  evidence of   fundamental scientific discovery  or  technological innovation  which goes beyond the adaptation of what has been invented or discovered elsewhere.  Nor, despite the very large numbers of Asians living in  advanced white majority societies, can one find  front-rank  scientists or technologists  in proportion to their proportion to the population, a surprising fact when Asian  academic achievement and business  involvement is on average higher than that of whites (anyone who doubts Asian under-representation in this area  should try identifying Asians living in white majority societies who fit the description of  front-rank scientists and technologists).

The willingness to imitate  white  societies extends  to culture. The Japanese in particular are  famous for aping  both high and low white culture, from Beethoven to the Beatles. Asian Harry Potter   fans are amongst the most frenzied in the world.  The architecture of whites  is copied enthusiastically and extensively and is accompanied by a  widespread willingness to destroy  indigenous  architecture, the white  concern for giving a special value to the old and preserving being weak in Asian majority societies.   An equivalent mass  response to Asian culture simply does not exist in  white societies – the  most that can be found are periodic outbreaks of  the use of  oriental  art  and motifs  by  white designers. This willingness to imitate might seem odd in view of  the traditionally  static cultural nature of  Asian societies.  It might be ascribed to the feelings of inferiority which Asian societies felt  when faced with the power of industrialised societies and  at least in China’s case, a sense of  humiliation because of  past white quasi-colonial involvement in China. If this explanation is believed  Asians copy white behaviour because they are proving to themselves that they are not inferior to  white society by emulating what white societies have achieved. However, that shows a  strange lack of ambition. Why not aspire to do something beyond what whites have done?  (Many Chinese  would  say they  are industrialising  and modernising  generally  now simply because they were held back in the past by  white control and manipulation of  their societies, however difficult that is to fit with the facts that foreign  influence over China effectively ended in 1949 and their general failure to advance before Western meddling began in the 19^th century).

An alternative explanation is that Asians imitate so readily  because it is natural for them to do so because their general personality traits lead them to do it. Or rather, it is natural for them to imitate in  certain aspects of life but not others.  Where  Asians  do not show such an appetite for imitation is in social structures . The Japanese and South Koreans may have formally adopted systems of elective government  from white examples, but within these  the traditional social relations  remain – practices are accepted which in the West would be considered straight forward bribery of voters or undue influence over them, for example “clan” loyalties. Or take the rule of law. In Japan, supposedly the most Westernised of Asian societies, hardly anyone who is brought to trial for a criminal offence is acquitted, a nonsense for any meaningful system of justice  As for China, uniquely amongst  Communist  countries,  the Communist elite have managed to retain  control whilst allowing capitalism  but eschewing democratisation or the idea of the law being above manipulation by the state.

Why do Asians imitate in some  ways but not others?  I suspect that the answer rests  on what is  the elite  view of society. Traditionally, the Chinese elite were always contemptuous of other peoples,  routinely treating them as subordinate peoples   who owed tribute to the Emperor (Lord Macartney‘s. gifts to the Emperor in 1794  were described as tribute).  Macartney,   who visited China before white interference in the country ,  constantly referred to the fact that  the Chinese  had what we would now describe as a  monstrous superiority complex and that when presented  with  products of the early Industrial Revolution,  the equivalent of which were unknown in China,  they frequently refused to show any  overt interest in them.  Macartney left China having failed to gain what he had been charged with obtaining, namely, the right  of British merchants to trade in China.

A similar refusal to  engage with white societies  can be found in Japan, which after some experience of  white merchants and priests, took the dramatic step of sealing off Japan from all but the most  limited European  contact for three centuries until the American Commodore Perry  forced trade with the white world upon them in 1853.

Once Japan had  engagement with the West  forced upon them a new elite ideology emerged which saw imitation of  certain  aspects of white society as the way to compete with those societies.  This new elite ideology  was accepted by the mass of  their population  with astonishing readiness  bearing in mind the previous refusal to engage with outsiders (there was even a proposal in the 1870s for English to replace Japanese as the language of Japan.) Why did this happen?   Most probably because the general personality profile of Asians  makes them unusually susceptible to authority.  Imitation of  white social relationships did not occur so readily  because such relationships are themselves  the product of innate personality traits . (It is worth bearing in mind that Japan decided to modernise without being quasi-colonised in the fashion of China.)

In summary, despite their higher average IQ, Asians have probably failed to become the culturally dominant race because  their innate personality traits work against them. They are too passive, too unquestioning, too lacking in initiative. The shape of their IQ with higher non-verbal scores and lower verbal scores may be wholly or partially the cause of these personality traits or, conversely, the shape of the IQ is simply an expression of the personality traits.  Other biological traits such as low testosterone levels may also promote such behaviour.

25. Why have whites dominated?

Plausibly, whites have been the culturally dominant race – in the sense of  creating the most sophisticated societies to date –  because they  marry a high average IQ with a superior verbal ability to that of Asians.  This means they can both handle the IQ demands of an advanced sophisticated society and have sufficient sociability to create structures which extend the group loyalty and sense of oneness beyond the family or tribe  without resorting to unashamed   authoritarian control,   for example civil society and representative government.   They display strong traits of initiative, imagination  and intellectual curiosity, traits which may be linked to their relatively high sociability, a behaviour which encourages emulation and competition between and within the sexes. Other biological traits such as testosterone levels somewhere  between blacks and Asians may also promote such behaviour.

There  is evidence that enhanced traits of individuality and imagination go back to the beginnings of modern European man. The vast majority of extant cave paintings in the world are found in Europe, especially  in the  west of the continent. (The  cave art of the Palaeolithic and  the finely  honed flint tools of the later Stone Age, whose workmanship goes far beyond the  demands of the demands of simple utility, arguably represent a higher state of development than the 19^th Century Tasmanians).

The great ancient white civilisations  which arose around the Mediterranean, those of Greece and Rome, show an immense fertility of  mind. It is here that we first find evidence of analytical  thought as a conscious pursuit.   Their  art is both extensive and  varied and subject to fashion, that is, it changes regularly over time. That art, both visual and literary,  is concerned  with either homo sapiens or gods who share human qualities, evidence of a similar mentality to that which drove the Renaissance.  In terms of  advanced social organisation, the Greeks created  the idea of direct democracy  and the Romans incorporated  democratic aspects into the first great European political entity.

These traits continued throughout the mediaeval European world,  even  though they were  gradually placed ever more firmly  in the constraining context of Christianity. Illuminated European manuscripts often   reveal a lively irreverence and interest in the  profane world  in their illustrations,  monarchs, great nobles and religious orders vied with one another to produce ever more magnificently egotistical  material statements in the form of  gorgeous  illuminated manuscripts,  great  castles and religious buildings,  parliaments  were  created in many kingdoms.  Intellectuals such as Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Peter Abelard and William of Occam  wrestled with the implications of existence. Then came the  Renaissance which  saw the qualities of individuality and imagination given full rein, aided by the  advance of the vernacular throughout Europe and,  most importantly, printing.   From that point onwards the  general cultural advance of Europe  has never faltered and has produced science,  high technology, representative government  and an ever changing kaleidoscope  of artistic endeavour.  These were the building blocks of modernity.

The acceptance of Christianity  within Europe  is interesting in itself  for the religion embodies the notion  of individualism, both in the personification of God and the individual’s relationship  with God.  Moreover,  the placing of God in human form  in the person of Christ echoes  the  humanising of  the Greek and Roman gods.  Old wine in new bottles.

26. Blacks: the odd man out

Blacks  occupy  a  special place in the  relationship  between  IQ  and social  organisation for two reasons:  they have the lowest average  IQ and   the difference in IQ distribution between them and the other  two broad  racial  groups (whites and Asians) is much greater  than  it  is between  whites  and Asians, assuming the latter gap exists.

Many  have  difficulty accepting the average black African  IQ  of  70. Professor  J  Phillipe Rushton of the  University  of  Western  Ontario addressed  this  disbelief  in  an  intriguing  article  for  VDARE.COM  ‘Solving  The African IQ Conundrum :  “Winning Personality”  Masks  Low Scores'(http://www.vdare.com/asp/printPage.asp?url=):”I know that the figure  is  not  a fluke….  because for the last  six  years  I  have collected  African IQ data on hundreds of students at  the  prestigious University  of  the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg,  South  Africa.  The average IQ for these African students turns out to be 84. Assuming they score  15 points above the general average,  as university students  of any  group typically do,  then an average African IQ of 70  is  implied exactly what the direct measurements show.”

Rushton  goes on to use the out-of-academic-fashion concept  of  mental age: “An IQ of 70 in adults…is equivalent to a mental age of about 11 years.  This would make the normal range of mental ages found in Africa to  be from less than 9 years to almost 14 years.”  (The average IQ  of whites is 100 which means their normal range of mental ages is 14 to 18 years.)

But not all low IQs are equal according to Prof Rushton, viz:  “An IQ of 70 suggests mental retardation: at least  it  would  in the White populations of  Europe,  North  America, Australia and New Zealand. There it would frequently  be associated with dysfunctional social behaviour and visible deficiencies.

“This is because, as Arthur Jensen pointed out in his 1998 book,  The g Factor,  retardation in Whites is often the result of a single gene  or chromosomal  anomaly,  which  also causes  physical  abnormalities  and mechanical deficiencies effecting motor or speech skills. But, clearly, these  abnormalities and deficiencies are not seen in the bulk  of  the black population of Sub-Saharan Africa.”

As for measured personality traits Rushton  says “They  are  outgoing,   talkative,  sociable,   warm,   and   friendly. Psychometrically  speaking,   they  score  high  on  the   Extraversion personality  dimension.  They  are also much  less  anxious,  shy,  and fearful  than Whites  they are low in the Neuroticism  dimension.  This combination  of  high  Extraversion and low Neuroticism  results  in  a socially dominant personality profile. ”  This contrasts with the  more introverted behaviour of whites and the even more introverted behaviour of Asians.

Rushton also cites studies which show that blacks

– rated  themselves as more attractive than did whites.

rated  themselves higher in reading,  science  and  social  studies  than  whites ,  although  they knew  their  academic  performance was lower than whites.

Put together the mental age of 9 to 14 and the psychometric traits listed above and much is explained. In any society/, whether they are in the minority or majority,  black  adult behaviour , and especially black adult male behaviour,  commonly mimics what one would expect  from children  varying from the pre-pubescent to the  early adolescent:  high  self-esteem regardless  of  the  objective  facts  of their lives, a lack of self-consciousness, considerable vocalisation, a  propensity to noisy display generally,  a love of the  gaudy,   a  poor ability to handle abstract  reasoning, a failure to understand the consequences of actions, a weak sense of personal responsibility and a general sense of living in the moment.

White bias ? Well, apart from the objective evidence of  traits such as a disproportionate tendency to desert the mothers of their children, a lack of sexual continence resulting in the fathering of children with multiple mothers  and disproportionate criminality (The Bell Curve documents these traits in great detail)  it is possible to point to such things as  the content of rap music (the child’s wish to shock) and   the widespread addiction to  “bling” (the child‘s wish for display).  Nor is such behaviour the preserve of low status blacks but is common amongst high status blacks – see appendix C.

Take one trait, the propensity  for violence.  Blacks display this  to a high degree  whether  they are in the majority or the minority.  Sub-Saharan Africa since decolonisation is littered  with massacres,  ranging from the one million Hutus killed in  Rwanda to less organised slaughter in places such as the Congo and Sierra Leone.  In advanced states such as the USA  the black involvement in homicide, as both killer and victim,  is remarkable, viz:

“Around 8,000 of nearly 16,500 murder victims in 2005, or 49 percent, wereblack Americans, according to the report released by the statistics bureauof the Department of Justice.”. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070809202217.9us2orhu&show_article=1

Most of the killings of blacks were by blacks. The fact that blacks are so willing to kill other blacks whether or not they are in the majority or minority points to a general propensity for violence rather than one enhanced by white racism towards blacks or black racism towards whites.

The British experience is similar to the that of  the US.  In Britain it is  impossible to get  comprehensive  statistics on crimes by race – I have made strenuous efforts to do so using the British Freedom of Information Act but  without success. The next best thing is  personal research  using  the mainstream media. I  did  this for two years as a by product of  a column  entitled The Joy of Diversity which I wrote  for  the magazine Right Now! The column catalogued the immense ethnic mayhem  which  has become part of British life. To compile it I kept cuttings  of ethnic  misbehaviour and compared it with another file of  white crimes of  the same type.  The proportion of  murders, serious assaults and rapes, especially gang rapes, which  were committed by blacks was comically high. In the case of gang rapes of a victim of a different race to the rapists,  the rapists were almost always black –  I was unable to find a single instance of white gang  rape of a black victim. Shootings were overwhelmingly a black crime.

Behavioural  differences between blacks,  whites and Asians  have  been objectively measured. Prof  Rushton writes:  “Temperamental differences, measured  objectively by activity recorders attached to arms and  legs, show  up in babies.  African babies are more active sooner and  develop earlier than White babies who, in turn, are more active than East Asian babies.  Motor  behaviour  is  a  highly  stable  individual  difference variable.  Even among Whites,  activity level measured during free play shows highly significant negative correlations with IQ: more restrained children average higher intellects.”

There is nothing new about such ideas. Francis Galton mused about racial behavioural differences in the nineteenth century, while over a quarter of a century ago  Edward Wilson reported on studies by D G Freedman (1974,  1979)  on  new born   infants  which  “demonstrated  marked   racial   differences   in locomotion,  posture,  muscular tone and emotional response of  newborn infants  that cannot reasonably be explained as the result of  training or  even conditioning within the womb.  Chinese-American newborns,  for example, tend to be less changeable, less easily perturbed by noise and movement,  better  able to adjust to new stimuli  and  discomfort,  and quicker  to  calm  themselves than  Caucasian-American  infants.”  P274 Sociobiology;  Abridged version.

