Race and Intelligence

Ever since the dawn of nationalism, there has been a tendency among some people to try to prove that their nationality is the smartest. When genes were discovered, this inevitably led these people to argue for genetic superiority. (Before it was “blood.”)

I feel like this was mostly a fringe argument until the internet made it possible for anyone and everyone to spread their opinions. We’ve all seen versions of this argument online, and some of us have even been exposed to it in academic.

This is my most recent experience of it:

(I apologize for linking to Twitter.)

And now some of the people who believe that “white” people are genetically superior are friendly with the powerful in the US, if not outright in positions of power.

I shouldn’t need to explain how dangerous that is. We have a lot of history to show how dangerous this belief is.

But what I never see when I see people arguing, subtly or outright, that “white” people are superior is what the mechanism is. What could cause skin colour and intelligence to be associated with each other?

Note: I am not a scientist and have not studied genetics or IQ. But the internet tells us gatekeepers are bad and limit intellectual discussion so here I am wading into this.

I think this is all kind of farcical, without even thinking about the genetics sie,In this diassumptions I see made all the time which because:

• “race” is a made up concept that predates our knowledge of genetics

• human intuitions about difference predate our knowledge of genetics

• (American) racial categories make absolutely zero sense and are not actually based on facial characteristics so claiming that there are links between IQ tests and “race” is nonsense.

Races Don’t Exist

The idea of multiple races within humanity seems to have been invented in the 18th century whereas the term wasn’t used for biology until the 19th century.

Genetics as a science was pioneered in 1865 around 100 years after the idea of race was probably invented. And, of course, Mendel was ignored for decades and it wasn’t until the 1940s that DNA was discovered.

That very simply means that, because the idea of race was invented before human beings understood inheritance, race is a human invention.

Certainly there’s a possibility that the people who invented the idea of multiple human races could have guessed right about inheritance without knowing the science. It’s possible, sure. Is it plausible?

Fear of Difference is Ancient

As far as we know, humans have always been afraid of The Other.

And this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Fearing people from another tribe was probably quite prudent. It was likely a huge advantage for cultures/tribes who had an ingrained fear of difference over those that didn’t simply because it would be easier for an adversary to trick a culture/tribe with a lower fear of difference.

A very simple theory would be that tribes/cultures that nurtured the intuitive fear of difference (different language, different appearance, different dress) had more overall success than those that discouraged the intuitive fear of difference and welcomed any and all strangers. I have no idea if how that’s what actually happened. But, if it did happen that way, it happened for hundreds of thousands of years.

Notably, it happened for hundreds of thousands of years before humans understood inheritance in a scientific way. Meaning we were all really scared of difference well before we could show how inheritance works.

It feels like it’s pretty much impossible to avoid bias here. Of course humans learning about genetics would think there’s going to be genetic proof that The Other is different than Us. That’s natural because that’s what humans grew to believe. As much as we have such a high opinion of ourselves, that we believe we are interested in the truth, the vast majority of us are interested in confirming our biases. We believe there are big differences between Us and The Other for our entire existence, we are therefore highly motivated to prove those differences using Science.

But it’s only with the invention of race that The Other became whole swathes of humanity who look vaguely similar - ish (with ish doing a lot of work here) - and not just the enemy across the border. And it’s the invention of race plus the fear of difference that has motivated people for hundreds of years to try to prove there is a difference in intelligence between Us and Them.

Even though humans are 99.9% similar to each other genetically.

Ancient Intuitions are Not Always Good Intuitions

Intuition is important. Anyone who has ever had a gut feeling that proved true knows this. Anyone who has felt like they needed to leave a place, left, and then heard something bad happened knows this.

Anyone who has ever reacted to something without thinking, resulting in a good outcome knows this. Anyone who has pulled a kid out of a pool before even realizing the kid was in trouble knows this.

But of course intuitions can also be bad. We just usually ignore that. We don’t remember when our gut feelings don’t pan out, when they’re wrong.

