Sasha Gusev is Wrong

After all these years, the Black-White IQ gap sure looks genetic.

Written by Bo Winegard.

He is wrong. But give him some credit. Unlike most racial egalitarians, Sasha Gusev supports his ad hominem attacks on hereditarians with arguments. While many of those arguments are fallacious or empirically dubious, they are still arguments, and arguments, unlike insults or moral denunciations, can be refuted.

In a recent example, Gusev reproved “racism Twitter” for asserting that observed racial differences in IQ and other traits are partially genetic in origin. He called this view “aggressively misleading” and claimed it was “completely unsupported by the data.” He then proceeded to offer several erroneous claims himself before advancing the implausible notion that education is the primary cause of the enduring Black–White IQ gap.

Here I respond, arguing that education, like the innumerable other environmental hypotheses proposed over the past sixty years, cannot account for the gap. Judged on weight of evidence, the environment-only theory of race differences is a spectacular failure, sustained largely by moral intimidation and other extra-scientific pressures. To be sure, hereditarianism may yet turn out to be false, but at present the cause of the IQ gap sure looks genetic. And there is little doubt that the unpopularity of hereditarianism among elites owes more to its incendiary implications than to its scientific shortcomings.

I begin with a brief summary of the topic of race differences in intelligence before moving to a more detailed refutation of Gusev’s arguments.