The fact that black babies develop more rapidly than whites and whites more  rapidly than Asians  probably explains why black children often appear advanced  when they are young and then seem to regress in relationship to whites and Asians as they get older.  They are probably not regressing but rather whites and Asians are attaining their full development at a later stage. An analogy can be made with the development of Man’s  nearest relative, the chimpanzee. A chimpanzee infant is  advanced compared with a human infant in the early stages of  their lives but soon falls back. The difference in racial development may be the consequence of the differing  average  brain sizes in blacks, whites and Asians (the larger the brain, the longer it takes to develop after birth), although there could be more subtle structural differences  which play a part.

Fluency of speech is particularly important for Prof Rushton because  he believes it misleads non-whites to overestimate black intelligence. He emphatically  concludes “…the  greater talkativeness of Blacks does not indicate brightness,  it often masks a low ability to reason  abstractly.”   I would agree with this.  Fluency  is  no guide to intelligence in itself because people can be fluent while saying little of significance. More sophisticated  speech can be produced  by those  of  no great  intellect simply by creating  a catalogue of  learned phrases and speeches in much the same way  that  a comedian will build up a library of jokes in their  memory –   politicians are the prime example of this.  It is also true that someone who  takes the   verbal lead,  especially in circumstances where people  are  often inhibited,   will  tend to influence  others simply because they  speak confidently when others do not.  (It  is  possible  to get some idea of a person’s  IQ  if  their speech   is analysed  properly.  The indicators of a decent IQ  will  be those  verbal behaviours which replicate the type of  mental  exercises found  in IQ tests,  for example,   the ability to follow or develop  a logical  train  of thought,  the ability to  spot  contradictions,  the ability  to  understand analogies and their strength or  weakness,  the competent    use   of  metaphor,   the  use  of  clever   puns   arising spontaneously,  the ability to understand and explain  complex  matters and   the ability to take new data and manipulate it intelligently  and rapidly.  In a social situation  the  presence or absence of such qualities will normally be missed, hence the over-estimate of black mental capacity).

In summary, blacks  find it difficult to live in high IQ societies where they are a minority because (1) having a low IQ in itself makes living in such a society difficult, (2) their inferior IQ distribution means that there are few members of their own racial group with respectable IQs to assist those with lower IQs and (3) their racial difference sets them apart from the majority high IQ population and consequently they cannot gain the support they require to live in a high IQ society from the majority high IQ population.

Where they are in the majority their natural inclinations and limitations drive them towards behaviour which is incompatible with a sophisticated society.

Their weaker IQ distribution and the “shape” of their IQ – relatively strong on verbal questions, relatively weak on non verbal questions – is such as to promote childlike behaviour, behaviour which is amplified by adult physicality and experience.   Other biological differences such as high testosterone levels may also amplify their naturally   immature behaviour .

When blacks live in advanced societies their innate tendency to behave in a manner which is, in the terms of an advanced society, anti-social, is amplified by their inability to compete with the higher IQ race(s) in the society.

27. A dysgenic future?

Since Hitler, unapologetic eugenics has  been  beyond the Pale in mainstream political and  academic discourse, although it chunters along unnamed in abortions for the genetically unfit and raises its  head occasionally in books such as The Bell Curve which explores the effects of differential breeding, mainly  in the USA,  and concludes that there is a risk  of a serious dysgenic  effect on national IQs.

The dysgenic effects feared by the Eugenics movement in white societies  in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were that much higher breeding rates of the less able (in practice defined as the poor) would bring about the degradation of the human stock of nations. This was a  false fear in the context of the racial make up of  white societies of the time because there is   a phenomenon known as reversion to the norm. This means that  higher IQ parents will tend to have children with lower IQs than their own, while lower IQ parents, i.e., those below the mean, will  tend to have children with IQs higher than those of the parents. The effect of this would be to roughly maintain the distribution of IQ in a population. Thus, if the poor, less able, call them what you will,  in  a population breed more freely than the more able, the long-term loss of intellectual resources in a population should be slight going on non-existent.  However, there is a nasty fly in the ointment: each racial group maintains its own IQ distribution regardless of where a particular population lives – the Japanese in America have the same IQ distribution as Japanese in Japan, blacks in Jamaica a similar distribution to those of sub-Saharan blacks.  Hence, a low IQ racial group  will remain trapped in its inferior IQ distribution Moreover, even with inter-racial breeding the average IQ  will still be depressed to a degree when people from lower IQ racial groups breed with a higher IQ group.

If a low IQ minority increases through immigration or breeding  at a faster rate than the high IQ majority three effects will be felt: (1) the intellectual resources of the country will decline, (2) an ever more substantial part of the  resources of the high IQ majority will have to be devoted to containing the effects of the low IQ minority and (3) there will be a tendency for members of the high IQ majority to emigrate to countries where there is either a smaller low IQ minority or the natural resources (especially land) of the country are greater, the consequence being to further reduce the intellectual resources of the country they are leaving. Increasing white flight from Britain in the first decade of the 21st century is a  good example of this trait.

If the  aggregate level of intelligence is what matters to the maintenance of  a sophisticated society,  there must be a point at which the society cannot be sustained  if the aggregate IQ is reduced below whatever is the  minimum level. This  is the danger which faces  advanced countries  which have experienced  and are experiencing large-scale immigration of low IQ races.

The different personality traits of blacks, whites and Asians may mean that the efficiency of a society composed of two or more of the races would be less than that of one composed of only one the race.  One race may perform better in a racially homogenous society than another, for example, perhaps it is more important for blacks to be in a homogenous society than whites or Asians because the IQ difference is simply too great for blacks to operate efficiently in a high IQ society.  Perhaps Asians with their reduced sociability have a greater need for formal order and find it difficult to integrate into   the comparatively free wheeling societies of whites,   although their superior  IQ  allows  them  to find  strategies  to  live  within  such societies without integration.    It may be that the marrying of   relatively high   sociability and high average IQ amongst whites means that they are best able of the three major racial groups to function with large minorities of the other racial groups within their society because the social forms they naturally create are more flexible than the societies created by blacks and Asians.   However, even if true, that would not mean that a mixed society is beneficial to whites, merely those whites are better able to accommodate minorities   and mitigate their ill effects.   (It is worth noting that the economic, political and cultural dominance of whites over the past 500 years has been accomplished by societies which enjoyed a very large degree of racial homogeneity).

Where one of the groups  in a population is much smaller than the other the larger will naturally dominate,  especially in public matters such as politics.  But where neither can naturally dominate how will things such as the political system  be determined?   Because of innate personality biases one racial group may naturally favour representative government, the other some form of authoritarian government. There is no obvious way of deciding the matter short of violence.

What is certain is that racially mixed societies will be less cohesive than racially homogenous ones.  The reason is obvious:   the natural sense of “tribal” solidarity is fractured.  People feel at best less natural sympathy with other racial groups and at worst a suspicion and antipathy to them.  Of course, it is not only racial difference which creates such a situation for ethnic differences, whether historical or cultural, can have a strong divisive quality.  But there is a fundamental difference between cultural and biological difference: the former is susceptible to  change  on a human time scale:, the latter is  not.  An immigrant of the same racial type as the majority population of the receiving country but of a different ethnicity  can have children who can  be assimilated  within a  generation  to the point where they are indistinguishable from the native majority. An immigrant of a different racial type  can remain set apart from  the receiving country’s majority population  indefinitely  if they  and their descendents  retain their racial type by breeding with others of the same race.

Ethnic solidarity is essential to the coherence and survival of a population.  In his “On Genetic Interests”, Frank Salter concludes “Territory is a collective fundamental good for  harmonising   familial and ethnic genetic interests and securing long-term genetic continuity”. This goes to the heart of ethnic solidarity and survival. This dictum applies to a large degree even where a  population does not have formal control of the territory because numerical dominance on the ground is nine parts of the biological law. Britain  provides a first rate example with the Welsh and Scots maintaining de facto territorial control of their territory.

The societies most at risk at present are white societies because it is they which have experienced and are continuing to experience mass immigration of racial groups which differ from their own majority populations.  Whites are also  displaying low fertility rates, most below replacement level,  while immigrant groups are generally  breeding  above replacement level, often well above replacement level.

Why  are whites showing such a disinclination to breed?  In part it is selfishness. In pre-modern  societies (including many still extant) Man  has frequently acted to restrict population at   the level of the individual,   particularly    by infanticide, a very widespread behaviour throughout history. It is not that great a leap in human behaviour for individuals to move from “I must kill this baby because I do not have the resources to raise it” or “to  try  to  raise  the child  will lessen the  chances  of  my  other children” to “I will not have a child because to do so will lessen my own chances of satisfying my own desires”.

This mentality is bolstered by any political ideology which exalts the individual and diminishes the coherence and importance of the ethnic group, whether that is a band, tribe or a nation. Liberal Internationalism is such a creed, which adds to overt individualist propaganda the effects of mass immigration and so-called free trade and free markets, all of   which attack the economic and territorial security of nations.  This increases the insecurity of  whites who breed  less freely  as a consequence.

But the position is more complex than simple ideology. Even in the more prosperous developing countries – where attitudes to breeding are still traditional – demographics are shifting towards the advanced country distribution. Clearly, increased prosperity and security is an important driver of reproductive change.  Longer  life spans also probably have an effect,  although exactly what is difficult to assess – if I had to venture a guess the effect would be that the longer the life the less feeling of urgency in the individual to breed.

There is also the question of what constitutes  genetic inheritance from a human standpoint – note I say from the human standpoint not what genetics  may tell us.  Because sexually reproducing organisms halve their genetic transfer every generation (more or less), the genetic inheritance  of  any  individual  is  soon diffused  to  the  point  of practical non-existence within the context of the ethnic group, although a significant   genetic similarity between members of an ethnic group and more broadly within a racial group continues.  Human beings unlike animals can be aware of this. Such people breed regardless of this fact and tend to favour to others genetically related to them tenuously if at all by blood, such as in-laws and  great grandchildren or grand nieces and, of course,  if the individual is not aware of the rapid genetic dilution he or she still shows such favour to those who are not genetically close.  What matters to the individual is the continuing of the genealogical line regardless of the genetic content of the line. It is the cultural transfer which counts.  No other animal has such an imperative.

Whatever the  reason for white  demographic decline  it does raise the question of what would be the objective consequences if whites  became greatly diminished in numbers and  power in the world or even vanished as a distinct race. Judged by the history of the world to date it would in all probability remove  from the world  the race most capable of  imaginative thought and invention.  That could mean  the future development of Man  took a much narrower and more limited course.

It is also true  that whites  majority societies  have been the only ones which have  meaningfully honoured the liberal with a small “l” values  which  have ameliorated the cruelty which is a normal part of most societies.  If  white dominated  societies  ceased to exist  through whites becoming the minority in them or because they have been so fragmented  by immigration  that the values are extinguished by ethnic strife, there can be no confidence that the values  would survive at all.

28 Conclusions

The general differences between societies plausibly express   the societal differences in IQ:  the more complex the society the greater the need for IQ related problem solving; the less complex, the greater the reliance on knowledge based behaviour. That is not to say that complex societies do not rely greatly on knowledge or that the simplest society allows no room for reasoning. Rather, it is  that the balance between IQ related problem solving and knowledge is differs according to the nature of the society.

If IQ is largely innate this raises some immensely difficult  moral questions for  any society.  Take away sentiment and  the hard truth is that on rational grounds no white or Asian society would want to host a large black population because that will substantially lower the average IQ of the society, with all the problems that brings in terms of anti-social behaviour and the loss of national intellectual capacity.

To say that the IQ distribution of a race implies  nothing  at the individual level may be pedantically true but  it does not alter the fact that if  a low IQ race is present in substantial numbers most will have low IQs.  In a high IQ society that is a problem  for such individuals because there is less opportunity  to lead a normal life for the low IQ individual. There is not self-evidently “a place for everyone”.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen  provide a clear message:  some societies, and most particularly those with a predominately black population, simply do not have sufficient people with IQs high enough to sustain a modern society. There are two rational conclusions  to draw from their work.  The first is that it is pointless for advanced states to keep on trying to modernise countries with low IQ populations which   cannot sustain the sophisticated societies needed to maintain an advanced modern state and  those populations should be left to find their own level.

The second is that the only active intervention which might conceivably improve conditions in low IQ states is their  formal re-colonisation and permanent administration by the advanced states, for that at least would bring order and societies which had infrastructure which worked.

The first course of action has the difficulty of seeming cruel at worst and heartless at best.  The second is a political  non-starter because of the sacrifices those in the advanced states would have to make in terms of  money and personnel and the almost certain guerrilla resistance of at least  part  of  any  population  which was subject  to  an  attempt  at re-colonisation.

Lynn and Vanhanen’s remedy for the problem is the half-way house between decolonisation and doing nothing. They advocate transfers of wealth   and expertise from advanced high IQ societies to the IQ deficient ones.    Not only is this profoundly unlikely to be something the populations of   advanced states will tolerate for ever, but the experience of 40 years or more of vast amounts of Aid being poured into low IQ countries shows that such assistance is worse than useless because it invariably produces corrupt regimes and large Aid dependent populations.

If Lynn and Vanhanen are right, the cold reality is that there is currently no way of  radically changing the nature of  low IQ societies. Indeed, by feeding them with Aid  the donors are making matters worse because they help to increase the low IQ populations  vastly beyond  the level at which a viable society for the population could exist.   However,  low IQ populations may not be forever because even if  IQ is now substantially innate it may not be so in the future. It is probable that within the next fifty years genetic engineering, chemical manipulation, surgical alteration and cybernetics may provide humans with  the capacity to  raise the IQ of  those with low IQs. This would of course raise  immense moral questions as well as practical difficulties such as who would  provide the expertise and materials needed to change the IQ of hundreds of millions of people.