I’m an agnostic but I tell people I’m an atheist. I have no idea what caused the universe. I tell people who are religious or spiritual I’m an atheist because, if I say I’m agnostic, they assume I am open to the possibility that a monotheistic god exists. (Somehow nobody I know ever seems to assume this means I’m open to polytheism. I wonder why that is…) This is basically not true, though. I cannot prove that a monotheistic god doesn’t exist but it might as well not exist for my purposes.

The universe is over 13 billion years old. The earth is 4 billion years old. Homo sapiens are over 300,000 years old. The idea that a monotheistic god created a universe that ran for 10 billion years in order to produce a planet which could support life and then ran for another 4 billion years to eventually produce a species which, through slow evolution, emerged in that god’s image is utterly preposterous, to me. I do not claim to know what caused the universe or to even have the faintest idea. But, for me, the likelihood that it could be a monotheistic god as imagined by ancient humans is so close to zero as to render the odds essentially zero.

(To put it another way, how my friend would: I agree with religious people that all other gods but theirs don’t exist. I just go one step farther and don’t think their god exists either.)

Though many people (most people?) won’t agree with me, I think this is basically settled. I think there is no proof of the existence of a monotheistic god. (For me to change my mind, I would have to see a miracle so obvious, so unambiguous, it would far exceed any “miracle” I’ve heard of. It would likely have to consist of god talking to me directly, and me having the opportunity to record it so I have proof not just for others but, especially, for myself later on.)

What does this have to do with the claim that some races are smarter than others?

I suspect most people strongly disagree with me about the nonexistence of (a monotheistic) god. I suspect most people feel that this cannot be true. Some of these people have spent a long time attempting (and I would say failing) to prove that (a monotheistic) god exists, even though there is no, and has never been, any evidence of a (monotheistic) god. They feel this way because they were taught to feel this way: by their parents, by their friends, by authority figures in their childhood and adulthood, and by society at large. (We know this because, of course, there are plenty of societies now and throughout history who do not believe in a monotheistic god. Until they encountered Christians or Muslims or Jews, the idea was preposterous to them.)

Monotheistic religion comes from a long history, starting int something like the 14th century BCE. It is an ancient intuition about the nature of the universe that has been repeated, altered, and reified throughout history. (It is not as ancient as polytheism, another ancient intuition which I believe is also totally incorrect.) We believe in (a monotheistic) god because we are taught to, because our parents were taught to, and their parents were taught to, and so on, back for millennia. In addition, huge amounts of effort have been made to “prove” that this intuition is correct. I can’t conceive of the number of words written and spoken throughout the existence of our species in defense of the idea of the existence of (a monotheistic) god.

But this belief is not correct and no argument to prove it correct has ever succeeded, except among those (a majority) who want to believe that it is true. If you believe, there’s nothing I will ever be able to do to change your mind.

I think that the fear of difference is a similar intuition to the belief that there must have been a cause (or causes) to the universe which cared about humans specifically, more than any other species.

Like the fear of difference, it may have been an evolutionary advantage in the past. (Belief in the supernatural in general, not monotheism specifically).

Like the fear of difference, it completely predates our scientific understanding of the universe. Specifically in the case of religion, we knew absolutely nothing about how anything worked outside are atmosphere as we couldn’t see outside it. (This is a little different than inheritance, as there were credible guesses about how people inherited traits whereas there weren’t really credible guesses about the nature of the universe.)

The difference between the belief in (a monotheistic) god and the belief in there being some kind of essential difference between Us and Them is that, while there will likely never be enough science to prove the non-existence of (a monotheistic) god, there is plenty of science that strongly suggests there are only minor differences between Us and Them.

In both cases,though, many of us are slaves to our ancient intuitions. Even though it is natural to be slaves to these intuitions, we shouldn’t be. Especially when we were making claims which are dangerous. Alas, this is what people do.

IQ Studies and American Racial Categories

People will tell you that there is a robust relationship between race and IQ in the United States. There are books about it. Some people, including some really smart people I trust and agree with on some things, believe this is true.

