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Chanda Chisala – A Troublesome Intelligence?

Summary:
Could the research carried out by hereditarians be pseudoscience, and that there is not much difference in the potential of I.Q between the different races after all?  Every truly scientific proposition offers some clear empirical conditions under which it would be falsified; otherwise, it would have to be shelved under the mystical field of unfalsifiable pseudoscience. For the racial genetic hypothesis (the proposition that test score differences between blacks and whites are in part rooted in racial genetic differences), Professor Richard Lynn provided this scientific veneer by challenging opponents to find a single society where blacks do not appear to be clearly less intelligent than whites on any societal metric of intelligence. He gave further reasoning for this bold universal

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Could the research carried out by hereditarians be pseudoscience, and that there is not much difference in the potential of I.Q between the different races after all? 

Every truly scientific proposition offers some clear empirical conditions under which it would be falsified; otherwise, it would have to be shelved under the mystical field of unfalsifiable pseudoscience. For the racial genetic hypothesis (the proposition that test score differences between blacks and whites are in part rooted in racial genetic differences), Professor Richard Lynn provided this scientific veneer by challenging opponents to find a single society where blacks do not appear to be clearly less intelligent than whites on any societal metric of intelligence. He gave further reasoning for this bold universal condition:
If only environmental factors were responsible for the different IQs of different populations, we should expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans. The failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor.” Richard Lynn.

Well, it seems that God truly does have a sense of humor. It turns out that we did not need to look further than Richard Lynn’s own multiracial home of Britain to find the falsification that he proposed for the racial genetic hypothesis.
Although some hereditarians had already noticed some troubling signs (for their hypothesis) that the black African kids in the UK appeared to be at worst only about 8 IQ points below white children (instead of at least 20 to 30 points expected by racial IQ hereditarians), my humble contribution to the debate was to note that Africans were almost always lumped together into the ‘black African’ group when doing such comparisons. This concealed the real picture of how certain nationalities that were migrating from English-speaking African countries to the UK were actually already outperforming the British whites. On the face of it, it does not seem useful to lump English-exposed Nigerian or Ghanaian immigrant children, for example, with children of Somali refugees fleeing much worse humanitarian emergencies in Africa, especially without any prior exposure to the English language.
Murray Doesn’t Know This?
I was therefore surprised to recently notice on Twitter that Charles Murray, the author of the infamous ‘Bell Curve’ book, apparently does not know about this ‘troublesome’ performance of black African school children in the UK. In his tweet claiming confirmation of the traditional white-black gap in UK schools, he too makes the mistake of looking only at the combined “black” group, which not only lumps together all the different African nationalities, but even throws in the blacks from the Caribbeans, who have much lower scores than black Africans. Furthermore, he seems to be convinced that if we ever looked at mean test scores instead of things like “pass rates”, we would notice an even bigger gap between black and white children in favor of the latter, a gap that should theoretically be even bigger than the black-white test score gap in the US (since blacks in America, having more white genes in them, are said to have an IQ of 85 whereas the blacker people of sub-Saharan Africa have IQ 70).
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Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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