Other things being equal, the vast majority of adults would seek the highest  IQ for their child, or if the alteration could done after birth at any age, to seek the highest IQ for  themselves and  their children.   It is also true that in an society where there was any meaningful democratic expression it would be impossible for a government to deny such engineering to those who wanted it.

But it probably would not be left to the individual. If some  states positively insist on altering the IQ of  their entire populations, this would lead to fears that any country which did not follow suit would be left behind in the competitive struggle between societies. Alternatively, manipulation of IQ could be selfishly  used by elites to create a permanent advantage for themselves. Not a pretty future to contemplate.

Appendix A White men can  run

“Let’s start with the biological differences in sports, which is something almost everyone observes. Jon Entine’s recent book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It, addresses the old cliché that “White men can’t jump” (and the new one that Oriental men jump even less well). Entine shows that in sports, it is Black men and women who can sky! And yet, as the data also show, it is mainly Blacks of West African descent who excel at running over short distances, while Blacks of East African descent – from Kenya and Ethiopia – excel at marathon running over long distances. These differences between East and West Africans show that taking an average can sometimes gloss over important distinctions. Still, Blacks from both East and West Africa excel at one or another kind of running. In sports, Blacks as a group, have a genetic advantage. “ J Phillipe Rushton http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/images/jpr21-chart1.jpg

The idea that blacks are inherently more athletic than whites  (and even more so than Asians) is widely  accepted as true even in academic circles  which deal with racial difference.  People look at the finals  of  track events at the Olympics and  see a disproportionate number of  blacks, especially in the sprint events, and conclude that this correlation between race and  athletics winners proves the case for black athletic supremacy. The problem with this  conclusion is that it  is merely a correlation and a correlation which has not been subjected to rigorous examination.

There are good reasons to suspect that black athletic  advantage  does not exist.  In the late  nineteen seventies and eighties the 800 and 1500 metres events  were dominated  by whites such as Seb Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram. Their times look good today – Coe’s 800 metre record only went a few years ago.  The current Olympic 400 metres champion is  the  white man Jeremy Warriner. The 200 metres at the  Sydney Olympics was won by a white man  the Greek Kostas Kenteris. When the black Michael Johnson (arguably  the greatest track athlete of the past  half century) won the 400 metres in the Atlanta Olympics he was followed home in second place by the white Roger Black.

If whites can  compete  successfully as the people mentioned above competed , clearly whites are not genetically incapable of beating even the best black athletes. Of course,  there is still the question of whether one race is on average more naturally endowed with  athletic ability than others,  but if  there are substantial  numbers of whites who win  at the highest level and set times which blacks do not beat either at all or by much, then it is reasonable to question  whether whites are on average inherently inferior as athletes. The starting point for such questioning should be  the numbers participating in athletics in the various disciplines and their racial and class distribution.

Fifty years ago most  Olympic  track winners  were white. Then as decolonisation took place  and multiculturalism gripped  hold of  places such as the USA and Britain, more and more black athletes entered  track athletics. They began to dominate  the  sprints, then the longer distances. The question is did blacks  begin to dominate because  they were inherently superior to whites or because the number of whites  taking up track athletics was  far fewer than the number of blacks doing so?  An analysis of overall numbers is required.  I  have been unable to identify such an analysis.

Then there is the question of class. Athletics has  the reputation of  being a largely middleclass pursuit for whites in the West, while black athletes  are perceived as coming from poorer backgrounds. If these perceptions are correct,  the white athletes are being drawn from a much smaller  population. An analysis of  the class of athletes is  required. Again, no such analysis appears to exist.

During the time of the  Soviet Union those countries which came  within the European Communist bloc were concerned with winning as many medals as possible. This pushed them to concentrate on the events which were less competitive and more  susceptible to coaching because of their highly technical nature. These were the field events such as the javelin and high-jump. This further reduced the number of white athletes  potentially available to compete in track events.

Athletic scholarships  may also have a role in promoting  black  athletes, especially in the USA. Political correctness  may have caused these to be given to blacks disproportionately. An analysis of  how scholarships are  awarded, for example, are they formally or informally reserved for blacks?   Similar exercises are needed for  charities who  make awards to athletes  and for bodies which dispense taxpayer funded aid to athletes.

If a human activity becomes dominated by one  race,  ethnic group or class, there is a tendency  for those outside  whatever the group it is to cease trying to engage in the activity.  If  blacks have done  disproportionately well in  sprinting  over the past forty years,  whites will  tend to drop the idea of even trying to enter competitive sprinting.

That blacks do not all excel in the same type of  events is a pointer to a cultural rather than a genetic reason for  their disproportionate success in recent decades. The idea that blacks from the West Coast  of Africa have one advantage and blacks from the East Coast another  is rather odd bearing in mind the size of Africa and the racial diversity found there. It would make sense to say this local population group had this advantage and another that advantage if the groups were isolated  (this might be the explanation for the island of Jamaica‘s remarkable record of producing great sprinters), but  it stretches credulity to believe the entire continent below the Sahara  is divided by different types of  genetic athletic advantage, especially as it is known that there have been in historic times  large scale movements of people  who originated in West  and central Africa to Southern and Eastern Africa (the Bantu peoples).

The fact that East Africans shine in middle distance events  is plausibly  a consequence of the fact that Kenyan  government put considerable resources into promoting  middle distance running after the success of Kip Keino.  It is noteworthy that the rest of East Africa has not produced an army of  such athletes and that many of the outstanding runners of the past ten years have not be East Africans but north Africans who are racially very different.

Even the claim that most top black sprinters  come from West Africa is debatable. Slaves were taken from deep into the heart  of Africa. Most of the black top sprinters come from the USA or the Caribbean.  Many have a white admixture. Very few West Coast Africans are top sprinters, despite large numbers of West Coast Africans  who have emigrated to the West.

The fact that many top “black” athletes are of mixed white/black parentage is telling. Why should that be if blacks have an innate athletic advantage?  Surely  the less white blood the better?

Finally, there is the  question of drugs. Many sprinters have tested  positive for drugs  in the past thirty years. Most of those have been black,  an unsurprising fact because most  top sprinters  have been black during that period. Many others have provided tests which suggested drug use without being sufficiently high to fail a drug test.

The physiques  of most black sprinters  in the past twenty years in particular have looked suspiciously like  those of bodybuilders, a group which is notorious  for using drugs such as steroids. Unless the truth about drug use in the period of black sprinting ascendancy  is known, and it probably never will be,  it is difficult to assess exactly what is the natural athletic ability of a runner.

Appendix B Digital technology

Technological  change  has been  making  increasingly  severe   demands  on  human beings for around 300 years. There  was change before then of course, but it was slow and most people   could live their lives without  having to adapt to radically   new ways of living.

Things  began to speed up as the Industrial Revolution began and an argument can be made that the century  1815 and 1914  saw  more radical technological  qualitative  change than any generation before or since. But  that  change  was the difference between living in  a  still  largely  pre-industrial society (in 1815) and  an  industrial     society  in its  early middle age (in 1914).  Moreover,  the  change  did  not actually require the vast  majority  of  the  population to master complicated machines at their work,  let  alone in their own homes.

In  1914 the most complicated machine most people had to operate was probably the telephone and vast swathes  of the population would not even have had to go that far into  the  world  of technology. Not only that, because  machines  then were either mechanical or part mechanical,  i.e.,  not   electronic, just looking at the way a machine was made  often allowed the intelligent  observer to have a fair guess at how  it  worked and to see  what had  gone  wrong  if it malfunctioned.  Even  work-related machines which required skilled operators, such as  machine  lathes,  were not   fundamentally difficult to understand, although the dexterity  required to operate them often took time to acquire.

Things remained essentially  the same until  the advent of personal computers and the widespread use of digital technology.  Machines became   more and more predominant in advanced societies but they were   not,   in  most  instances,  complicated  to  use. This  was  particularly  true  of those machines used in  private  life.  Telephones just required the user  to dial;  washing machines  had  a  start  button and nothing else; televisions  and radios  simply needed switching  on;  cars were simply  designed to travel. Then came digital technology.

Computers are like no other machine ever invented. They have  a  unique combination of  an unparalleled public and  private   use  and   a  central importance to  economic  activity and public  administration.   The  potential  penalties  for  the   failure  of these machines  are vastly greater than  for  any   other  piece  of  technology.   Not  only  can  an  immediate   application  of a computer be ended,  as can happen with  all  machines,  but  computer users also  risk  losing  networking  capacity  and, if they have not useable backed up copies  of   their computer data, the loss of their entire records and conceivably the loss of the means to continue their business. Computer users are also vulnerable to outside sabotage though hacking  and viruses.   No other machine has ever  exposed a society to such risks through its ubiquity and vulnerability to outside influences.

These machines are also vastly more demanding of time than   any  other  machine  ever  used  by  the   general   public. To  master computers to the  degree where a person does not lie helplessly in the hands of  experts  is a  demanding and continuing   task.   It is unlikely that many could or would manage it  without making  computers their  profession.   In fact,   even   supposed  computer  professionals   are   only   knowledgeable in   their  specialist  areas:   a   hardware  specialist has no deep knowledge of software and vice versa, while programmers long ago lost any detailed understanding of an entire program. It is also true that many self described IT experts are anything but. They get by with a small amount of IT knowledge  because of the general level of ignorance amongst the general public and the fact that most problems can be overcome by re-booting or by  reinstalling programs.

The computer age  is a stunningly  recent   phenomenon.  Most people even in the West   would  not  have   used  a  computer before 1985.  Probably a majority  had  not   done  so by 1990.  By the end of the 1980s  the nearest  most   would have got to a computer  would probably have been   bank  ATM  machines.  The internet was esoteric and laborious,  the   web barely more than a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye.   Even    in  the  world  of  employment  computers  were  still   used   sparingly.

As  with  computers actually called computers,  so with the other machines which  cause much  grief now.   The mobile phone was  a status symbol  and   the size of a brick, while  landline phones were still phones   boringly   restricted   to   simply   phoning   rather   than    mini-computers with a tendency to bemuse.   Microwaves had  a  simple   choice  of power.  Refrigerators did  not  offer  to  remind  you  of  what needed to be ordered.  TVs   tended  to  simply work when switched on.

In  the past 15 years all this has dramatically changed.   We  are in  a world in which computers are absolutely integral   to  business and public administration and they are  now  the  norm rather than the exception in homes.  For most people, it  is  literally impossible to escape them.   Worse,  they  have  become ever more complex to use and invade ever  more  of our lives as microprocessors are inserted  into  the most unlikely things such as clothes.  Machines  generally   are more demanding. To use This has profound implications for  people  both in  high IQ and low IQ societies.

Even to use computers at a low level  of expertise, such as using a word processor to its  full capacity and  sending email  efficiently , requires  a degree of concentration and  knowledge with which  a substantial minority are uneasy.  More demanding activities such as  spreadsheet  use  or the construction of a database  are inaccessible to the majority. Most  people  have only a  minimal knowledge of the  capacities of their operating system . This lack of expertise  afflicts the young as well as the old, which suggests that this is going to be a permanent  problem because the young have grown up with computers.

Of  the commonly used programmes  search engines  are particularly interesting from the point of view of IQ. Everyone  who uses a computer can use a search engine at some level, but  the skill with which they use search engines varies massively.  This is unsurprising because the search engine is  the  commonly used program which most calls upon IQ related abilities.  It relies not simply on knowledge but  also  problem solving. To perform a function in a word processor  requires the user  to apply inert knowledge, go to this menu, use this function etc. To use a search engine efficiently for anything but a simple search for a certain website  requires the ability to formulate questions  in the most pertinent way.  I never ceased to be amazed how at many people  use search engines ineptly, often comically so. I should not be amazed of course because the ability to do so is IQ dependent.

The implications for those with a low IQ are these: the lower the IQ, the more the person will struggle in an advanced society because the use of computers is increasingly inescapable.  In a high IQ society the low IQ individual will struggle but the society  as a whole will  manage. In a low IQ society there will simply not be the IQ firepower to sustain a society based on digital technology.  In a high IQ society  the low IQ part of the population will be left increasingly in a technological no man’s land, unable to competently use the technology but forced to use it simply to live.

The constant learning process

Personal  computing  began in the mid  seventies. A  person  starting then would have had to learn the BASIC  programming language.   By the early eighties they would have been using DOS. By 1990s Windows   expertise  was  necessary.   Since  1990  successive   editions  of  Windows  have  varied  considerably  from   the  previous version requiring further learning.

What  goes for  operating systems applies also to most  other programs,   which   when  they  are   upgraded   often   bear    surprisingly little  resemblance to the  version  prior  to  them.  Certainly,  if one moves from an old   program   to  a version  which has been uprated twice, the chances are  that knowledge  of the original program will be of little use  in  understanding the new one.

Apart from the effort needed to constantly learn new programs  and to attend to such things as installations of software and hardware, the other great drawback of computers is the amount of time which can be spent on maintenance.  It is all too easy to find a  day  or  two  slip by just sorting out a single relatively  simple  computer problem or learning how to use a new program.

The nature of what is to be learned

The burden  of learning is   especially heavy because of  the  nature of that which is to be learned. This  is what might be termed   dead information.   There is no  intrinsic  interest in what is to be learned. It is merely a means to an end.  To operate  a program all that is needed is a knowledge of   the  menus  and  function keys.   That is precisely  the  type  of   information  which  is least palatable to  the  normal  human  mind.  Hence,  it is the least easy to learn for most people.    The  computer is in effect forcing human beings to  act  like  computers, something utterly alien to them.

Intelligence  is  of  little  use on its own.  Computers  are  information   driven  machines.  Put the most intelligent man in the world before a   computer  and  he  will  be utterly helpless  if  he  has  no  computer  experience.  Even  if the  man  has  some  computer   experience,  he will be as incapable of using  a completely   unfamiliar type of program as the dullard.