But I’ve never seen a deeper explanation for this supposed relationship between race and IQ which deals with the elephant in the room, the one that Americans cannot see for some reason.

That elephant is that American racial categories are complete nonsense. As in, they make absolutely zero sense. They are not based on anything biological, but rather based on some vague physical similarities and, arguably worse, they have changed over time.

Here they are, as of 2024:

• American Indian or Alaska Native

• Asian

• Black or African American

• Hispanic or Latino

• Middle Eastern or North African

• Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander

• White or European American.

This is just the latest list, a list that has changed multiple times throughout the history of the US, which wouldn’t be possible if races were objective reality. I’m sure you can see some problems. Here are some obvious ones:

• “White or European American” includes all white people except the Spanish and the descendants of the Spanish and the Portuguese whose ancestors interbred with natives everywhere in the Americas except British, French and Dutch colonies.

• “Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander” are their own race now but weren’t in the past.

• “Middle Eastern or North African” are their own race now too, and this seems to mean Arabs (and presumably Israelis). Does anyone know if it includes Turks or Persians? Shouldn’t that be obvious? What if you are from North Africa but black?

• “Hispanic or Latino” means that the Spanish are not white nor is anyone whose family used to be Spanish, immigrated to the Americas, and then interbred with the natives enough to look “Latino.” (Latino apparently now includes Brazilians which is why there is a distinction between Hispanic and Latino. I suspect that, before there was much Brazilian immigration to the US, Latino did not include Brazilians.)

• “Black or African American” includes anyone who is descended from African slaves or anyone from sub-Saharan Africa who cannot pass for another racial category. This is a pretty key issue as anyone who “looks black” is black in the US, at least culturally. (In a self-defining survey, presumably people who look mixed might claim to be white or from some other group but it’s unlikely they are treated that way outside of the census. I knew someone in university who was like the reverse of the Human Stain. He looked mixed but he was white. In the US, he would have been “black.”)

• “Asian” includes everyone from the rather large continent of Asia except for people from the Middle East. (Again, not sure where Turkey or Iran fall here.) This is the most absurd category as anyone who has ever met or seen pictures of people from Turkey, Iran India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan and the Indonesian side of New Guinea, which we’ve for some reason decided is in Asia, can tell you. These people do not look alike! They do not sound alike! They are not one “race.” This is the category that proves the lie definitely: it’s a lazy geographical grouping, all the more lazy because Europe and Asia aren’t really separate continents except through historical convention. (Another false old belief.)

• “American Indian or Alaskan Native”: I only list here for completeness sake and to point out yet another insane historical legacy as we all know “American Indians” are not from India and yet! We will not call them by their real names.

This is…totally obviously the product of historical contingency (accident) and nothing else, right?

• The Spanish are not less white than the (non-Brazilian) Portuguese, the Italians and the Greeks, are they? (Well, none of them used to be white except the northern Italians…)

• There’s no way on a census of determining how much or little someone’s ancestors interbred, whether it’s Spanish (and Portuguese) with natives or whether it’s anyone with Africans. And skin colour does not show this no matter how hard some people want to believe that.

• Using geography to delineate large races of the world leads to absurdity pretty quickly, especially in Asia (where there are many different skin colours) and Africa (where there are, at the very least, two different ones).

• Similarly, using geography to create these mini races also leads to absurdity. For example, is an aboriginal from Australia part of the same race as a Samoan?

• If the written description of the race cannot even capture where that race is from (“American Indian”) what possible value is there in that racial category?

• If anyone whose skin colour is a little bit different than what it’s supposed to be can pass as a another “race,” what does that tell us about the racial category?

• Humans have never stopped breeding with each other, even since a bunch of Europeans invented racial categories to try to break them up into large groups so there will always be a) a bunch of people who self-identify as belonging to two or more of whatever groups we invent and b) a bunch of people who “should” belong to one or more groups we invent but don’t know they do because they and their parents don’t look enough like the group they are “supposed” to belong to.

