Are black people inherently less intelligent than those who are white?

It is taken for granted today that any differences in intelligence between ethnic groups must be a product of environment, rather than genes

It is today an article of faith, at least among all right-minded and progressive people, that any observed differences in intelligence between members of various ethnic groups must be caused by such things as education, social class, family income and other environmental factors. The very idea that such differences might be inherent is anathema to liberals and intellectuals. This orthodox view was championed with great vigour by the famous geneticist Richard Lewontin, who died in 2021. He was probably one of the best-known geneticists in the world.

     Richard Lewontin had been a professor at Harvard for almost half a century and was a staunch opponent of the idea of genetic determinism. In 1972 he published a paper which is still frequently quoted today, in which he expressed the view that there could be no such things as human races because the great majority of human genetic diversity, over 80 %, occurs within geographical groups, rather than between the traditional racial classifications (Lewontin, 1972). As a self-declared Marxist, Lewontin might in any case have been expected to be in favour of revolutionising society, but his political views were closely bound up with his scientific work, which caused him to assert warmly that differences in intelligence between different populations can all be explained by environment and that it is unnecessary to posit genetic effects relating to what he regarded as non-existent races. Since he was so enormously famous and such a great figure in his field, it is curious that Richard Lewontin found the need to try and mislead people about what he claimed are the facts relating to the inheritance of intelligence.

    One thing which almost everybody who wishes to advocate the view that nurture is all and nature of trifling significance when it comes to intelligence does is to deride IQ tests and suggest that they do not really measure intelligence at all. Professor Steve Jones, a British geneticist who also believes that the difference between races is trivial says rather sniffily,

     I have no idea whether IQ tests are an unbiased measure of intelligence: what

    they measure is, I hope, known to those who design them.

     (Jones, 1993)

Richard Lewontin is even more dismissive. He wrote,

     First, what do I.Q. tests actually measure? They are a combination of

     numerical, vocabulary, educational and attitudinal questions. They ask such

     things as “Who was Wilkins McCawber? (sic.)”,

     (Lewontin, 1991)

    Now this is very odd, one is tempted to say suspicious. Overlooking the fact that the one of the world’s great scientists was apparently unable to spell the name of a famous character from fiction, what are we to make of this passage? Do IQ tests really determine intelligence based upon a knowledge of nineteenth century literature? This is of course completely untrue. Black children in deprived parts of American cities are not being marked low in IQ tests because they have not read David Copperfield. This is a very neat bit of sleight of hand. What Richard Lewontin was trying to do was to explain the undeniable fact that black people in the United States have always, on average, scored lower than white people (Weis, 2020). One way of accounting for this is to try and trash IQ tests and suggest that they tell us nothing meaningful about intelligence. Claiming that they are geared to cater for what Lewontin described as, ‘the societal prejudices of educational institutions’ (Lewontin, 1991), is an excellent way of accomplishing this purpose. In the real world, IQ questions and the tests containing them are usually designed to be ‘culture fair’, that is to be independent of previous education. Typically, they entail such things as spotting patterns or mentally manipulating shapes to decide which two are identical or might fit into a certain space. Hidden away though within the text of the book from which these quotations is taken, a book about DNA aimed for the popular market and called The Doctrine of DNA, is an extraordinary admission which rather blows a hole in the denunciation of biological determinism. Talking of the IQ scores of adopted children, as they relate to the IQs of their biological parents, Lewontin has this to say,

     So biological parents are having some influence on the I.Q. of their children

     even though these children were adopted early, and putting aside the

     possibility of prenatal nutritional differences or extremely early stimulation, it

     would be reasonable to say that genes have some influence on I.Q. scores. We

     can only speculate about the source of the genetic influence. There is a

     premium on speed in I.Q. testing, and genes might have some influence on

     reaction times or general speed of central nervous processes.

     (Lewontin, 1991)

     The significance of these three sentences may not be immediately obvious. Lewontin is claiming three things. First, he is saying that part of our intelligence is inherited from our parents. Secondly, he tells us that we don’t know which genes are involved in this. Finally, and most strangely, he suggests that it could be something to do with genes making the central nervous system work more rapidly, as though this is no big deal. He then moves on without more ado to another subject.