The substitution of function for intellect

That  computers are function rather than intelligence  driven  is  objectively  demonstrated  by the fact that all  of  what   might be called the administrative  operations of a  computer – file management,  loading of programs etc –  could be  done by a computer program.

When I watch the young using computers,  obvious or disguised in the shape of phones and the like,  I get a feeling of deep  unease.  They  so  obediently pull down  menus  and    select   options  that I wonder at the difference between them  and  a  robot.  The  machine is driving the human being at  least  as   much  as  the  human  being is  driving  the  machine;  brute  machine functionality is replacing intellect.

There  is  only so much any human being can  learn,  both  in terms  of time and mental impetus.  If increasing amounts  of  both are required by computers simply to operate them,  where  will that leave intellectual development?    Worse,  will the  ability  to  operate  machines become  to  be seem as the  most  important activity of  human beings?

The myth of youthful expertise

It  is true that those who have grown up with  computers  are   more  comfortable  with the machines than those who  came  to them in adult life – the latter still comprise, more than 50 per cent of the population. It is worth noting.   However,  the idea  that  the young  generally  have any  substantial understanding of  computers is dubious going on simply wrong. A recent survey  by the global market-research company Synovate, reported:

“We found that people tended to fit into one of three categories: 27 per cent are what we call ‘cybernauts’ – people who like to be ahead of the game in terms of technology. However, the majority, 53 per cent, are ‘average Joes’. They don’t love technology per se, but view it as a facilitator – it helps them to communicate or entertain themselves. They tend to use it in quite a functional way, such as emailing, banking or shopping online. Then there are 20 per cent who we describe as ‘digital dissidents’, meaning they actively dislike using technology and avoid it wherever possible.” Daily Telegraph 30 6 2007  The myth of the MySpace generation.

The  young know how to use the internet and web,  can work  a  word processor and  use programs which really interest  them.  But  let  their   computer develop  a  fault   which  renders Windows  unstable or unusable or  a piece of hardware  fails,  and  they are,  in most cases,  as helpless  the  generations which did not grow up with computers.

What  the young do have which  older people do not  have   is group  knowledge.  A schoolchild of today can call  on  the computer  knowledge of their peer group and the assistance of   teachers.  Those  a little older who are in work  still  have   their  peer  group  to  help them   if  they  get  stuck.  In  addition,  if they work for a large employer they can call on the  expertise  of the employer’s IT  department  or  service contractors.

Computers  have only been in schools since the mid  eighties.  Anyone over the age of forty (arguably,  over the age of  35)   will  not  have  a  peer group on  whom  they  can  call  for  assistance  with  computers  (and  other  machines)   because   almost  all  of  those  they  know  well  will  be  of  their approximate  age  – few people have  close  friendships  with  those who are  much younger than themselves – and the  people   who  are  their age will have little computer  experience  or knowledge.   The  best they can hope for is  assistance  from  their children if they have any,  and then it is pot luck  as   to how computer competent those children are and how  willing  they  are  to help the parent.   If an older  person  has  no  compliant computer literate children and  does not work for a   large employer,  he or she will  be utterly isolated from the   knowledge   needed   to  deal  with even   basic computer developments.

The  science  fiction writer Arthur C Clarke  pointed  out  a  good few years ago that there comes  a point with  technology  when it became indistinguishable from magic for all but the initiates. The dangers of that are obvious: for that which is not generally understood  gives the few who do understand a power over those who do not.  That potentially gives private corporations and governments a great stick with which to beat   their  customers  and citizens into  submission,  either  for  profit or political power.

Where the technology is as vital and central to a society  as  computers  have  become,   there  is  the  further  and  more   fundamental  risk   of society reaching a  state  where   the   technology  can  no longer be either properly  maintained  or  controlled.

Appendix  C Two high status blacks

“You’re a child: that’s what makes you so f**king scary”. The character Dr Nicholas Geharty to Idi Amin in the film The last king of Scotland.

The interesting thing about the quote for our purposes is the “You’re a child”.  That is precisely what Amin was, from his love of self-awarded titles (“His Excellency,  President for Life,  Field Marshall Al Hadji, Dr Idid Amin,  VC,  DSO,  MC,  Lord of all the Beasts  of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and  Uganda  in particular”  was his full honorific  catalogue)  to  his often murderous outbreaks of personal violence.

Amin’s general  behaviour cannot even be described as adolescent: it is pre-pubescent,  for example,  his roll  of titles is  the sort of  list that  a  young boy might make when playing,  his   acts  of murderous  personal  violence  an   extension   of   a  child’s  temper tantrum.   Of course, having the body of an adult with its strength and adult sexual appetites and a greater experience of life generally  than a  child,  Amin’s behaviour did not exactly replicate that of a  child, but it was still  childlike.   His adult additions to the armoury of  a child’s abilities  did not make Amin  more adult,  but rather  provided him with new means of expressing his childlike nature.  That was  what made him,  in Geharty’s words  “so f**king scary”. A child in a child’s body  with  a toy gun is one thing: a child in an adult’s body  with  a real gun quite another.

That Amin should have behaved in the fashion he did should surprise  no one.  Lynn  and  Vanhanen  give the average  IQ  of  Ugandans   as  73. The behaviour  Amin displayed is precisely that which one would expect from someone with an IQ around that number, namely, that of a child.

Of course Amin  is just one example,  but his  behavioural traits are  found throughout  black Africa and everywhere else where blacks are found  in large numbers.  It does not matter whether one looks at  blacks  living in   the  poorest black African state or blacks living in  an  advanced First World state, the same things are found: a disproportionately high incidence   of   violence, general  criminality,   poor   educational achievement,  poor  work record (either broken or in low  grade  jobs), high  benefit dependency  (where  available),   sexual   incontinence, desertion  of children by fathers and women with children by  different fathers. These traits show through strongly even where the black is in a privileged position.

Take the life of the  soul singer James Brown who died  in 2007. Brown was born in the USA to  a mother who abandoned him when he was four.  His father handed him  over to his aunt Minnie  who in turn shifted him on to another aunt who ran a  brothel in Augusta.  Brown spent his formative years in the  brothel and developed a penchant for petty crime. So persistent was this behaviour that  at the age  of 15 he received an 8-16 year sentence.   Brown  actually  served three years and turned to crime again when he came out, although he was also trying to forge a musical career at the same time.

So  far  so explicable many readers will be thinking:  a  boy  and  man shaped by his dismal childhood.  The first thing to say in response  to that is that the mother’s desertion of her child,  the father’s  giving away  of  the child and the first aunt’s moving on of the  child  to  a brothel are symptomatic of one particular black behaviour, child desertion. The second thing is that when  Brown’s  life took a great turn for  the  better,  his  delinquent behaviour did not vanish.

Brown’s musical career took off in 1956 when he was 23.  From that time onwards he enjoyed great material success and celebrity for the rest of his life.  One might have imagined that his troubles  with the criminal law  were behind him.  Not a bit of it.  Here is his   Daily  Telegraph obituary:  “Throughout  his  career Brown had  brushes  with  the  law, culminating  in  a  six-year jail sentence  in 1988  for  assault  with intent  to  kill,  drunken driving and other traffic offences.  He  had burst  into  a  business conference at a hotel toting  a  shotgun   and accusing someone of having used his private bathroom.  There followed a 100mph police chase  which ended with the police shooting out the tyres of his pick-up truck.”  (DT 26 12 2006).  Brown was 55 at the time  yet still behaving like a child, his response to a trivial matter – the use of  his  private bathroom – being  stupendously  disproportionate.   In short,  neither age nor his change of circumstances from petty criminal to successful celebrity resulted in a change of mentality.  Of  course, it could be argued that his childhood conditioned his  adult behaviour, but  I  cannot readily think of any white or Asian  celebrity  who  has carried youthful violent criminality into their late middle age.  It is worth  adding  that he was reputedly regularly violent to  his  various wives, of which he had four.

 

How British higher education became corrupted

Education is a first rate example of how quasi-commercialism can corrupt. It was a pincer movement from the bottom and the top, from schools to universities. Prior to the end of the 1980s our universities had been funded for decades by the University Grants Committee (UGC) which was made up academics. The UGC received an annual sum of money allocated by the Government to higher education. The UGC then allocated this  to the universities. This was not a perfect system because the academics tended to favour the older universities over the older regardless of performance. However, broadly speaking it worked and most importantly there was no pressure on universities to tout for students regardless of quality. This in turn meant that academic standards were maintained. Indeed, the newer universities were very sparing in their granting of degrees because they wished to build their academic reputation.

The Thatcher Government changed all that. They first cut in real terms the funding of given to the UGC, then abolished the UGC in 1987 to be replaced by the University Funding Council (UTC) which was manned not by academics but businessmen.  The money was then primarily attached to  the individual – a second criterion based on the quality of research was also introduced but it was the numbers of students which brought in the large majority of the money. This forced universities to actively compete for students. This might not have mattered too much if the numbers of students had remained static but it did not because the Thatcher Government began the push towards dramatically expanding student numbers without a corresponding increase in funding.  This meant that spending per student was reduced and universities had to get as many students as they could to maintain income.  That alone caused universities  to drop their standards, both in terms of who they accepted and the class of degrees they awarded, because universities with a reputation for high entry standards and strict marking of degrees risked being shunned for those with a reputation for being laxer.  To take on stark statistic: in 1970 less than 40% of degrees awarded by British universities were firsts and upper seconds: the figure for these classes of degree awarded in 2006 is over 60%. 

The massive increase in student numbers from the late 1980s meant that the average quality of student was lowered. This is not a subjective judgement.  IQ  is  distributed within  the  British  population approximately as follows: IQ below 90 25%, IQ 90-110 50%, IQ Above 110 25%. In 1970 less than 10% of school-leavers went to university. They could all comfortably come from those in the 111+ range (they will not have done but most would). Raise the numbers to the current level of around 40% and as a simply matter of arithmetic, many must have IQs of less than 111 and because a significant part of those with above average IQs  will not go to university, there must be significant numbers now going to university with IQs below of 100.  Degree courses had to be lowered simply to cater for the less able. This was done in three ways: traditional degrees became less demanding; a swathe of new subjects such as media studies and tourism were granted degree status and the standard of marking was relaxed. The result has been a reversal of the situation when roughly a third of students obtained firsts or upper seconds to a situation now where two thirds receive a first or upper second.    

Because the increase in student numbers has not been met by a proportionate increase in state funding, staff-student ratios have increased, teaching time for each student reduced, both in terms of direct instruction and the time available to staff for marking.

To these attacks on university standards were added eventually the toxic effects of the poison injected into the opposite end of the education  system. “Progressive, child-centred education” really gained a hold in the 1960s. Anti-competitive and ideologically driven, the grammar schools were first almost destroyed, ironically rescuing the public schools which were on their financial knees by the mid-sixties because of the drain of middleclass pupils to free grammar schools, and teaching  methods gradually corrupted so that children were not challenged over errors and all opinions (at least the politically correct ones) became equally valid”.

The progressive ideal was greatly furthered by the introduction in the 1980s of a single school-leaving exam (the GCSE) to replace the CSE and O Level’. Had assessment remained entirely by final (synoptic) exams, The introduction of the GCSE would still have been mistaken because no  examination can meaningfully assess  the broad range of ability displayed by those who sit it – there has been a tacit recognition of this by the inclusion of questions and course tasks of different difficulty within a GCSE subject and candidates can choose to do the hard or the easy and this is reflected in their grades. The exam consequently says nothing about the standard of the candidate as such because the mark tells you nothing about the difficulty of the tasks attempted: for example someone taking just the harder questions in an exam  could score the same mark as someone attempting only the easy questions.

Mistaken as the exam was in principle, it was further damaged by the inclusion of substantial amounts of coursework – cue plagiarism and third party out-of-school help – and coaching by teachers, licit and illicit (the licit includes teachers being able to take an initial piece  of coursework by pupils and making suggestions for  its re-writing) and the use of modular exams (exams which tested only part of the course) which can be retaken several times during a course.

The school examination system has been further contaminated by the various examination boards becoming nakedly commercial bodies who compete greedily for candidates. The result is similar to that experienced by universities: standards have been dropped to attract business. The old practice of setting percentages for those gaining a grade and for those passing was dropped allowing any number of people to gain any grade.  Freed of this constraint grades have inexorably risen year after year for both GCSEs and the university entrance A Levels. So bad has the inflation become that A* grades had to be introduced because A grades were so plentiful that they allowed no distinction to be made between the better candidates. Predictably, the A* grade has now met the same fate as the simple A.

Finally, because so many more pupils were taking GCSE than O Level, the standard of the exam had to be reduced for the same reason that the standard of the degree was reduced: the number of less able students taking the courses increased dramatically. The dire failure of GCSE began to be acknowledged by even the Blair Government with first the Education Secretary Alan Johnson announcing that coursework would be reduced in some subjects and abolished in a few such as maths (the Times 6 10 2006) and then a junior education minister Lord Adonis announcing that consideration was being given to allowing state schools to substitute the international GCSE (IGCSE) for the GCSE (Daily Telegraph 25 10 2006). The IGSCE is an exam closer to the old O Level and is taken by pupils outside Britain and increasingly by private schools in Britain.

The upshot of all this is a decline in academic standards generally. The decline of GCSE standards meant A Level pupils began their A Level courses less well prepared than they had been previously which meant A-Levels had to be reduced in difficulty which meant that those arriving at university were less well prepared and the degree courses had to be made easier.

A further  pernicious consequence of the  gigantic expansion of university numbers is the abolition of  student grants and the imposition of tuition fees. This is not only discouraging students from poorer homes – there is now a lower proportion of workingclass in the British university population than there was in the 1960s – and leaving most students with considerable debts, but also creating a mentality amongst students, politicians, educationalists and indeed the general public, that education is only a tool to obtain a better job, that it has no general value.