So any studies that purport to show a relationship between these racial categories, or rather past racial categories, and IQ, are bunk. It’s a correlation between made up categories of people, which have extremely fluid borders, change meaning over time, and which do not actually represent commonly held physical differences, and IQ scores. Specifically in the US, which makes the whole thing even shakier. (Why should the US and its bizarre ideas of “race” be a proxy for the world? Why should any argument about race from the United States be acceptable outside of the United States?)

Races Don’t Exist, Ethnicities Do

Of course there are differences between people, but we have a concept for that which at least makes some sense, and that isn’t race. It’s ethnicity. It combines the human love for pointing out and sorting people by physical differences with common language, culture, nationality or religion.

So “white American” and “black American” or “African American” are ethnicities. “Latino American” is an ethnicity at this point.

(I do want to note that my text editor, which is made by Americans, does not treat “ethnicities” as a real word. This shows how dominate the American racial view is in the English language.)

People are trying very hard to convince all the different people in the US who are from Asia or descended from Asians that “Asian American” is an ethnicity but how could it be? Even between people Americans can’t tell apart, there are big cultural differences, which is why it makes way, way more sense to think about the Japanese as distinct from Koreans and to view the Chinese as not monolithic, but rather a group of different ethnicities. And that’s just (north) east Asia.

I suppose data that showed an obvious correlation between IQ scores around the world and a lot of ethnicities would be compelling evidence of a kind. But I’m not sure.

And I’m not sure because I think even ethnicity isn’t really a great category.

There is no ethnic group you can look at a photo of a sufficiently large number of members of, or a sufficiently large meeting of, and just say “the are all obviously X” without actually speaking to them. Physical characteristics, on which most of our ideas of difference are based, are not sufficient to identify an ethnic group.

Particulate inheritance means that there will always be children who express certain genes differently than their parents or their siblings. Sometimes these genes will be tied to physical appearance. So even if there was some ethnic group which only ever interbred and never ever bred with people from other ethnic groups, some children would still look different.

People have sex. The marry. They have children. Some of these children in every ethnic group do not sufficiently look like the other members of the ethnic group, they look like an Other. This has always happened.

Moreover, especially now that most of us are easily connected by air travel, more people than ever are having sex and marrying and having children with people from other ethnic groups.

But even before air travel that happened all the time.

There is no such thing as a pure ethnic group. And even if you could somehow find one, there would still be the odd child who looked “unpure”.

So just as there is no such thing as a pure race, if race were a thing that existed - a supra-category of ethnic groups - instead of being something just made up because people are lazy.

(And why should anyone be so desperate as to try to find all the minute differences in intelligence between the hundreds or thousands of ethnic groups in the world? What is the point?)

No, It’s Not Culture

As an aside: one of the things I’ve seen among the people who are desperate to prove a link between physical appearance and intelligence is a “pivot to culture” when they are confronted with too many problems in their original theory.

This position strikes me as untenable for at least two reasons:

• Culture is even more amorphous than physical appearance - which can at least be measured - so how could you possibly prove a link between culture and intelligence?

• The people who fall back on culture, who move the goalposts of the argument from physical appearance to culture, completely contradict themselves. First, it’s nature over nurture: physical appearance is proof of lower (or higher intelligence). Then, it’s nurture completely over nature: culture is the cause of lower (or higher) intelligence. It’s entirely possible (though not plausible, in my opinion) that physical appearance or culture or both could correlate with intelligence. But it’s extremely implausible that it’s one or the other and it’s a pretty obvious sign of someone who is being disingenuous, and who is just racist, if they pivot from arguing completely for a nature not nurture argument only to fall back on a nurture over nature argument.

I don’t need to worry about the argument any more. It’s not serious.

Ahem.

Anyway, all of this is what we might call the naive argument against a link between appearance and intelligence. I think it’s good enough but obviously many people do not agree with me because there are all these people on the internet arguing that there is a genetic link between physical appearance and intelligence. Somehow genetics confirms our ancient intuitions about the differences between Us and Them.

What are the Odds the Same Set of Genes Causes Skin Colour and IQ?

