Too soon for Soon My friend Jason Soon of Catallaxy Files does not believe that we of the race realist perspective have convinced him of our case, and even if we had, he sees no public policy implications [1]. Fair enough, reasonable people can disagree. Here is the general paraphrase of an e-mail I sent to Steve Sailer in the winter of 2000:

The hereditarian position elucidated by J. P. Rushton is far more persuasive than I would have thought, but I still hew more to a culturalist line, a la Thomas Sowell....

Sound familiar? My acceptance of race realism does not follow from my upbringing or my political beliefs [2]. At some point my paradigm shifted, and please excuse the overused phrase. I simply could no longer look at the evidence and state that my rather Byzantine culturalist reasoning was simpler than a bio-cultural framework [3]. I came to the bio-culturalist position both on the basic level of empirical evidence in specific cases, and through an axiomatic process. Let me elaborate.... The axiomatic reasoning is simple.... 1) I accept-after some anguish-that 40-80% of the difference in g is genetic between individuals. 2) So you have an x number of alleles that likely contribute to g. 3) Human populations a, b, c, e and so forth exist as distinct reproductive groups. 4) These human populations exhibit mild differences in the frequencies of many alleles (cystic fibrosis, etc.) It seems not unreasonable for me to think that perhaps that all human populations don't have the same frequencies of the alleles that contribute to the phenotype we term g. Simple enough, but what about the specific evidence in the ground? Arm-chair theorizing does not a paradigm shift make.... The point of evidence that bothered me....

• The 1 standard deviation (15 points) IQ difference between American blacks and whites has been relatively constant....

What bothered me is what combination of cultural forces would remain constant for the whole 20th century to maintain this gap? Though the Lynn-Flynn Effect has increased the mean IQ of both whites and blacks over the century, the underlying differential remains. The culprits?

• Racism (from the Left)
  • Is it reasonable to assert that the level of racism has been constant over the past few decades? Many indicators of racism has shifted. Black income has increased, residential segregation has abated (though still remains), interracial marriage between blacks and whites has increased, many blacks have attained political power and black Americans have national prominence as role models for all American youth in sports and entertainment. I am skeptical that a constant level of racism could be the primary factor in maintaining this 15 point differential. In addition, in The Bell Curve Hernstein and Murray indicate that blacks and whites of the same IQ earn the same incomes (blacks slightly more actually). This is very suggestive that racism is not that great a barrier to competence (also see the anecdotes that McWhorter and Sowell note about West Indians). In addition, other minorities show different IQ differences with whites, some like East Asians and Jews are higher, others like Latinos and American Indians score lower than whites but higher than blacks. One could reasonably assert that the level of racism is lower against these groups, though the high IQ of both Jews and East Asians indicates that racism can be overcome.
• Culture of social pathology (from the Right)
  • Dinesh D'Souza is a prominent recent proponent of this thesis in The End of Racism. The book is caustic in its prosecution of the African-American underclass culture (to some extent, D'Souza sees underclass culture as black culture). John McWhorter presents a milder and more empathetic picture in Losing the Race. The key here is the assertion that it is the underclass culture that pervades blacks from top to bottom, that African-Americans do not emphasize academics and that this cultural bias against scholarship and acting "white" means that they underperform. McWhorter asserts that students from the Caribbean background are far better students than native African-Americans (Thomas Sowell indicates in Race and Culture that West Indians in New York City have the same income level as whites). This is persuasive, to some extent [4]. Both McWhorter and D'Souza point out that middle and upper-middle class blacks do worse academically than poor whites or Asians. They have to indict the whole black ethnic group, from the ghetto to middle-class Montgomery County in Maryland for their culturalist theory to hold. Unfortunately, though I sympathize with the culturalist explanation, and was very convinced for a long time by it, I think it leaves some gaps. Why for instance do black children adopted by white families still have lower IQs compared to white adoptees? [5] I will agree that racism and possible openness to black social pathologies because of their physical appearance may be factors, but one would still expect them to be in between the two cultures, the supposedly upstanding mainstream culture and the negative black underclass culture. Another problem with the culture of pathology position is that the low black IQ is cross-cultural. Now, I am on the record as saying that the low IQ scores of African and West Indian nations will increase with social and economic development, but they are in general far lower than other low income countries. Though I quibble with the details of Lynn's book, there are some general trends that occur in groups of countries that I just can't ignore (see Steve Sailer's critique of the book). And trust me, I wish I could.