The irony is that even at the economic level this mentality is at odds with reality.  Successive governments have claimed that the lifetime earnings of a graduate are on average £450,000 greater than that of a non-graduate. This may have been true of graduates before the great expansion in student numbers but it is not now. The £450,000 has been revised to £100,000, a pretty small sum divided by the 40 years of the average working life. Of course that figure, even if it is true, hides a multitude of difference, with some degrees being next to worthless either because of the subject or the class of degree obtained.

What should be done? Ideally we should return to a system whereby students have their higher education fully funded and a maintenance grant paid.  This could be done by reducing the percentage of school-leavers going to university at the taxpayers’ expense to 20%. Mad you say? Well, Germany, the most successful European and arguably First World economy sends only 25% to university. Nor am I saying only 20% of school leavers should go to university in Britain, merely that the taxpayer should only fund 20%. There would still be opportunity for a would-be student who did not qualify for state paid-for degrees to fund a degree themselves, either on a full or part-time basis. The quality of degrees should also be improved by withdrawing state funding from what the public quite rightly thinks of as “mickey-mouse” degrees. The quality of school exams also needs to be raised significantly to prepare students for university.

 I said that would be the ideal funding solution, but there is a very large fly in the ointment: the EU. As things stand any prospective student legally resident within the EU has to be educated at British universities on the same basis as British students. The reintroduction of free university education and maintenance grants for British students would have to extended to EU residents as things stand. (It is worth considering in the context of EU interference in our affairs whether  the reason why tuition fees were introduced and maintenance grants abolished was because of the cost of educating non-British EU students. I rather suspect it was). The answer would be, as in so many things, to leave the EU and be once more masters in our own house.

 Would a reduction to state-funding for only 20% disadvantage the poorest students? It could conceivably do that if selection procedures are left as they are because they will still unfairly favour the middle-classes because they tend to get the better tuition at school.  How can this be avoided? By using IQ tests as well as A-Level or equivalent qualification results to determine entry. This would allow universities to meaningfully assess the abilities of students from different background. For example, suppose the choice was between someone from a public school with three As  and an IQ of 120 and a pupil from a comprehensive with a bad educational record who has three Bs and an IQ of 140, it would make perfect sense to take the comprehensive pupil because they would have the much greater potential.

As I write this I can hear the politically correct chanting their favourite anti-IQ tests mantras of “IQ tests only test how good you are at IQ tests” and “There is no correlation between IQ and academic achievement”. The answer to the first is that you might as well say that maths exams only tests maths or English exams English.  IQ tests test that part of the intellect which is the most useful but not comprehensive guide to a person’s intelligence. Nor am I suggesting that it should be the only criterion, a certain level of academic attainment also being required.  The answer to the second is simply, IQ is a necessary but not sufficient condition for academic success. If you have an IQ of 1590 you may or may not take a first in maths at Cambridge: if you have an IQ of 80 you will never take such a degree.

Societies and the implications of differing racial IQs

The general differences between societies plausibly express the societal differences in IQ: the more complex the society the greater the need for IQ related problem solving; the less complex, the greater the reliance on knowledge based behaviour. That is not to say that complex societies do not rely greatly on knowledge or that the simplest society allows no room for reasoning. Rather, it is that the balance between IQ related problem solving and knowledge is differs according to the nature of the society. If IQ is largely innate this raises some immensely difficult moral questions for any society. Take away sentiment and the hard truth is that on rational grounds no white or Asian society would want to host a large black population because that will substantially lower the average IQ of the society, with all the problems that brings in terms of anti-social behaviour and the loss of national intellectual capacity.

To say that the IQ distribution of a race implies nothing at the individual level may be pedantically true but it does not alter the fact that if a low IQ race is present in substantial numbers most will have low IQs. In a high IQ society that is a problem for such individuals because there is less opportunity to lead a normal life for the low IQ individual. Self-evidently There is not “a place for everyone”.

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen provide a clear message: some societies, and most particularly those with a predominately black population, simply do not have sufficient people with IQs high enough to sustain a modern society. There are two rational conclusions to draw from their work. The first is that it is pointless for advanced states to keep on trying to modernise countries with low IQ populations which cannot sustain the sophisticated societies needed to maintain an advanced modern state and those populations should be left to find their own level.

The second is that the only active intervention which might conceivably improve conditions in low IQ states is their formal re-colonisation and permanent administration by the advanced states, for that at least would bring order and societies which had infrastructure which worked.

The first course of action has the difficulty of seeming cruel at worst and heartless at best. The second is a political non-starter because of the sacrifices those in the advanced states would have to make in terms of money and personnel and the almost certain guerrilla resistance of at least part of any population which was subject to an attempt at re-colonisation.

Lynn and Vanhanen’s remedy for the problem is the half-way house between decolonisation and doing nothing. They advocate transfers of wealth and expertise from advanced high IQ societies to the IQ deficient ones. Not only is this profoundly unlikely to be something the populations of advanced states will tolerate for ever, but the experience of 40 years or more of vast amounts of Aid being poured into low IQ countries shows that such assistance is worse than useless because it invariably produces corrupt regimes and large Aid dependent populations.

If Lynn and Vanhanen are right, the cold reality is that there is currently no way of radically changing the nature of low IQ societies. Indeed, by feeding them with Aid the donors are making matters worse because they help to increase the low IQ populations vastly beyond the level at which a viable society for the population could exist. However, low IQ populations may not be forever because even if IQ is now substantially innate it may not be so in the future. It is probable that within the next fifty years genetic engineering, chemical manipulation, surgical alteration and cybernetics may provide humans with the capacity to raise the IQ of those with low IQs. This would of course raise immense moral questions as well as practical difficulties such as who would provide the expertise and materials needed to change the IQ of hundreds of millions of people.

Other things being equal, the vast majority of adults would seek the highest IQ for their child, or if the alteration could done after birth at any age, to seek the highest IQ for themselves and their children. It is also true that in a society where there was any meaningful democratic expression it would be impossible for a government to deny such engineering to those who wanted it.

But it probably would not be left to the individual. If some states positively insist on altering the IQ of their entire populations, this would lead to fears that any country which did not follow suit would be left behind in the competitive struggle between societies. Alternatively, manipulation of IQ could be selfishly used by elites to create a permanent advantage for them. Not a pretty future to contemplate.

IQ and a dysgenic Western future

 Since Hitler, unapologetic eugenics has been beyond the Pale in mainstream political and academic discourse, although it chunters along unnamed in abortions for the genetically unfit and raises its head occasionally in books such as The Bell Curve which explores the effects of differential breeding, mainly in the USA, and concludes that there is a risk of a serious dysgenic effect on national IQs.

The dysgenic effects feared by the Eugenics movement in white societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were that much higher breeding rates of the less able (in practice defined as the poor) would bring about the degradation of the human stock of nations. This was a false fear in the context of the racial make up of white societies of the time because there is a phenomenon known as reversion to the norm. This means that higher IQ parents will tend to have children with lower IQs than their own, while lower IQ parents, i.e., those below the mean, will tend to have children with IQs higher than those of the parents. The effect of this would be to roughly maintain the distribution of IQ in a population. Thus, if the poor, less able, call them what you will, in a population breed more freely than the more able, the long-term loss of intellectual resources in a population should be slight going on non-existent. However, there is a nasty fly in the ointment: each racial group maintains its own IQ distribution regardless of where a particular population lives – the Japanese in America have the same IQ distribution as Japanese in Japan, blacks in Jamaica a similar distribution to those of sub-Saharan blacks. Hence, a low IQ racial group will remain trapped in its inferior IQ distribution Moreover, even with inter-racial breeding the average IQ will still be depressed to a degree when people from lower IQ racial groups breed with a higher IQ group.

If a low IQ minority increases through immigration or breeding at a faster rate than the high IQ majority three effects will be felt: (1) the intellectual resources of the country will decline, (2) an ever more substantial part of the resources of the high IQ majority will have to be devoted to containing the effects of the low IQ minority and (3) there will be a tendency for members of the high IQ majority to emigrate to countries where there is either a smaller low IQ minority or the natural resources (especially land) of the country are greater, the consequence being to further reduce the intellectual resources of the country they are leaving. Increasing white flight from Britain in the first decade of the 21st century is a good example of this trait.

If the aggregate level of intelligence is what matters to the maintenance of a sophisticated society, there must be a point at which the society cannot be sustained if the aggregate IQ is reduced below whatever is the minimum level. This is the danger which faces advanced countries which have experienced and are experiencing large-scale immigration of low IQ races.

The different personality traits of blacks, whites and Asians may mean that the efficiency of a society composed of two or more of the races would be less than that of one composed of only one the race. One race may perform better in a racially homogenous society than another, for example, perhaps it is more important for blacks to be in a homogenous society than whites or Asians because the IQ difference is simply too great for blacks to operate efficiently in a high IQ society. Perhaps Asians with their reduced sociability have a greater need for formal order and find it difficult to integrate into the comparatively free wheeling societies of whites, although their superior IQ allows them to find strategies to live within such societies without integration. It may be that the marrying of  relatively high sociability and high average IQ amongst whites means that they are best able of the three major racial groups to function with large minorities of the other racial groups within their society because the social forms they naturally create are more flexible than the societies created by blacks and Asians. However, even if true, that would not mean that a mixed society is beneficial to whites, merely those whites are better able to accommodate minorities and mitigate their ill effects. (It is worth noting that the economic, political and cultural dominance of whites over the past 500 years has been accomplished by societies which enjoyed a very large degree of racial homogeneity).

Where one of the groups in a population is much smaller than the other the larger will naturally dominate, especially in public matters such as politics. But where neither can naturally dominate how will things such as the political system be determined?  Because of innate personality biases one racial group may naturally favour representative government, the other some form of authoritarian government. There is no obvious way of deciding the matter short of violence.

What is certain is that racially mixed societies will be less cohesive than racially homogenous ones. The reason is obvious: the natural sense of “tribal” solidarity is fractured. People feel at best less natural sympathy with other racial groups and at worst a suspicion and antipathy to them. Of course, it is not only racial difference which creates such a situation for ethnic differences, whether historical or cultural, can have a strong divisive quality. But there is a fundamental difference between cultural and biological difference: the former is susceptible to change on a human time scale; the latter is not. An immigrant of the same racial type as the majority population of the receiving country but of a different ethnicity can have children who can be assimilated within a generation to the point where they are indistinguishable from the native majority. An immigrant of a different racial type can remain set apart from the receiving country’s majority population indefinitely if they and their descendents retain their racial type by breeding with others of the same race.

Ethnic solidarity is essential to the coherence and survival of a population. In his “On Genetic Interests”, Frank Salter concludes “Territory is a collective fundamental good for harmonising familial and ethnic genetic interests and securing long-term genetic continuity”. This goes to the heart of ethnic solidarity and survival. The dictum applies to a large degree even where a population does not have formal control of the territory because numerical dominance on the ground is nine parts of the biological law. Britain provides a first rate example with the Welsh and Scots maintaining de facto territorial control of their territory.

The societies most at risk at present are white societies, because it is they which have experienced and are continuing to experience mass immigration of racial groups which differ from their own majority populations. Whites are also displaying low fertility rates, most below replacement level, while immigrant groups are generally breeding above replacement level, often well above replacement level.

Why are whites showing such a disinclination to breed? In part it is selfishness. In pre-modern societies (including many still extant) Man has frequently acted to restrict population at the level of the individual, particularly by infanticide, a very widespread behaviour throughout history. It is not that great a leap in human behaviour for individuals to move from “I must kill this baby because I do not have the resources to raise it” or “to try to raise the child will lessen the chances of my other children” to “I will not have a child because to do so will lessen my own chances of satisfying my own desires”.

This mentality is bolstered by any political ideology which exalts the individual and diminishes the coherence and importance of the ethnic group, whether that is a band, tribe or a nation. Liberal Internationalism is such a creed, which adds to overt individualist propaganda the effects of mass immigration and so-called free trade and free markets, all of which attack the economic and territorial security of nations. This increases the insecurity of whites who breed less freely as a consequence.

But the position is more complex than simple ideology. Even in the more prosperous developing countries – where attitudes to breeding are still traditional – demographics are shifting towards the advanced country distribution. Clearly, increased prosperity and security is an important driver of reproductive change. Longer life spans also probably have an effect, although exactly what is difficult to assess – if I had to venture a guess the effect would be that the longer the life the less feeling of urgency in the individual to breed.

There is also the question of what constitutes genetic inheritance from a human standpoint – note I say from the human standpoint not what genetics may tell us. Because sexually reproducing organisms halve their genetic transfer every generation (more or less), the genetic inheritance of any individual is soon diffused to the point of practical non-existence within the context of the ethnic group, although a significant genetic similarity between members of an ethnic group and more broadly within a racial group continues. Human beings unlike animals can be aware of this. Such people breed regardless of this fact and tend to favour to others genetically related to them tenuously if at all by blood, such as in-laws and great grandchildren or grand nieces and, of course, if the individual is not aware of the rapid genetic dilution he or she still shows such favour to those who are not genetically close. What matters to the individual is the continuing of the genealogical line regardless of the genetic content of the line. It is the cultural transfer which counts. No other animal has such an imperative.

Whatever the reason for white demographic decline, it does raise the question of what would be the objective consequences if whites became greatly diminished in numbers and power in the world or even vanished as a distinct race. Judged by the history of the world to date it would in all probability remove from the world the race most capable of imaginative thought and invention. That could mean the future development of Man took a much narrower and more limited course.

It is also true that white majority societies have been the only ones which have meaningfully honoured the liberal with a small “l” values which have ameliorated the cruelty which is a normal part of most societies. If white dominated societies ceased to exist through whites becoming the minority in them or because they have been so fragmented by immigration that the values are extinguished by ethnic strife, there can be no confidence that the values would survive at all.

