The Race Denialists are at it again. Black academic Tyler Austin Harper [Email him] (right) has attacked Richard Hanania’s new book The Origins of Woke as an “intellectual and moral failure,” in part because it has highlighted black-white differences in IQ [An Intellectual and a Moral Failure, The Atlantic, September 18, 2023]. It was the elite Leftist magazine’s second attack on Hanania: staff writer Adam Serwer (black and Jewish) targeted him three days earlier in a broadside against The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again. But as VDARE.com’s Steve Sailer has observed, the black-white IQ gap is probably “the best documented finding in US social science.”
Now a new study from A Genetic Hypothesis for American Race/Ethnic Differences in Mean g [Mankind Quarterly, June 2023] proves again that it really matters.
The term “g” stands for “general intelligence,” which underlies verbal, spatial and mathematical intelligence. It explains why people who score highly in one kind of intelligence test usually score highly on the others. It is strongly genetic.
The study was published in the “controversial” Mankind Quarterly—likely, in part, because the better-known journals have been hijacked by Woke activists pretending to be scholars.
Drawing upon the “Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study,” which sampled more than 10,000 Americans, the authors carefully examined the relationship between self/parental-identified race or ethnicity (called SIRE in the jargon) and key variables. These included the intelligence test administered as part of cognitive study. The authors also explored race differences in many other brain-related measures.
To say that the authors refuted the claims that “race is a social construct,” or that “race differences in IQ score are environmental” is almost too charitable. They annihilated those claims, and showed that the cognitive differences between the races are strongly genetic.
There was “measurement invariance” across the different groups in its sample of diverse European ancestries. In statistics, this means that the same trait—such as intelligence—was measured in all of the European-ancestry samples. Cultural differences could have played no role in making the test unfair to one group but not another.
The authors’ key finding: The more genetic European admixture a non-white had, the more intelligent they tended to be, and these intelligence differences were on g.
One thing about the claims made in the article is all the wrangling between races, tribes and ethnicities is going to disappear as soon as we start having large numbers of digital babies—that is, babies whose parents have selected a large proportion of their genes, a proportion large enough to guarantee high intelligence among many other desirable traits. When this tech is widely available, some parents may still opt for Darwinian chance evolution for their offspring but most will not.
Given the choice of having a genetically super fit and intelligent child for sure or a Darwinian coin-toss kid, most will want the guaranteed smart and healthy one. This constitutes beneficent and beneficial eugenics. No one will be forced to go either way, but the consequences of choosing Darwinian evolution over controlled eugenics will become obvious within a single generation.
Of course human-controlled eugenic evolution could turn out badly, as is true for all new technologies. But there is no doubt we will see enormous improvements in what humans can do in this area within the next few decades. Within 100 years and probably much less, off-body gestation of digital babies will change the entire landscape of human tribalism, pride, competition and so on. I believe there is a very good chance highly intelligent humans produced by voluntary eugenics will look back on us and our concerns today as the last gasps of their selfish, violent, and often grotesque human ancestry. ABN
American Buddhist Net 