Earlier: The ATLANTIC Wants To Cancel Richard Hanania’s THE ORIGINS OF WOKE

The Race Denialists are at it again. Black academic Tyler Austin Harper [Email him] (right) has attacked Richard Hanania’s new book The Origins of Woke as an “intellectual and moral failure,” in part because it has highlighted black-white differences in IQ [An Intellectual and a Moral Failure, The Atlantic, September 18, 2023]. It was the elite Leftist magazine’s second attack on Hanania: staff writer Adam Serwer (black and Jewish) targeted him three days earlier in a broadside against The Young Conservatives Trying to Make Eugenics Respectable Again. But as VDARE.com’s Steve Sailer has observed, the black-white IQ gap is probably “the best documented finding in U.S. social science.”

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Now a new study from A Genetic Hypothesis for American Race/Ethnic Differences in Mean g [Mankind Quarterly, June 2023] proves again that it really matters.

The term “g” stands for “general intelligence,” which underlies verbal, spatial and mathematical intelligence. It explains why people who score highly in one kind of intelligence test usually score highly on the others. It is strongly genetic. 

The study was published in the “controversial” Mankind Quarterly—likely, in part, because the better-known journals have been hijacked by Woke activists pretending to be scholars.

Drawing upon the “Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study,” which sampled more than 10,000 Americans, the authors carefully examined the relationship between self/parental-identified race or ethnicity (called SIRE in the jargon) and key variables. These included the intelligence test administered as part of cognitive study. The authors also explored race differences in many other brain-related measures.

To say that the authors refuted the claims that “race is a social construct,” or that “race differences in IQ score are environmental” is almost too charitable. They annihilated those claims, and showed that the cognitive differences between the races are strongly genetic.

There was “measurement invariance” across the different groups in its sample of diverse European ancestries. In statistics, this means that the same trait—such as intelligence—was measured in all of the European-ancestry samples. Cultural differences could have played no role in making the test unfair to one group but not another.

The authors’ key finding: The more genetic European admixture a non-white had, the more intelligent they tended to be, and these intelligence differences were on g.

Alleles, variant forms of a gene, are associated with extremely high intelligence, correlate with being highly educated, and are strongly linked to g. The relationship is expressed as a polygenic score. The authors’ sample showed that education-polygenic scores positively correlate with intelligence within racial groups. As the authors put it:

[education-polygenic scores] is statistically significantly related to g in all groups. The validities for Black Americans are reduced by around one-third relative to that for Whites. This finding is consistent with previously reported results.

Brain volume is also associated with intelligence. On average, people with bigger brains are smarter. Within racial groups, the authors found, brain volume correlated with polygenic scores, with the extent of white ancestry and with g. They write:

Total brain volume explained approximately 15% of the association between European ancestry and g and also explained approximately 8% of that between [education-polygenic scores] and g.

Now, this may all seem rather technical and complicated. But what the authors found is beautifully simple: Race differences in intelligence are at least partly genetic. Intelligence itself is overwhelming genetic, race differences in it are on the most genetically influenced IQ subtests and extent of European ancestry, among blacks, predicts alleles associated with intelligence, brain size, IQ score, and score on g, the highly genetic component of intelligence. Moreover, all of these factors are interrelated.

Like an attorney in a court case, one might poke holes in this scientific evidence. So all but the most stubborn—like Atlantic writers who know nothing about genetics or IQ studies, but do know how to point and splutter—won’t have any reasonable doubt about it. The verdict will be clear.

For the record, Tyler Austin Harper was an English major in college and has a doctorate in literature. Adam Serwer, [Email him] (right), a typically hard-Left journalist, has a master’s in journalism. In other words, they have no background in science.

So race differences in average IQ are partly for genetic reasons. Thus, in a multi-racial society it must follow that blacks—average IQ 85—will always be under-represented in elite institutions and in elite positions. Whites, Asians and, in particular, Ashkenazi Jews, with an average IQ of about 112, will always be over-represented. 

That has profound implications when higher education and high technology professions, or those professions requiring an advanced degree, are the route to career and financial success.

In July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race can no longer be used as a factor in university admissions. Because universities are, in theory, supposed to select for the best and brightest, rather than a diverse student body, the consequences are obvious. Far fewer blacks and far more whites, Asians and Jews will attend our best universities.

That is why the decision’s furious opponents begged the court to “defend diversity.” That was their only argument in favor of Affirmative Action, because average IQ does vary by race—something even the Wokest psychologists are forced to admit. So they blame low IQ on “environmental factors,” such as poverty, and even claim that being black is a stressor because of “structural racism” that undermines academic performance so that, despite being just as smart as whites or anyone else, blacks test poorly and cannot learn.

Well, now Fuerst, Kirkegaard, and Shibaev have refuted that claim. Unmistakably, the walls are closing in on the Race Deniers.

As a nation, we must accept this. If we want to be a meritocracy, if we want the best people in the most important positions, then we simply cannot have anything close to races being represented in proportion to their percentage of the population. 

That’s particularly critical in professions like medicine or the military.

At stake is not only our wealth and productivity, but ultimately our very lives.