Why have whites dominated?

 Plausibly, whites have been the culturally dominant race – in the sense of creating the most sophisticated societies to date – because they marry a high average IQ with a superior verbal ability to that of Asians. This means they can both handle the IQ demands of an advanced sophisticated society and have sufficient sociability to create structures which extend the group loyalty and sense of oneness beyond the family or tribe without resorting to unashamed authoritarian control, for example civil society and representative government. They display strong traits of initiative, imagination and intellectual curiosity, traits which may be linked to their relatively high sociability, a behaviour which encourages emulation and competition between and within the sexes. Other biological traits such as testosterone levels somewhere between blacks and Asians may also promote such behaviour.

There is evidence that enhanced traits of individuality and imagination go back to the beginnings of modern European man. The vast majority of extant cave paintings in the world are found in Europe, especially in the west of the continent. (The cave art of the Palaeolithic and the finely honed flint tools of the later Stone Age, whose workmanship goes far beyond the demands of the demands of simple utility, arguably represent a higher state of development than the 19^th Century Tasmanians).

The great ancient white civilisations which arose around the Mediterranean, those of Greece and Rome, show an immense fertility of mind. It is here that we first find evidence of analytical thought as a conscious pursuit. Their art is both extensive and varied and subject to fashion, that is, it changes regularly over time. That art, both visual and literary, is concerned with either Homo sapiens or gods who share human qualities, evidence of a similar mentality to that which drove the Renaissance. In terms of advanced social organisation, the Greeks created the idea of direct democracy and the Romans incorporated democratic aspects into the first great European political entity.

These traits continued throughout the mediaeval European world, even though they were gradually placed ever more firmly in the constraining context of Christianity. Illuminated European manuscripts often reveal a lively irreverence and interest in the profane world in their illustrations, monarchs, great nobles and religious orders vied with one another to produce ever more magnificently egotistical material statements in the form of gorgeous illuminated manuscripts, great castles and religious buildings, parliaments were created in many kingdoms. Intellectuals such as Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Peter Abelard and William of Occam wrestled with the implications of existence. Then came the Renaissance which saw the qualities of individuality and imagination given full rein, aided by the advance of the vernacular throughout Europe and, most importantly, printing. From that point onwards the general cultural advance of Europe has never faltered and has produced science, high technology, representative government and an ever changing kaleidoscope of artistic endeavour. These were the building blocks of modernity.

The acceptance of Christianity within Europe is interesting in itself for the religion embodies the notion of individualism, both in the personification of God and the individual’s relationship with God. Moreover, the placing of God in human form in the person of Christ echoes the humanising of the Greek and Roman gods. Old wine in new bottles.

Why have East Asians not dominated?

Why have Asians not dominated?

 Why have Asians not dominated human cultural evolution? How can it be that the racial group which has the highest average IQ is not that which has reached, to date, the greatest cultural achievement, wealth and power?

Before I answer that question, let me debunk some of the Western myths about China so that we start from the proper historical and cultural place when assessing Asian achievement and development. (The Asian population is of course more than China, but China by population represents most Asians and Asians at their most culturally advanced throughout history until perhaps the last century, since when Japan has arguably taken the lead).

Insofar as people in the West think about China’s place in history – and most do not think about it at all – they normally believe that China has long been a unified state sharing a single  culture and  a single language with a continuous history stretching back thousands of years (thus making it unique) and that it was always culturally and technologically in advance of the West until relatively recently, the “relatively recently” being anything from 1500 to as late as 1800 AD depending on which authority you choose to follow. Joseph Needham in his monumental Science and Civilisation in China is the prime example of someone propagating this myth.

The reality is that the history of China has been as politically messy and fractured as that of Europe, arguably more so because their territory is larger and their population throughout history has been substantially greater than that of Europe. The country was not even nominally unified until the third century BC – under the short lived Chhin dynasty (221-207 BC) and has spent more than half of the time since being split between competing dynasties, for example, the Northern and Southern Sung 960-1126, times of general warlordism (5/6th centuries AD) or subject to foreign invaders such as the Mongols (1279-1368) and the Manchu (1644-1912). Moreover, even at times of supposed unification the actual amount of control exercised by Emperors was necessarily small compared with that achieved by the modern industrialised state because the means to govern vast territories and large populations was minute in the past compared with our own day. China is also so far from being a single racial/ethnic entity that today it contains within its borders approximately 100 million people who are in modern Western terms ethnic minorities.

As for the supposed cultural unity, the spoken language is very far from being a single tongue understood throughout China. The division between Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese is reasonably well known in the West, but the fracturing of Chinese goes far beyond that. For example, the erstwhile Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping spoke with such a heavy accent and dialect that his daughter had to translate for him when he spoke in public. Nor is the written language a single language similarly understood by all literate Chinese – different characters are used in different parts of the country and the same character may have different nuances depending on the origins of the reader.

In short, it makes no more sense to speak of China as a continuous state or single civilisation than it does to speak of Europe as a continuous state or single civilisation.

Nor is it true that there is a special antiquity to Chinese civilisation. In matters such as writing and the use of metals, the Chinese were at best no earlier than the civilisations of the Middle East and Mediterranean, and arguably behind them, especially in writing.

The claim that the Chinese were throughout history more culturally advanced than Europe until fairly recently is especially weak. It is only necessary to reflect on the archaeological and historical evidence of the cultural achievements of the Egyptians, those in the Fertile Crescent (Assyria, Babylon), the Cretans, Mycenaeans and the immense achievements of ancient Greece and Rome to realise that the China of antiquity was not superior in terms of their physical control of the world. To take one striking example, few Chinese buildings pre-dating the Ming era (1368-1644) are extant; most buildings, including those of the great, before that date being of timber. Compare that with the great stone buildings of the European and Mediterranean ancient world, the magnificent castles, abbeys, cathedrals and churches of the European mediaeval world and the amazing architectural diversity of the European modern period.

Of course, it is very easy to cherry pick particular material accomplishments at particular times and places, but fail to place them in their general historical context by posing questions such was an invention followed through and did it become generally used? Such a failure gives a wholly unbalanced picture of the relative merits of cultures. It is true that before the modern period (say 1500 AD)the Chinese can be shown to have had certain inventions before Europe but the opposite also applies, for example, the Chinese had the compass before Europe, but Europe boast priority with the Archimedean screw.

Even where China produced an invention before Europe and then Europe introduced it at a later date, it does not follow that Europe copied that invention from China or the experience of using the invention was the same in Europe as in China. The classic example of this is printing with moveable type. China and Korea had moveable type many centuries before Gutenberg printed his great Bible in the 15th century, but there is no evidence that Gutenberg was influenced in any way by the far Eastern example. Discrete invention of the same thing or process in different cultures is common. Not only that, whereas moveable type printing never gained widespread use in China it very rapidly became the norm in Europe, most probably because written European languages are  based on an alphabetical system with a few characters  while written Chinese is an ideographic language with thousands  of ideograms, each of which requires a single block of type. Since 1700 at the latest, European technology has utterly dwarfed the achievements of the Chinese.

There is of course far more to civilisation than its material consequences. The intellectual and social science, philosophy, art, political structure and so on. Here China also falls well short of Europe.

China never managed to develop anything worthy of the name of science. Throughout their history the Chinese have been very inventive when it comes to producing artefacts and practical solutions to particular problems but have displayed a remarkable lack of interest in developing theory from those practical solutions to provide general explanations of the world.

It is also noteworthy that although the Chinese produced many important inventions such as gunpowder, they commonly failed to exploit them either at all or to develop them substantially. When Europeans began to make regular contact with China in the seventeenth century the guns of the Europeans were much superior to those of the Chinese despite the latter having invented gunpowder. Looking at the frequent failures to develop inventions, the suspicion arises that often an invention was produced to amuse or serve the interests of a powerful person rather than with the idea of making it a commercial proposition or from a simple interest in the challenge of making it and subsequently understanding how it could be improved. Lord McCartney, who headed the first official British diplomatic mission to China in 1793/4 noted  “Most of the things the Chinese know they seem to have invented themselves, to have applied them solely to the purpose wanted, and to never have thought of improving or extending them further”  (A Journal of the embassy to China (Folio Society), while Adam Smith commented in the latter half of the 18^th century that “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have long been stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry and populousness , almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times”. (The Wealth of Nations Penguin edition p 174.)

Philosophy as we would understand it in the West, that is, analytical thought examining the nature of reality with, in theory at least, an absence of ideological baggage clouding the issue, is virtually  missing from Chinese history. Traditional Chinese philosophy never divorced itself entirely from religion and was predominantly concerned with how society should be ordered. Its primary purpose was social control. It is more a series of maxims than an exercise in philosophical enquiry. The let-everything-be-challenged method found intermittently in Western philosophy from at least the sixth century BC onwards appears foreign to the Chinese mind. Interestingly, they were great compilers of what we would call encyclopaedias. They delighted in recording what was already known or thought, rather than investigating what was not known or might be thought.

A similar resistance to change can be seen in Chinese art and fashion. Look at contemporary depictions of Chinese and the dress of a Chinese in 1000 AD is much the same as the dress of a Chinese in 1800. Chinese art shows a similar stability over the same period, being for the most part heavily constrained by artistic conventions. Where there is a deviation from such academic artistic discipline it is mainly found in periods where foreign invaders gained power, most noticeably under the Mongol emperors who imported craftsmen and artists from here, there and everywhere. Looking at Chinese fashions and art over time is similar to viewing Egyptian artefacts which show a remarkable stability over several thousand years. This is the direct antithesis of the general European cultural experience which consistently shows change in fashion and art.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Chinese is their political and social development. Politically, the Chinese never really moved beyond the rather primitive state of believing in an absolute ruler who was a god or a man directly in touch with gods and warlordism. There were attempts to introduce more rational and less absolute forms of government, but these were invariably short lived. Ideologies such as Confucianism attempted to lay down moral rules for rulers, but that was about the limit of any sustained attempt to restrain emperors with anything short of violence. Ideas of constitutions restricting what government may do, representative government or direct democracy were simply alien to Chinese society.

State administration is often lauded as an area of great Chinese superiority, with the Mandarin system put forward as evidence of this, appointment by examination having begun as early as the 7th century AD. But was it really superior to that of the Roman Empire, which pre-dated it by centuries, or more impressive than that of the Catholic Church at the height of its power? Arguably, the Mandarin system was primarily an expression of the general trait of Chinese society to control and categorise rather than a system designed to meet a particular need, as opposed to the administrations of Europe which developed to serve needs such as the management of money.

Below formal government it is difficult to discern in Chinese history anything which could be described as civil society, those organisations and relationships which perform a civic social function but which are not part of the formal political structure, for example, charities, clubs, the co-operative movement and trade unions. Chinese life has traditionally revolved around the family – including a strong dose of ancestor worship – with any social organisation beyond that being the province of those in authority. There is nothing which resembles the corporate charitable concern for the poor found within the Catholic Church let alone a formal legal obligation such as the English Poor Law of 1601.

A society which leaves the vast majority of a society in abject penury and small elite with immense wealth is a primitive form of social organisation. It is a form known since the beginning of history unlike the settled societies which have spread wealth more evenly, which are all of more recent growth. Left to its own devices Chinese society never went beyond the great disparity of wealth state. When Europeans began to gain first hand experience of China from the seventeenth century onwards a common observation was the tremendous disparity of wealth. Here is Adam Smith again: “The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe” (The Wealth of Nations p174), but “the rich, having a superabundance of food to dispose of beyond what they can themselves consume, have the means of purchasing the labour of other people. The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than the richest subjects in Europe” (The Wealth of Nations p310).

This brief de-bunking of the myth of Chinese cultural superiority carries within it suggestions of why Asians have not achieved cultural supremacy, despite their superior IQ distribution. IQ is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cultural advance. What is missing from the Asian mentality to have hindered their advance? Could it simply be that a combination of sufficiently propitious circumstances have never arisen to drive them beyond a certain point, that Europe surged ahead simply by luck rather than any innate difference? This would seem to be most unlikely because of the length of time during which China has been a sophisticated society with substantial technological and organisational achievements.

Why did China never make the jump from by-guess-and-by-God technology to true science? Why did China show so little interest in analytical philosophy? Why did China never develop a political system more sophisticated than that of the god-Emperor when Europeans ran through just about every form of political organisations there is in the past 2,500 years, most of them before the birth of Christ? Why was the idea of political participation, so widespread in Europe in both the ancient and the late mediaeval world, absent in China? Why was there an absence of civil society in China? These differences would seem to be more than culturally determined, to be the cultural expressions of innate tendencies in behaviour.

IQ is far from being the only measurable innate difference between races (insofar as IQ is innate). J Philippe Ruston in Race, Evolution and Behaviour lists several dozen race-dependent variables under the headings of Brain size, Intelligence, Maturation rate, Personality, Social organisation and Reproductive effort. Under Personality are listed the following: activity level, aggressiveness, cautiousness, dominance, impulsivity, self-concept, sociability. On all of these except cautiousness blacks score higher than whites who in turn score higher than Asians. With cautiousness the position is reversed with blacks scoring lower than whites who score lower than Asians. It is not unreasonable to interpret these differences as the Asian personality being less enquiring or adventurous than that of whites, less sociable and more submissive.

The ascending ranking of black-white-Asian is steady throughout almost all the variables described by Ruston – the odd men out are administrative efficiency and  cultural achievement which Rushton ranks as simply “higher” for both whites and Asians than for blacks. Arguably, those are the two variables most open to subjectivity and, judged by the entire sweep of human history; it would seem to be stretching a point to put whites and Asians on the same level in these two areas. As previously mentioned whites managed an industrial revolution from scratch, created modern science, developed analytical philosophy and very early on evolved many varied forms of political life, including direct democracy. Before European examples were put before those, Asians never advanced much beyond by-guess-and-by-God technology, had nothing moderns would describe as science, possessed no analytical philosophy and did not develop a political system more sophisticated than that of the absolute monarch.