      The central nervous system consists of the brain and spinal cord. Running from this is the peripheral nervous system, leading to the hands and feet. If, as Lewontin thinks may be possible, the increased score in IQ tests which is noticeable in the children of parents who have high IQs is caused by faster processing in the central nervous system, then he is presumably talking about the brain, rather than the spinal cord. In plain language, he is saying that these children may do well in IQ tests because they have inherited from their parents, brains which handle and process information more rapidly than some other people.

      If this is what is happening though, then it is of enormous significance and the fact that he mentions such an hypothesis in a throwaway remark of this sort tells us a good deal about his attitudes. For those among us who are not world-famous scientists, speed of processing information in the brain is a large part of what we mean by the word ‘intelligence’. It is for this reason that we talk of people who catch on immediately to a topic under discussion as being ‘quick-witted’. Conversely, those whose apprehension lags behind the rest of us are sometimes dismissed as being ‘slow’. It is after all a matter of common observation that intelligent people tend to understand new concepts in a shorter than average time and are also quicker off the mark in grasping the gist of an argument or solving mathematical or other problems. What Richard Lewontin writes casually of, ‘general speed of central nervous processes’, he is actually describing a large chunk of what differentiates the clever from the dull.

      At risk of labouring the point, if I ask two people to calculate 2 % of £415 and one glances at the figure and almost at once tells me that the answer is £8.30p, while the other sits scratching his head and after much laborious thinking, takes ten minutes to work out the result, am I not justified in suspecting that one might be brighter than the other? This is assuming of course that both individuals have received a similar secondary education up to the age of 16 or so and that there are no other obvious differences. Perhaps I try to explain an economic theory, such as the relationship of supply and demand and one person at once grasps what I am talking about, while the other has to mull the thing over for a quarter of an hour before it starts to make sense to him; is this significant when evaluating intelligence? Most ordinary people who do not happen to be Marxist geneticists would, one suspects, agree that this may be so.

     It might be helpful at this point to introduce a real-life case where tests of cognitive ability are administered, not for some arcane and purely academic purpose as is often the situation with IQ tests, but for practical reasons to sift out those who will be the best for a vitally important job. In this case, the tests are similar in some respects to the IQ tests which we have been discussing, but have been rigorously designed to be ‘culture fair’. This means that they do not depend on prior academic education beyond a rudimentary stage and require no extensive vocabulary or familiarity with the works of Charles Dickens.

     For the better part of six months in 2020, attempts were made by means of Freedom of Information requests to persuade Britain’s Royal Air Force to disclose the ethnicity of those who did well in the aptitude tests taken by those applying for admission and also to reveal which groups had not done so well. When, in December that year, the figures were finally released, it was very plain why there had been such a marked reluctance to let people see them. The tests themselves concerned things like spatial awareness, the ability to manipulate three-dimensional objects mentally; rotating them and working out where they would fit and so on. They had no connection with formal education and were not culturally biased. The scores in one, the BIS Test of Spatial Ability, taken by those who might wish to be gunners, police officers and lorry drivers, were fairly typical. Over five years, from 2015 to 2020, they were as follows,

     Any Chinese Background 60.1

     White British 55.4

     Asian Indian 50.1

     Mixed Black Caribbean And White 51.4

     Black Caribbean 44.0

     Black African 40.6    

    These scores align very closely with other tests, such as those for IQ, the Scholastic Aptitude Test used for admission to American universities and many others. Chinese people, as we would by now expect, came above everybody else. This will come as no surprise. Below the Chinese came white applicants and a little way below them were those whose families were from the Indian sub-continent (Daily Telegraph, 2020).  Looking at the scores for black people though shows something starkly, which is that the more black heritage a candidate had; the lower the score he achieved in the test. Candidates of mixed black Caribbean background, usually one black parent and one white came higher than black Caribbeans, who usually have some white ancestry. The lowest scores of all were by those whose background was entirely black African.

     It need hardly be said that the Royal Air Force, from whom these scores had to be prised as though from a closely shut-up oyster, was quick to respond with an orthodox explanation. A spokesman blamed ‘underlying inequality’ in education. This is however hardly convincing. Had the different black groups all received a different quality or standard of education from each other?  Did the young people of black African heritage go to schools inferior to those which the Caribbeans had attended? It must be borne in mind that all these groups had, by and large, grown up and been educated in Britain. Did the Chinese and white people all attend better schools? This argument would also have been more persuasive if the tests had entailed a knowledge of mathematics, English grammar or general knowledge. They did not. All they required was an ability to think clearly and logically. Any notion the tests could have been culturally biased in favour of Chinese and white people may also be abandoned. This might have been a reasonable point if one ethnic group consisted of illiterate Kalahari bushmen and another of middle-class citizens from a sophisticated city like New York, but all came from the same country.