Knowing what we know about how complicated this all is - how someone’s ethnicity is a mixture of physical and cultural characteristics and how they might have parents or, especially, grandparents from other ethnicities - how can we possibly believe that our intuition that physical appearance (skin colour/hair texture/face shape) means something is correct?

What are the odds that ancient humans who saw people who didn’t look like them for the first time were correct in believing themselves to be superior?

What are the odds that Europeans in the 15th through 19th centuries were correct in believing that everyone they encountered who didn’t look or sound or dress like them were intellectually inferior?

I don’t think the odds are high. And I think we have plenty of evidence throughout the last 500 years to show that they are not high.

But, putting that aside, I think it’s simpler than that: I just don’t understand what the mechanism would be that would like obvious external physical characteristics like skin coulour (a product of living in warmer climates) or hair colour, texture and appearance, or facial shape would be tied directly to brain function. What possibly evolutionary advantage would that be?

What is the fucking Mechanism?

Of course I don’t mean how people procreate. (Yuk yuk yuk.) What I mean is, what is it in the human body that would cause a person’s intelligence and their skin colour (or the wiriness of their hair or their peculiar facial features or the shape of their skulls…) to be connected so that it would a) show up at the population level on IQ tests and b) consistently show up in individuals?

Hand-waving “genes” is not an explanation. Genes are very complicated and we know individual genes do not cause individual traits. That just not how genes work.

So, if you want to argue that there is a genetic reason for one “race” to be intellectually superior or inferior to another “race,” you have to argue that a set of genes - not just one - causes both intelligence and skin colour (or whatever physical characteristic you’ve deemed the determinant of “race”).

And that’s just a totally crazy idea, right? What are the odds a set of genes would be cause an external physical feature and the level of intelligence at the population level?

I think it’s much more likely that we may never fully sort out the stew of genes. But, if we did, wouldn’t it be more likely one set of genes contribute to intelligence and another, different but somewhat overlapping set of genes contribute to external physical characteristics? (And if that’s the case, as I suspect, how much of the Venn diagram would these groups of genes share? What is the likelihood it’s over 50%?)

If that’s true, then there’s no argument, right? Because human beings are all extremely genetically similar and everyone will have some combination of all of these genes. And because particulate inheritance determines our genes, whatever causal link between broad, observed differences in population characteristics - however we categorize that population - and individuals is even more tenuous.

Without knowing anything at all about my grandparents and great grandparents, how can you argue I’m dumber than you because of my skin colour or my male pattern baldness?

The Burden of Proof is on the Racists

I don’t actually believe everyone who claims there is a relationship between “race” or ethnicity and intelligence is a racist, though those who believe they are just following the evidence are being unwitting tools of racists.

But I do think that, if you want to allege a causal relationship between skin colour, or some other external physical characteristic that just happens to conform to historical human prejudices (what a coincidence!) with intelligence, the burden of proof is entirely on you, and not on those who claim there is no relationship, or there isn’t a strong relationship.

To me, this claim of a link between physical appearance and intelligence is an extraordinary one and so it requires extraordinary evidence. It’s extraordinary because of how lazy it is and how dangerous it could be if it was somehow believed by enough people.

To be clear, I’m not super worried anyone is ever going to find a direct causal link. I just think it’s extremely unlikely. It’s not Christian/Muslim/Jewish god unlikely, but it’s unlikely.

It’s unlikely because genes and inheritance are not that simple.

It’s unlikely because the interaction between biology and culture is not at all simple.

It’s unlikely because humans are all one species, we share our genes.

It’s unlikely because our fears of difference are just an evolutionary and cultural legacy, they’re not based in biological reality.

Stop Falling For It

All I really want to say is that, if you are a well-intentioned person, who is interested in heritability, and interested in genetics, stop falling for this crap. Until there is an actual biological link between skin colour (or face shape or hair texture or whatever) and intelligence, stop humouring the people who claim that some IQ test study somewhere proves it. It doesn’t. It can’t. So stop sharing it, stop promoting it, stop discussing it. You’re only helping the racists.