When they are a minority in high IQ societies Asians tend to fill technical posts – which favour higher IQs – or engage in business, much of which is conducted within their own racial group. They make surprisingly little headway in areas which require the highest level “people skills”, such as formal politics or interest groups. Whether they as a minority live in high or low IQ societies Asians display an extremely strong tendency to keep within their own communities, but unlike many other minority groups they generally do not engage in much overt antisocial behaviour – their crime tends to be directed at other members of the racial group – and display little overt ethnic aggression such as portraying themselves as victims of racism or by demanding racially based privileges for their group. This behaviour also fits the Asian personality template described above.

There is a further consideration. IQ is not of a piece. Although Asian IQ is higher than white IQ overall, it is not higher in all respects. Asians score substantially higher than whites on non-verbal tests but are significantly inferior to whites on verbal tests. They score particularly strongly on spatial tests. These differences in the quality of racial IQs fit neatly into the differences listed by Ruston and to work such as Freedman’s. The inferior verbal ability of Asians fits with the idea of reduced sociability. The greater aptitude on non-verbal tests could be plausibly be interpreted as meaning that the Asian mind is adapted to solving what I would call bounded problems, that is, problems which have objective boundaries such as how do we build this canal? rather than problems without such boundaries such as what is the good? and what is art?

The limitations of the Chinese intellect can be seen in their adherence to an ideographic form of writing. If one set a genius and a dullard the task of developing a system of writing, the genius would come up with an alphabetical system and the dullard some form of pictorial representation. The genius would produce the alphabetical system because he would see beyond the obvious and immediate and eschew the literal representation of a thing or idea, while the dullard would see only the obvious and immediate way of representing a thing or idea. The genius would go for the less obvious for he would see that it was both more economical and powerful a means of representation because it required only a small number of signs to express infinity of things and ideas. The dullard would merely see a need to keep on adding to the number of signs.

Of course the Chinese went far beyond crude pictograms which each literally depicted something, but by retaining  a pictorial system in which each thing or idea had to be represented by a particular sign or group of signs they retained the problems associated with a non-alphabetical system, namely its lack of economy and flexibility, there being several thousand characters associated with  written Chinese. The sheer number of characters makes the learning of written Chinese a monumental task, especially for those learning the written language as an adult. Many, probably the large majority, of foreigners who speak Chinese cannot read and/or write it. Nor is this purely a non-Asian trait. When the Chinese communists attempted to create a literate China in the 1950s they found that many pupils simply were not up to the task – there was a spate of suicides at the time amongst those being forced to learn to read and write Chinese. The Chinese met this difficulty by introducing a system of 1,000 simplified characters and a 25 letter Roman alphabet was introduced into Chinese primary schools in 1957 to help with pronunciation.

Why did the major representatives of the group with the highest IQ not only start down the dullard’s path with a written language but continues on that path today despite its very obvious disadvantages? Perhaps the answer lies in their IQ and other psychometrically measurable traits. If Asians have minds which are orientated toward the visual, perhaps it is natural to prefer a pictorial system of writing. Nonetheless it is strange that such an obviously cumbersome system should have been retained for so long by the Chinese – the racially similar Koreans adopted an alphabetical system of writing in the 15th Century. Of course, literacy in China was very restricted and it may have been retained simply because it was the system known to the elite (who were its prime users) and cultural inertia became the controlling force. It also had the advantage for the elite of naturally restricting literacy, because of the considerable mental demands the written language makes on the individual when they are learning it. However, such an advantage in the past is a positive disadvantage today and has been since the Chinese first had to compete with modern advanced societies.

We have the experience of more than a century of industrialisation and Westernisation in Japan and several generations of such behaviour in South Korea and Taiwan. China has gone down the industrialising road intermittently for over a century and full-bloodedly for the past quarter century. These societies have had the example of the white experience of industrialisation, science and general cultural heritage before them. Despite this and whatever their economic success, and that is patchy vide Japan‘s post-1980s stagnation and the oceanic gulf between coastal city China and the vast Chinese interior, compared with white societies there has been in Asian societies since their opening up to the West remarkably little evidence of fundamental scientific discovery or technological innovation which goes beyond the adaptation of what has been invented or discovered elsewhere. Nor, despite the very large numbers of Asians living in advanced white majority societies, can one find front-rank scientists or technologists in proportion to their proportion to the population, a surprising fact when Asian academic achievement and business involvement is on average higher than that of whites (anyone who doubts Asian under-representation in this area should try identifying Asians living in white majority societies who fit the description of front-rank scientists and technologists).

The willingness to imitate white societies extends to culture. The Japanese in particular are famous for aping both high and low white culture, from Beethoven to the Beatles. Asian Harry Potter fans are amongst the most frenzied in the world. The architecture of whites is copied enthusiastically and extensively and is accompanied by a widespread willingness to destroy indigenous architecture, the white concern for giving a special value to the old and preserving being weak in Asian majority societies. An equivalent mass response to Asian culture simply does not exist in white societies – the most that can be found are periodic outbreaks of the use of oriental art and motifs by white designers. This willingness to imitate might seem odd in view of the traditionally static cultural nature of Asian societies. It might be ascribed to the feelings of inferiority which Asian societies felt when faced with the power of industrialised societies and at least in China’s case, a sense of humiliation because of past white quasi-colonial involvement in China. If this explanation is believed Asians copy white behaviour because they are proving to themselves that they are not inferior to white society by emulating what white societies have achieved. However, that shows a strange lack of ambition. Why not aspire to do something beyond what whites have done? (Many Chinese would say they are industrialising and modernising generally now simply because they were held back in the past by white control and manipulation of their societies, but difficult that is to fit with the facts that foreign influence over China effectively ended in 1949 and their general failure to advance before Western meddling began in the 19^th century).

An alternative explanation is that Asians imitate so readily because it is natural for them to do so because their general personality traits lead them to do it. Or rather, it is natural for them to imitate in certain aspects of life but not others. Where Asians do not show such an appetite for imitation is in social structures. The Japanese and South Koreans may have formally adopted systems of elective government from white examples, but within these the traditional social relations remain – practices are accepted which in the West would be considered straight forward bribery of voters or undue influence over them, for example “clan” loyalties. Or take the rule of law. In Japan, supposedly the most Westernised of Asian societies, hardly anyone who is brought to trial for a criminal offence is acquitted, a nonsense for any meaningful system of justice As for China, uniquely amongst Communist countries, the Communist elite have managed to retain control whilst allowing capitalism but eschewing democratisation or the idea of the law being above manipulation by the state.

Why do Asians imitate in some ways but not others? I suspect that the answer rests on what is the elite view of society. Traditionally, the Chinese elite were always contemptuous of other peoples, routinely treating them as subordinate peoples who owed tribute to the Emperor (Lord Macartney‘s. gifts to the Emperor in 1794 were described as tribute). Macartney, who visited China before white interference in the country, constantly referred to the fact that the Chinese had what we would now describe as a monstrous superiority complex and that when presented with products of the early Industrial Revolution, the equivalent of which were unknown in China, they frequently refused to show any overt interest in them. Macartney left China having failed to gain what he had been charged with obtaining, namely, the right of British merchants to trade in China.

A similar refusal to engage with white societies can be found in Japan, which after some experience of white merchants and priests took the dramatic step of sealing off Japan from all but the most limited European contact for three centuries until the American Commodore Perry forced trade with the white world upon them in 1853.

Once Japan had engagement with the West forced upon them a new elite ideology emerged which saw imitation of certain aspects of white society as the way to compete with those societies. This new elite ideology was accepted by the mass of their population with astonishing readiness bearing in mind the previous refusal to engage with outsiders (there was even a proposal in the 1870s for English to replace Japanese as the language of Japan.) Why did this happen?  Most probably because the general personality profile of Asians makes them unusually susceptible to authority. Imitation of white social relationships did not occur so readily because such relationships are themselves the product of innate personality traits. (It is worth bearing in mind that Japan decided to modernise without being quasi-colonised in the fashion of China.)

In summary, despite their higher average IQ, Asians have probably failed to become the culturally dominant race because their innate personality traits work against them. They are too passive, too unquestioning, too lacking in initiative. The shape of their IQ with higher non-verbal scores and lower verbal scores may be wholly or partially the cause of these personality traits or, conversely, the shape of the IQ is simply an expression of the personality traits. Other biological traits such as low testosterone levels may also promote such behaviour.

High status/high IQ jobs

Some jobs by their nature require a strong IQ, for example, you will not find people with low IQs working as physicists or mathematicians. Anyone who has to master a complex technical job such as flying an airliner will have a healthy IQ.

But not all high status jobs require the mastery of a particular skill or ability that can be objectively measured and there is good circumstantial evidence that in many high status jobs an individual can get by with only a mediocre IQ. It is also true that job status is strongly class-dependent. Some jobs which are considered to have relatively low status in the context of a society as a whole because they are mostly done by those drawn from the lower social levels may require a strong IQ, for example, the skilled mechanic, the rank-and-file police detective.

Jobs also have status within their social stratum. The skilled mechanic will enjoy high status within the working class; a brain surgeon will trump a bank manager in middle class circles. A few occupations are beyond class, for example, those who exercise serious political power or, in our celebrity obsessed world, the likes of film stars.

The status of a job and of a person’s position within a work hierarchy can play an important part in disguising incompetence, as can political ideology. The Bell Curve identified an interesting trait in US society: blacks and Latinos are over represented in reputedly high status jobs such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, the over-representation plausibly being the consequence of an ideologically driven policy, namely, “positive” discrimination: —

“We have obtained SAT data on classes entering twenty-six of the nation’s top colleges and universities. In 1975, most of the nation’s elite private colleges and universities formed the Consortium on financing Higher Education (COHFHE, which amongst other things, compiles and shares information on the students at member institutions, including SAT scores. We have obtained these data for the classes entering in 1991 and 1992… In addition, the figure includes data on the University of Virginia and the University of California at Berkeley in 1988.” (The Bell Curve p451).

“The difference between black and white scores was less than 100 points at only one school, Harvard. It exceeded 200 points at nine schools, reaching its highest at Berkeley (288 points). Overall, the media difference between the black and white mean was 180 SAT points, or conservatively estimated, about 1.3 standard deviations.” (The Bell Curve p451)

For US graduate schools Murray and Herrstein found that in Law school only 7 per cent of blacks had scores above the white mean. The figures for medical schools were similar to those of the Law schools, while the arts and sciences were slightly stronger. (The Bell Curve pp455-8).

As for teachers, affirmative action in the workplace Teacher competency exams showed whites passing at twice the rate of blacks in three of the four states cited – California, New York and Georgia – with Pennsylvania the odd man out with a white/black pass rate of 93/68. (The Bell Curve P494)

It is difficult to conclude anything other than that the intellectual quality of blacks working in medicine, law and education is on average substantially less than those of whites and Asians and that this inferiority will manifest itself in a reduced ability of blacks to do the job. However, many blacks manifestly do survive in such jobs. How do they do it? The answer is a mixture of the subjective nature of the subjects (even the law allows many interpretations), status and political correctness.

Take the case of medicine. It is far from being an exact science. Consequently, many mistakes remain hidden because an error can be explained away as being a reasonable opinion which just happened to be wrong, misdiagnosis would be the classic example of this behaviour.

To this “get out of jail free card” can be added the natural respect that a doctor carries for most people, including other medical staff, the ignorance of the general public on medical matters and a very strong reluctance on the part of medical staff to make a complaint about other medical staff. All this makes people generally reluctant to question a doctor’s behaviour. Where the doctor is from a group which is protected by political correctness these natural barriers become amplified.

The power of all these traits can be seen from the frequent cases of unqualified people successfully impersonating doctors for long periods of time. There have even been a few cases of people successfully impersonating surgeons for years.

But there is another reason why those with low to mediocre IQs get away with being doctors: medicine is not the most intellectually demanding profession (it used to be known as the stupid profession). To be medically competent a doctor needs a powerful memory – to master the very large amount of information presented to him during training and ongoing post-training experience – and personality traits which allow him to both judge patients and be able to inspire trust and confidence in them. What it does not require most of the time is very high level problem solving.

Despite the limited intellectual demands of medicine it is accounted a high IQ profession nowadays, at least by implication, and the academic entry requirements for medical school grow ever more stringent. Why?  There is great competition to enter the profession because it has high status and pays well. This means that higher IQ candidates for medical school will, other things being equal, be preferred to those with lower IQs. In short, medicine today is probably burdened with higher IQ personnel than it requires.

But over-qualification applies only to those who are not beneficiaries of “positive” discrimination and lower IQ candidates disproportionately come from the groups who do benefit from such favouritism. For the reasons given above, they can survive because the job does not make intellectual demands which unambiguously reveal their inadequacy. In addition, those who benefit from “positive” discrimination will tend to generally benefit from political correctness, for this will drive those outside the protection of political correctness – in the developed world white doctors, nurses, technicians and administrators- to cover up the inadequacies of the low IQ politically correct protected doctor. Ironically, the higher than necessary IQ of those doctors outside the politically correct fold will assist in the process of covering up because they will tend to be more competent at doing so because of their higher IQ and greater competence.

What is true of medicine applies to many other high status jobs. People with low to mediocre IQs can and survive for long periods in positions which are patently beyond their competence (this of course applies to all races not merely blacks). There is far more to competence than just IQ, but often the incompetence is ascribable to a lack of IQ-related problem solving ability – the Dilbert cartoon strip deals brilliantly with both the question of incompetents in high places and the different qualities required by people in different jobs.

