2006, Richard Lynn, 'Race Differences in Intelligence'
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Richard Lynn RACE DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE Christopher Brand (left) and Richard Lynn Race Differences in Intelligence An Evolutionary Analysis Richard Lynn WashingtonSummit Publishers Augusta, GA A National Policy Institute Book 2006 © 2006 by Richard Lynn For Joyce Sei il mio amor e tutta la mia vita (You are my love and my whole life) Mimi - La Boheme, Act V C O N T E N T S Chapter 1. The Meaning and Measurement of Intelligence .................................................................... 3 Chapter 2. The Meaning and Formation of Races................................................................................... 7 Chapter 3. Europeans ............................................................................................................................ 14 Chapter 4. Africans................................................................................................................................22 Chapter 5. Bushmen and Pygmies......................................................................................................... 49 Chapter 6. South Asians and North Africans ........................................................................................ 53 Chapter 7. Southeast Asians.................................................................................................................. 65 Chapter 8. Australian Aborigines.......................................................................................................... 68 Chapter 9. Pacific Islanders................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter 10. East Asians......................................................................................................................... 80 Chapter 11. Arctic Peoples.................................................................................................................... 98 Chapter 12. Native Americans ............................................................................................................ 101 Chapter 13. Reliability and Validity of Race Differences in Intelligence........................................... 109 Chapter 14. Environmental and Genetic Determinants of Race Differences in Intelligence .............. 118 Chapter 15. The Evolution of Intelligence .......................................................................................... 127 Chapter 16. Climate, Race, Brain Size, and Intelligence .................................................................... 134 Chapter 17. The Evolution of Race Differences in Intelligence.......................................................... 145 Appendix. Intelligence Tests............................................................................................................... 160 References ........................................................................................................................................... 163 2 Chapter 1. The Meaning and Measurement of Intelligence 1. Definition of Intelligence 2. The Hierarchical Model of Intelligence 3. The IQ 4. Flynn Effects Race differences in intelligence began to be analyzed scientifically in the middle years of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, Samuel Morton (1849) in the United States assembled a col- lection of skulls, measured their volume, and calculated that Europeans had the largest brains followed by Chinese, Malays, and Native American Indians, while Africans and finally Aus- tralian Aborigines had the smallest brains. He concluded that these differences in brain size accounted for the race differences in intelligence. A similar view was advanced a few years later in France by Paul Broca (1861, p. 304): "in general, the brain is larger in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior than in inferior races." About the same time Fran- cis Galton (1969) in England arrived at the same conclusion by a different route. He assessed the intelligence of the races by the numbers of geniuses they produced in relation to the size of their populations. He concluded that the Greeks of classical Athens were the most intelli- gent people, followed in descending order by the lowland Scots, the English, the Africans, and the Australian Aborigines. In the twentieth century this question continued to be debated. The intelligence test was con- structed by Alfred Binet in France in 1905. It was translated into English by Lewis Terman (1916) at Stanford University and later in the century a number of other intelligence tests were constructed. This made it possible to measure and compare the intelligence of the various races and by the end of the twentieth century many hundreds of studies had been published on this issue. Most of these have been concerned with the difference between blacks and whites in the United States, but studies have also been made of the intelligence of peoples in virtually every part of the world. For the difference between blacks and whites in the United States, the most authoritative studies are by Shuey (1966), who summarized all the studies from World War I up to 1965, Osborne and McGurk (1982), who updated this summary to 1980, Loehlin, Lindzey, and Spuhler's Race Differences in Intelligence (1975), Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994), and a series of publications by Jensen culminating in The g Factor (1998). There has been some interest in the intelligence of the Chinese and Japanese, which was re- viewed by Vernon in The Abilities and Achievements of Orientals in North America (1982). A number of studies of the intelligence of Africans, Caucasians, and East Asians have been summarized by Rushton in Race, Evolution and Behavior (2000). All of these studies have been concerned with two problems. These are the evidence on race differences in intelligence, and the degree to which these differences are determined by genetic and environmental fac- tors. It is widely accepted that race differences in intelligence exist, but no consensus has emerged on whether these have any genetic basis. All those named above have argued that there is some genetic basis for race differences. However, a number of authorities have con- cluded that there is no compelling evidence for genetic factors. This position has been adopted by Flynn in his Race, IQ and Jensen (1980), Brody in Intelligence (1992), and Mackintosh in IQ and Human Intelligence (1998). The present book differs from previous studies in four respects. It is the first fully comprehen- sive review that has ever been made of the evidence on race differences in intelligence worldwide. Second, it reviews these for ten races rather than the three major races (Africans, 3 Caucasians, and East Asians) analyzed by Rushton (2000). The races analyzed here are the Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, Bushmen, South Asians and North Africans, Southeast Asians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Arctic Peoples, and Native American Indians. Studies of these are presented in Chapters 3 through 12; Chapter 13 sum- marizes these studies and gives evidence on the reliability and validity of the IQs of the races. Third, Chapter 14 discusses the extent to which race differences in intelligence are determined by environmental and genetic factors. Fourth, Chapters 15, 16, and 17 discuss how race dif- ferences in intelligence have evolved over the course of approximately the last 100,000 years. These discussions are preceded by accounts of the nature of intelligence and the measurement of race differences given in this chapter, and of the concept of race in Chapter 2. 1. Definition of Intelligence There is a widespread consensus that intelligence is a unitary construct that determines the efficiency of problem solving, learning, and remembering. A useful definition of intelligence was provided by a committee set up by the American Psychological Association in 1995 un- der the chairmanship of Ulrich Neisser and consisting of eleven American psychologists whose mandate was to produce a report on what is generally known and accepted about intel- ligence. The definition of intelligence proposed by the Task Force was that intelligence is the ability "to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought" (Neisser, 1996, p. 1). This definition is generally acceptable, except for the compo- nent of effective adaptation to the environment. All living species are adapted effectively to their environment or they would not have survived, but many living species such as snakes and other reptiles cannot be regarded as intelligent. In economically developed nations, the underclass with its culture of long-term unemployment, crime, drug dependency, and welfare- dependent single mothers, is well adapted to its environment in so far as it is able to live on welfare and reproduce, but it has a low average IQ, as shown in detail by Herrnstein and Murray (1994), and is not intelligent in any reasonable sense of the word or as measured by intelligence tests. A definition which avoids this misconception was proposed by Gottfredson and endorsed by 52 leading experts and published in the Wall Street Journal in 1994: Intelligence is a very general mental capacity which, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic