The case for environmentalism

... made by a hereditarian.

Written by Lipton Matthews.

As is typical for mainstream media articles on race and IQ, The Guardian condescendingly reports that hereditarian explanations have been “debunked over and over again”. To appear credible, the piece draws on the expertise of Professor Andrew Winston. Yet in his comments that were quoted, Winston simply reiterated the alleged wrongness of hereditarianism:

This kind of race science keeps coming back into the mainstream, gets criticised heavily, and then diminishes it for a bit, perhaps, and then returns in some new form, depending on the general context.

In fact, in the whole piece, not a single study or piece of evidence is cited in support of environmentalism. Given how thoroughly the hereditarian theory has supposedly been refuted, the Guardian and its preferred experts should find it easy to list studies that back up their claims.

I have been interested in the debate surrounding race and IQ for some time, and find myself more convinced by hereditarianism. However, I am aware of many studies that seem to buttress the environmentalist theory. In the remainder of this article, I will take an environmentalist perspective and discuss some of the studies the Guardian could have mentioned.

Distinguished psychologist John C. Loehlin and co-authors in their thoroughly researched 1976 book Race Differences In Intelligence pinpointed weaknesses in the hereditarian theory.

Although the team observed that there was a positive association between IQ and skin colour in America’s black population, this was found to be lower than expected and explainable by cultural factors. Moreover, their analyses of admixture studies yielded a negligible relationship between cognitive ability and blood group genes likely to be of European origin. Black students with exceptional IQs were not more likely to possess more European ancestry.  And children of mixed unions demonstrated higher intelligence if the mother was white, suggesting a maternal rather than genetic effect.¹

In another landmark study frequently invoked by anti-hereditarians, psychologists found that 4-year-old children of white mothers and black fathers scored higher on the Stanford-Binet IQ test than the children of black mothers and white fathers. This finding puzzled the researchers due to the absence of significant disparities in the perinatal environments associated with white versus black mothers. The researchers also ruled out selection bias, observing that the interracial couples with white mothers had similar socio-economic characteristics to those with black mothers. Instead, the authors concluded that the higher average score of the better performing group ‘likely rests on postnatal environmental influences.’

More recent findings are also damaging to the hereditarian position. A 1986 adoption study revealed that black children adopted and raised by white families had substantially higher IQs than those adopted and raised by black families, which suggests that the white family environment confers advantages that boost IQ.

Likewise, in a 2007 study, Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt theorized that IQ gaps should emerge early if their origins are genetic. Yet analyzing the results of mental tests for children ranging from eight to twelve months, they found that racial differences in outcomes were very small. The researchers concluded that differences in children’s environments between racial groups can fully explain IQ gaps.

Objections to hereditarian arguments have also been advanced by the physicist Drew Thomas. Unconvinced that IQ gaps were genetic, he re-analyzed adoption data showing that black adoptees raised by whites have lower IQs than white adoptees raised by whites. Thomas found that when he adjusted for attrition in the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, most of the disadvantage among black adoptees disappeared.

Andrew Colman is another psychologist who has argued the evidence is not consistent with hereditarianism. In a 2016 paper criticising the work of Hans Eysenck, he quotes a leading textbook on population genetics:

Sometimes the argument is made that because a trait is heritable within two different populations that differ in their mean trait value, then the average trait differences between the populations are also influenced by genetic factors (e.g., Herrnstein and Murray 1994). Because heritability is a within-population concept that refers to variances and not to means, such an argument is without validity. Indeed, heritability is irrelevant to the biological causes of mean phenotypic differences between populations. (Templeton, 2006, p. 285)

Bringing together several lines of evidence, Colman contends that racial differences in intelligence are due to socio-economic background, as well as educational, demographic, and cultural factors. Interestingly, he even entertains the possibility that lower scores among blacks are due to a cultural ethos that devalues cognitive stimulation – a theory to which the late James Flynn subscribed.

Meanwhile, the psychologist Richard Nisbett has countered the hereditarian claim that the failure of academic interventions implies a genetic basis for the black-white IQ gap. In a scholarly article responding to Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, Nisbett cites a number of reports showing that interventions actually do increase IQ scores. Hereditarian arguments are introduced by Nisbett throughout the article and then refuted with reference to specific studies. Based on the breadth of samples and methodologies in the studies he cites, it would be difficult to posit that he cherry-picked research favorable to environmentalism.

Additional evidence against the hereditarian position has been supplied by the evolutionary biologist Kevin Bird. In a recent article, he carried out several tests for natural selection using education polygenic scores for Africans and Europeans. Bird found no evidence that diversifying selection shaped the cognitive ability of African and European populations. Rather, he discovered that the difference in mean IQ was substantially smaller than predicted by hereditarians.

Many other studies favourable to environmental explanations exist. Hence environmentalists should never resort to ad hominem attacks since they can easily counter hereditarian arguments with scholarly material.

The inability to engage hereditarians on a scholarly level indicates that journalists are either ignorant, lazy or doubt the validity of studies touting environmental explanations for racial IQ differences. The first two are certainly plausible.

Lipton Matthews is a research professional and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute, The Epoch Times, Chronicles, Intellectual Takeout, American Thinker and other publications. His email address is: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

1. Of course, contemporary admixture studies have found somewhat different results.