Even more fundamental to understanding how low IQ individuals survive in high status jobs is the fact that having an incompetent in a high status job does not automatically mean that the operation of the organisation or unit they work within is dysfunctional. If the incompetent person is a senior manager the people under him will compensate for the person’s incompetence by quietly ignoring what the manager says should be done, by using their intelligence and experience and by following standard rules and practices. Organisations of any size but the very smallest have an in-built functionality which transcends the individual.

The larger and more complex the organisation is the less important the position of a senior manager becomes, because the larger the organisation the greater the in-built functionality and the less the effect an individual can have on the organisation, try as they may. Anyone who doubts this should examine the careers of those who have risen to be chief executives of large public companies which they have not founded (entrepreneurs who create their own businesses are a different kettle of fish). Their careers are almost invariably patchy: they have success at one company then fail at another. But once they are on the corporate CEO gravy train it is the devil’s own job to get them off. Like high profile Premiership football managers, no matter how often they fail there is seemingly always another big job waiting for them.

What applies to private business applies in spades to public servants, both because there is no bottom line (the taxpayer pays regardless of outcome) and because those ultimately responsible are the politicians who misuse their power to cover up mistakes where possible, and where it is not, to pretend that a monumental piece of incompetence is nothing of the sort. They get away with it in the main because most so-called democratic systems (in reality elective oligarchies) are tightly controlled by an elite which manages to bar by one means or another (sociological inertia, control of the media and so on) any new political force from gaining power or even influence. Even where a new party does gain power, it is almost always comprised of the same class of people who held power before. The electorate is left with no meaningful choice and the politicians as a class are literally irresponsible in such circumstances.

Positions of authority generally offer the low or mediocre IQ individual a great deal of latitude, because such people are protected from an objective examination of their performance by their status and because they can call upon the ability of others to do the high IQ work. They can also take the ideas of their subordinates for their own and place the blame for failure on their subordinates. The higher the status of the job, the greater the ability of the low IQ individual to hide their inadequacies, both moral and intellectual.

Much of what those in positions of authority do is little more than the exercise of personality plus the acting out of learned positions. This is particularly obvious in the case of politicians who commonly operate simply on the recitation of learned statements rather than responding intelligently to questioning or the demands of situation. Often when politicians are forced by circumstances to make a serious attempt at explaining something they make a frightful hash of it because they do not have any proper understanding of the subject.

The case of George W Bush is an extreme example of this behaviour. When presented with a prepared speech which he has rehearsed extensively and with the use of a teleprompt, he can speak fluently, although even in these circumstances he will get some of the phrasing of his delivery comically wrong by placing stresses where there should be none. But put Bush into a situation where he has to answer questions without any prior knowledge of what is to be asked and his speech takes on a chaotic form with stretches of hesitancy followed by passages where he suddenly becomes fluent for a sentence or two, although the fluent passages often  have no direct relevance to the question he is answering – this, of course, is a common politician’s ploy, but Bush does not use the tactic as a means of avoiding the question but to fill the space with words, any words. This behaviour is easily explained: Bush cannot deal with questions on the hoof. This leads him to stutter and hesitate until he remembers something he has learned parrot fashion which he then trots out. Once this is delivered he is back to not knowing what to say and the stumbling hesitancy re-surfaces.

What applies to politicians has application to not only people in authority but in some degree to any person. For much of any person’s life, both social and working, the individual can get by without needing to exercise higher intellectual functions. For a large part of the population their lives can be lived without ever having to exercise high level intellectual functions because, contrary to popular opinion, most jobs in a modern advanced state are as they have always been: mundane.

The high status people who cannot easily hide their incompetence are those who undertake jobs which can be judged objectively, most commonly those involving a technical ability such as an engineer or scientist. Bluff there will not carry you through, well, not unless you are a cosmologist.

Tellingly, although the black middleclass has increased massively in the USA over the past 50 years, the distribution of blacks across the full gamut of middleclass occupations is uneven. For example, black academics have become much more common in the USA in the past fifty years, but there are few in the indubitably high IQ subjects such as maths, physics and chemistry. I was tempted to include philosophy but that is a subject which is difficult to define. It is indubitably a high IQ subject when done well, but it can also be done badly and still get an academic hearing in a way that work by an incompetent physicist could not. Hence, quite a few blacks have entered philosophy departments but what they produce is more social commentary and political polemic than analytical philosophy in the Western tradition. Certainly, no major black philosopher in that tradition exists. Where blacks do appear in great numbers in academia is in “black” studies, an area in which they can rule the roost with virtually no academic challenge because of political correctness.

The High IQ individual in a low IQ society

Insofar as the person’s life makes calls upon IQ related abilities the higher IQ individual will enjoy an advantage. However, such an individual could be at a considerable disadvantage simply because he will be abnormal. The society will value particular knowledge and skills and discount the value of intelligence. Indeed, intelligence may lead to behaviour which is viewed as dangerous because it is innovative.

Even if his high IQ does not result in behaviour judged to be “dangerous”, the high IQ individual will find his intelligence to be of far less use and advantage than it would be in a high IQ society because the range of problems to which the person’s intelligence can be harnessed are much more limited than they would be in a high IQ society.

The exception to this rule is where the high IQ minority is the controlling elite, either because they hold formal power (various Latin American countries) or because the country is de facto dependent upon them to maintain the proper functioning of society (South Africa).

A low IQ individual in a high IQ society

What does an individual do when faced with a situation which is beyond their experience or capabilities? Generally they panic at some level; at the least the person becomes very uncomfortable. The low IQ person placed in a society which is best suited to those with substantially higher IQs  is potentially at risk of suffering such stress far more often than the higher IQ individual. Most dramatically, low IQ is associated with mental illness, viz:

“Many people with psychiatric disorders appear to have a lower than average level of intelligence prior to developing mental illness, study findings suggest. Dr Erik Lykke Mortensen, from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and colleagues therefore suggest that poor performance on cognitive tests among psychiatric patients could reflect low intelligence rather than the effects of the mental health disorder. For their study, the researchers identified 350 men in their late 20s who had a range of psychiatric disorders, all of whom had completed an IQ test when 18 years old. In all, nine different groups of psychiatric diagnoses were represented: schizophrenia and schizotypal disorders, other psychotic disorders, mood disorders, neuroses and related disorders, adjustment disorders, personality disorders, alcohol-related disorders, other substance use disorders and other diagnoses. All the psychiatric disorders, with the exception of mood disorders and neuroses and related disorders, were associated with a low IQ score, with scores for patients with the average scores for patients in the other psychotic disorders group 8 points below average, while they were 13 points below average for those in the substance use disorders group. Neither the social status of the parents nor the presence of psychiatric illness in the parents could explain the low IQ scores seen in the men.” Low intelligence linked to a range of psychiatric disorders.

http://www.patienthealthinternational.com/ncm.aspx?type=news&param=9145 11 November 2005

It is conceivable that the stress low IQ people experience in a high IQ society may be in part the cause of this greater incidence of mental illness. That could explain why blacks in Britain are massively over-represented in the mental health system while in countries such as Jamaica the incidence is not abnormally high. I say could because the difference between the incidence in Britain and Jamaica could be simply a reflection of the vastly different mental health resources in the two countries. There may also be an issue of racial discrimination: the Black Londoner’s Forum claims African Caribbean’s are 44% more likely to be sectioned, 29%more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion and make up 30% of in patients on medium secure psychiatric wards, despite having similar rates of mental illness as British white people.

The behaviour of a low IQ individual in a high IQ society will largely depend on two things: the opportunity to live a life within the limits of their intellect and the extent to which their lives are controlled by the group in which they live.

A low IQ individual with a secure job asking little by way of skill or intellect but paying enough to allow the individual to marry and raise a family, can live a life which is neither socially disruptive nor unfulfilling for the person or those associated with him or her. The stability of such a person’s life will be increased by support mechanisms such as a closely integrated community, civil society institutions such as unions and friendly societies and the universal state provision of such necessities as education, healthcare and welfare. If the low IQ individual lives in a community with those who are of generally higher IQ, their behaviour can assist the low IQ individual to exist by offering assistance through direct help, example and the fact that the higher IQ individuals create a more secure and efficient society through their general behaviour and abilities. In addition, such a community can directly shape the behaviour of the low IQ individual by setting socially beneficial standards and norms which would be less likely to exist in a community of low IQ individuals.

Where a high IQ society removes or diminishes the opportunities for those with low IQs to live comfortably their behaviour will become more anti-social. For example, policies such as mass immigration and “free trade” diminish the quantity of work and the level of wages available to the lower IQ individual through increased job competition within the domestic market and the export of jobs. In addition, immigrants increase competition for community provided social goods such as healthcare and this bears most heavily on those with low IQs because they are disproportionately found amongst the poor. In such circumstances those with low IQs will be more prone to crime, unemployment, welfare dependency, poverty and social alienation.

The propensity for anti-social behaviour is enhanced where the elite inflates the sense of victimhood of a minority group which has a weak IQ profile. The trait has four strands: first, there is the overt promotion of the group’s victimhood by the elite; second, there is the removal from public debate of criticism of the group, third, the operation of double standards when dealing with the “victim” group and the rest of the population and fourth, the creation of formal privileges (affirmative action) and covert privileges (equality laws).

American blacks are a prime example of what happens when a low IQ ethnic group exists within an advanced society and the reins of the high IQ majority are slackened. They have a much higher rate of anti-social behaviour now, especially in areas such as illegitimacy and single parenthood, than they did before Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation, a time of overt segregation in the South and widespread  racial  discrimination everywhere. The anti-social behaviour of blacks on average was higher than that of the majority white population even before the legislation in the 1960s, but their natural tendency to produce antisocial behaviour was restricted by the white majority behaviour which neither fed a sense of victimhood nor diminished the number of jobs most blacks could do by allowing vast immigration, increased imports and outsourcing. Nor was there the vast panoply of publicly funded support, both at the federal and state level, to make not working a viable proposition.

Regardless of race, the lower the IQ the more dependent a person is on the support of the group. Modern advanced societies, especially those in countries such as Britain and the USA, provide an ever weaker system of social support as the natural support groups from the family to a person’s social class are actively undermined by the trend towards greater general affluence and the increasing withdrawal of the state from the control of economic activity through their elites’ commitment to “globalism”, which  is  a curious hybrid of the laissez faire  version of internationalism which extols the free movement of goods and services and people and the Left Internationalist ideal of humanity as a single social entity. This elite commitment, seen in its most extreme form in Britain over the past quarter century, undermines the opportunities for those at the lower end of the IQ distribution to gain and hold a job which is within their capabilities and which can  provide them with an income which will allow them to live an independent life.

The opening of national markets to imports from lower cost countries such as China destroys home based manufacturing, which however efficient cannot compete with producers who pay a tiny fraction of what a Western employer must pay both in terms of wages and in meeting the other bureaucratically imposed costs such as those relating to social security and health and safety.

Added to cheap imports are the mass immigration of cheap labour and the export of jobs such as call centre posts to low cost countries such as India. (Generally, employers who have to compete globally are ruthless in cutting staff). Finally, in the name of removing protectionist behaviour, governments are prevented by the treaties they have themselves signed from subsidising employers in their own countries.

The other side of the disadvantage coin is the movement towards the dismantling of the Welfare State on the ostensible grounds that it is “too costly”. In reality, this mentality is the consequence of globalism, which has greatly reduced democratic control in the First World  by  weakening the position of labour through the lowering of protectionist  barriers and the cheap labour produced  by  mass immigration and by the committing of nation-states to international treaties which restrict national action and impinge upon the sense of ethnic solidarity.

Mass immigration provides not only immediately increased competition for scarce social goods, but causes a weakening of the will of the majority to support social provision because there is a reluctance to fund social goods for those who are seen as ethnically different.

The upshot of the weakening of social provision and individual ethnic help is, of course, an increased inability of those with weak IQs to live comfortably or fulfilling in an advanced society. At best they risk being reduced to permanent pensioners of the more intellectually able members of their society.

IQ and the position of ethnic minorities

Ethnic minorities have a built-in insoluble problem – the majority population will invariably resent their presence if the ethnic population is of a size which allows them to effectively colonise a territory – and that territory may be as small as a few streets – and to be visible as a distinct group.

Where this occurs the majority population will normally not feel any ethnic solidarity with the minority, while the ethnic minority will keep itself to itself. This will severely limit any assistance at the purely social level the majority gives to the ethnic minority populations. Where the minority is of a lower average IQ than the majority population they will not benefit from the help of the higher IQ majority in the same way that the lower IQ members of the high IQ majority are helped by higher IQ members of their own group.

The larger the minority group the more extreme its position will become, because the larger it is the easier it is for a member of the minority to live without having social inter-action with the majority population. This will make the majority population even less inclined to offer aid to members of the minority. As mentioned previously (see Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism), there is also solid evidence that the more racial and ethnically divided a society is, the less willing are its members, and particularly those of the majority group, to provide for social goods such as welfare or healthcare.

Because the low IQ minority has inadequate access to aid from those with higher IQs, as a group they will display a disproportionately high level of antisocial behaviour because they are less able to cope with the practical and psychological demands of a high IQ society. Being a low performing minority in a high IQ society also feeds the paranoia and victimhood of the minority, who tend to attribute their failure to succeed in the society to oppression and discrimination by the majority. They will make this attribution even when other higher IQ minorities in the society do succeed.

A higher IQ minority amidst a lower IQ majority is a much rarer phenomenon. The examples involving black majority populations are mostly restricted to colonial situations, whether past or extant, the most notable example being South Africa which is kept afloat as the most advanced state in black Africa by the white created infrastructure and continuing large-scale white involvement in the country.

Minorities of Ashkenazi Jews and Asians in Western countries have higher average IQs than the societies in which they live, but there are two important differences between their position and the position of whites in SA and their majority black population. The first is the fact that the difference between Ashkenazi Jews and Asians and that of the white majority population is nothing like as great as that between  blacks and whites. The second difference is that the white average IQ of 100 is adequate to create and sustain an advanced modern society.