     Any rational person who had not been indoctrinated into contemporary ways of thought and examined the raw data from the RAF aptitude tests without the filter of modern ideology and correctness of outlook would most probably assume that the Chinese were the brightest and most able and the black Africans the dullest in thinking skills. That most of us veer away from this simple view of the matter in favour of mysterious ‘underlying inequalities’ in education and indeed view the obvious answer to the conundrum as being disgusting and unacceptable tells us a great deal about the mores of the modern, Western world in the first decades of the twenty-first century, but nothing at all about why black people do not do well in objective tests of aptitude and intelligence.

     Thinking now about the orthodox perspective on a set of data such as these, it is difficult to understand how cultural and educational differences could explain what is seen. From the famous American anthropologist Ruth Benedict to Richard Lewontin, the same reason for these disparities is routinely trotted out. This is that environmental factors alone are sufficient to account for what is seen. When, in 1943, Ruth Benedict wrote about the very different scores achieved in intelligence tests by black and white recruits for the army, there was some reason for her to adopt this stance. She said,

     For instance, in the First World War, intelligence tests were given to the

     American Expeditionary Forces; they showed that Negroes made a lower score

     on intelligence tests than whites.

     (Benedict & Weltfish, 1943)

To Benedict, the reason for this could hardly have been plainer and she patronisingly pointed out to the soldiers of the Second World War for whom her views were intended in a pamphlet which she was writing,

     Everybody knows that Southerners are inbuilt equals of Northerners, but in

     1917 many southern states’ per capita expenditures for schools were only

      fractions of those in northern states, and housing and diet and income were 

      far below average too. Since the vast majority of Negroes lived in the South,

     their score on the intelligence test was a score they got not only as Negroes,

      but as Americans who had grown up under poor conditions in the South,

      (Benedict & Weltfish, 1943)

      All that Ruth Benedict writes here was perfectly true of the United States 80 years ago. Like many liberal and progressive people at that time she thought that once conditions had changed and the education and social standing of black people achieved parity with whites, then this would all fade away as a matter of course. This has not happened. The attainment gap in academic results, intelligence tests and so on has not vanished; it stubbornly remains.

     Thinking now about the Royal Air Force aptitude tests at which we looked above, we may say some things with assurance. All these applicants are likely to have attended the same kind of state school. It is unlikely in the extreme that any young person who had gone to a fee-paying school would have been applying for a technical position such as gunner or lorry driver. They would be almost certain to wish instead to become officers. These young people went to state schools and were all educated side by side in the same classrooms to the same National Curriculum which is mandated by law in Britain. The tests, which were culture fair, appeared to show that the more African heritage an applicant had, the lower the score which he or she would achieve. The highest score were achieved by those of Chinese ancestry. There can be little doubt that anybody viewing these results objectively, without their view being obscured by the modern horror and detestation of racism, would be very likely to assume that one could draw a provisional conclusion about the relative cognitive abilities of the ethnic groups involved.

    An increasing amount of data of this kind is coming to light in recent years and yet the standard view, that no difference exists between the average intelligence of different ethnic groups and human populations is, if anything, even more entrenched now than it was ten or twenty years ago. This resistance to examining new evidence is not unusual when one paradigm is under threat from a new one and this theme, that of a paradigm shift, is one I shall explore in a future article.

Benedict, Ruth; Weltfish, Gene (1943) The races of Mankind, New York: Public Affairs Committee.

Daily Telegraph (2020) Black applicants significantly more likely to fail RAF selection tests than white counterparts, The Daily Telegraph, 15/12/2020.

Jones, Steve (1993) The Language of Genes, London, HarperCollinsPublishers.

Lewontin, R (1972). The Apportionment of Human Diversity, Evolutionary Biology. 6: 391–398. doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-9063-3_14.

Lewontin R.C. (1991) Biology as Ideology, Toronto: Anansi Press.

Weiss, L. (2020) A-07 Race, SES, and IQ Test Score Differences: The Case for Social Justice, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, Volume 35, Issue 6, September 2020, Page 780.