Which environmental factors explain the black–white IQ gap?

Environmentalists don't seem to know.

Written by Noah Carl.

Every so often, and it does happen to be quite often, an academic article is published that equates the hereditarian hypothesis with racism. The latest example is a paper by Kevin Lala and Marcus Feldman, which just came out in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, let me share a few quotations. Lala and Feldman refer to “racist claims of ubiquitous genetic differences between socially defined races”. Such claims, they argue, “help to perpetuate racist ideas”. They state that Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending’s theory of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence has “racist underpinnings”. Oh, and the paper itself is titled ‘Genes, culture, and scientific racism’.

According to Lala and Feldman, “there is no scientific evidence that supports the claims of Shockley, Jensen, Herrnstein, Murray, and other hereditarians that there are substantial genetic differences in intelligence between races”. So hereditarianism is not merely “racist”, but there is no scientific evidence that supports it – not a single piece, apparently.

Given how sweepingly Lala and Feldman dismiss hereditarianism, they must surely have a compelling alternative theory? They must have a large body of evidence that shows which specific environmental factor or factors explain racial IQ gaps? The problem is they don’t.¹