OK, I could keep trotting out data and inferences. You see the general reasons why I believe what I believe. Godless can-and does-data flood you constantly, so I'm going to move on. Why does this all matter? Godless has already touched on a lot these things, but let me see if I can add a "softer" touch. I'm going to simplify things and simply present the three options that I've indicated, the two non-genetic explanations, and the genetic one [6]. What might their implications be for public policy? The Leftist idea that racism is the problem has great costs for society. Affirmative Action is the main cost we see, but there are subtler and more insidious consequences. For instance, the idea that only whites can be racist creates a bizarre inversion of morality. I believe that liberals hold whites to higher standards. This implies that non-whites are indulged as if they were child-like beings without the same sense of morality as cultured white liberals. Cornel West is a brilliant man (he knows Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew from what I read), but 20 years of indulgence by the white elite have led to Sketches of My Culture, go check it out and remember this man makes millions every year! And the racist assumption also creates resentment from whites, and I think in the long term is fueling white nationalism. And of course, in the end the perception that racism is the root of group differences is undermining the idea of individual responsibility. As a classical liberal I deplore this. The conservative idea that black social pathology is part of their culture also leads to a patronizing attitude. The fact that black Americans are religiously conservative is always referred to, and black Americans are encouraged to reform their ways and join the mainstream. Black failure to attain the levels of social well-being of white ethnic immigrants is a indictment of their culture and its failures, and also points to personal failings. Conservatives, like liberals, also want to engage in their own form of social engineering. Welfare must be ended, marriages must be encouraged and Christianity must be fostered. In the end, conservatives believe that blacks are only different on the outside, and failure to conform with their standards of success and social norms are evidence of laziness or obstinacy. Of course, the last option, the most horrible of all to contemplate for many, is that race does matter on some basic level. Yes, we all agree that medicine needs to take into account race, but who wants to open the possibility that the ancients were right, and that temperament and intelligence might be different from race to race? The implications are obvious. Genetic engineering is important as a long term goal to equalize endowments. And one should not generalize from the experience of one race to another. Here I want to give an example. The AIDS epidemic in Africa has followed a different path than on the other continents. Look at the UNAIDS site and look up which countries have the highest HIV infection rates. Yes, African ones stand out (though not all, some like Senegal have pretty low rates-at least by African standards). But most of the other countries that have high HIV rates outside Africa have large or predominantly African populations. One could argue that a common pan-African culture exists, but I am skeptical of this. You can draw your own conclusions, but as I've said before, I think imposition of European norms on African cultures has been disastrous because they don't take into account behaviors that have evolved over tens of thousands of years in the African environment. But even today, epidemiologists spend their time worrying about the coming AIDS epidemic in China or India. The fact is that the Thai epidemic was far less grievous than expected. The First World heterosexual epidemic is concentrated to marginal individuals, and in the United States, to African-Americans. This is the problem with the conservative idea that only culture matters, and everyone can be turned into fastidious Calvinists-in behavior if not theology (much of Christian Africa is simultaneously sexual conservative in outward mores but has HIV rates between 10-30%). All this being said, reasonable people can disagree. The dominant shapers of public thought all disagree with me. My opinion is that of a radical minority, at least if it came down to taking a show of hands in public. But if you apply the three rules, skepticism, empiricism, and rationalism I think you will find that I am not being totally unreasonable. I am not making a grand claim that genetics explains everything. People haven't said that Huntington's Clash of Civilizations has been disproved because Taiwan and South Korea seem to be following western liberal democratic traditions of late rather than "Sinic"ones. While it seems broadly acceptable to make culturalist statements, bio-cultural ones seem off limits, and I hope that will change. Is the bio-cultural explanation more ornate and difficult to juggle than the idea that low IQs of those of African descent world-wide is a matter of common culture or global racism [7]? [1] I prefer race realist to racialist-because the latter has a negative connotation, and I am far too gone in being a racial "sellout" to be considered a racialist. In addition-here is my wish list for Catallaxy Files: 1) Comments! I want to be a pest on that site just like everyone else pesters us. Since I tend to agree with the classical liberal perspective of CF I won't be disagreeing too much alas.... 2) Standardize the font. Some of it is serif and some sans-serif. I figure I'd pipe in since I already prodded Jason to increase the width of the content text region. [2] I was raised under the strict dictum "to each according to their effort." ergo, I had nothing but contempt for those less academically adroit than me, because their lack of success indicated their inherent laziness. Perhaps one could say I was a non-Calvinist Calvinist? Politically, I have tended to be something of a right-libertarian, and so I see the individual as the central organizing principle of a successful polity. I have over the years become more understanding of the position that human beings exist as part of an organic whole, but the great insight of classical liberalism and the liberal tradition is that government need not operate on the level of clan, tribe or nation beyond certain necessities (defense, utilities, etc.), because the "nation" operates above and beyond the purvey of government. [3] Culturalist explanations are not always Byzantine, but mine were starting to become a little convoluted as I needed to reassess in light of new data on differences between ethnic groups that I had only become aware of. [4] Unfortunately, I can't track down any numbers on Sowell, and McWhorter was basing his opinion on personal anecdotes as a professor. I remember as a child my father complaining to a friend that the black students in his chemistry laboratory had great difficultly with the subject matter, the friend responded that there must of been a cultural deficit, to which my father responded that no, African and West Indian students still had problems too. Now, who to believe? One could possibly assert that a common black culture exists through the Diaspora and in Africa. I think this is stretching it a bit though, I have far more confidence in the diversity of culture than genetics. The latter tends to mutate faster than the latter, so I lean toward an explanation of the latter as the cause for a common level of g. By the way, anyone who hasn't should read Thomas Sowell's books. I was reading them back when I was a conventional liberal, but they are so expansive that you can't put them down. Sowell is a gem. [5] The interpretations can differ to be fair. I am going to look at the primary sources myself and make my own judgements. But from what I've read, I am generally convinced more by the pro-genetics camp simply because their interpretation seems more straightforward. Of course, it may seem straightforward since it already matches my current position. [6] All three sure have some validity. Racism exists-though to be honest it's never effected my self-esteem when I've experienced it, in fact quite the reverse. Culture and genetics can in my opinion feed into each other, and small genetic differences can be amplified by cultural factors (for instance, a black student that performs poorly at school comes to detest the institution and fail and is reinforced by the social norms of his poor performing peers). [7] OK, Phil Shropshire will get on my case for pointing at Africans, but frankly it is easier since they are an outlier in this area. Caucasoid and Asian groups have big IQ ranges, but again, the overlap tends to follow Rushton's Rule (Asian -> Caucasoid -> African). No blogging this weekend-back to less controversial stuff next week...let's hope....