Nigerians, Scrabble, and the GCSE

 

Exam hall at Hull Collegiate School (Wikicommons – Robin S. Taylor). The GCSE exam is a poor measure of raw cognitive ability. If some students get tutored and others do not, there will be more environmental variance in IQ, and the exam results will say less about the genetic potential for cognitive ability.

 

 

Chanda Chisala has written more about cognitive ability in sub-Saharan Africa. His argument is straightforward:

 

[…] if it is true that on average black Africans in Africa score extremely low on scholastic/intelligence tests because they grow up with much less educational and other modern cultural resources (as Flynn would agree), then they should perform "extremely well" (by comparison) in those "g-loaded" cognitive contests that do not require too much of such quality cultural exposure (as Jensen would agree). (Chisala 2021)

 

Chanda argues that raw cognitive ability is better measured in Africa by a Scrabble championship than by an IQ test, since most Africans lack "access to well-trained teachers, big libraries, computers or even TVs" (Chisala 2021). Africans are good at Scrabble:

 

Nigeria happens to be the world's top performing nation in English Scrabble, while francophone African countries are also the most dominant in French Scrabble, despite the fact that the top players in Western countries are super-high-IQ nerds with visibly exceptional mathematical talents (Chisala 2021)

 

Correlation isn't causation. Is a high IQ needed to do well at Scrabble? Not according to this study:

 

Forty tournament-rated SCRABBLE players (20 elite, 20 average) and 40 unrated novice players completed a battery of domain-representative laboratory tasks and standardized verbal ability tests. The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance, suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task constraints. (Tuffiash, Roring, and Ericsson 2007)

 

Success at Scrabble seems to be due largely to practice and is thus a poor measure of raw cognitive ability.

 

A curious detail: Nigeria's top performers come overwhelmingly from one part of the country: the Niger Delta, which is home to the Igbo and related tribes. Since the peoples of the Niger Delta used to dominate trade between the coast and the interior, and since trade selects for cognitive ability, mean IQ should be higher in those populations that have long practiced it, like the Igbo (Frost 2015).

 

Young Nigerians in the UK - Academic achievement on the GCSE

 

Although many African immigrants do poorly in British schools, some actually do well. A study of six secondary schools in inner London found that results on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) were higher for African students who spoke Igbo, Yoruba, Luganda, and Ga than for White British students who spoke only English (Demie 2013, p. 9). Chanda sees the GCSE as a proxy for IQ and argues that IQ differences between African immigrants and White British must be highly malleable:

 

Africans speaking Luganda and Krio did better than the Chinese students in 2011. The igbo were even more impressive given their much bigger numbers (and their consistently high performance over the years, gaining a 100 percent pass rate in 2009!). The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on "case study" model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites. (Chanda 2015)

 

Igbo students stood out as high achievers on the GCSE, as did Yoruba students to a lesser extent. In both groups, however, the mean results were highly variable from one year to the next:

 

2009: Igbo - 100%, Yoruba - 39%

2010: Igbo - 80%, Yoruba - 68%

2011: Igbo - 76%, Yoruba - 75% 

(Demie 2013, p. 9)

 

Chanda attributes this variability to statistical noise caused by small sample size. If so, there should be an inverse correlation between sample size and variability. GCSE scores should be more variable for smaller groups than for larger ones. Yet the reverse seems to be true for the years 2009 to 2011:

 

Yoruba: 90 students / gain of 36 percentage points

Somali: 53 students / gain of 13 percentage points

Twi-Fante: 37 students / loss of 3 percentage points

Igbo: 16 students / loss of 24 percentage points

Krio: 12 students / gain of 4 percentage points

Tigrinya: 12 students / loss of 8 percentage points

Lingala: 12 students / loss of 5 percentage points

Ga: 8 students / gain of 9 percentage points

Swahili: 8 students / gain of 10 percentage points 

(Demie 2013, pp. 7, 9)

 

The two largest gains were made by the two largest groups: the Yoruba and the Somali. If the differences between 2009 and 2011 are statistical noise, why are the largest ones associated with the largest groups? Shouldn't we see the reverse? Shouldn't the smallest groups show the most variability?

 

Something seems to be causing those impressive GCSE gains. Since the students are not the same from one year to the next, and since the gains differ considerably from one ethnic community to another, the "something" must be the community itself. Over time, the Yoruba community became better at assisting its students, and this kind of assistance was available only in larger communities like the Yoruba.

 

The most obvious forms of assistance are tutoring and coaching. Such assistance is mentioned by parents in interviews for the above study:

 

Parent A: Father of daughter in Year 9. Generally supportive of the school which was not his first choice but is supplementing his daughter's education with a home tutor. He also calls on his extended family, his oldest son who is a graduate is also expected to help. (Demie 2013, p. 14)

 

Although tutoring and coaching are perfectly legitimate, they invalidate the GCSE as a means to measure IQ, particularly its genetic component. If some students get tutored and others do not, there will be more environmental variance in IQ, and the exam results will say less about the genetic potential for cognitive ability. Therefore, GCSE results tell us what we already know: if you get tutored and coached before an exam, you'll do better.

 

Are tutoring and coaching the only forms of community assistance? There is another one: impersonation. In other words, the parents hire a smart student from their community to take the exam in their child's place. This strategy is feasible only if the community has enough individuals who are (1) intelligent and (2) similar in age and appearance to the student in question. Such individuals are lacking in a small community, as are the middlemen who can refer an anxious parent to a suitable source of assistance.

 

How common is this strategy? Adebayo (2013) studied cheating behavior among Nigerian university students and British university students. He found that impersonation services were used or provided by 20% of the former and 1% of the latter. In general, cheating took non-collaborative forms among British students and collaborative forms among Nigerian students:

 

These include behaviours like writing somebody's coursework, colluding with others to communicate answers to one another, over marking one another's course work etc. This is quite different from plagiarism and non-collaborative cheating characteristic of the British sample reported by Newstead et al (1996). Reasons for these differences may be attributable to differences in population, differences in cultural ethnic, differences in emphasis placed on examination as part of educational assessment (Adebayo 2013, p. 146)

 

Adebayo (2013, p. 148) found high rates of collaborative cheating among Nigerian students:

 

Permitting own coursework to be copied - 72.6%

Copying another student's coursework with consent - 47.3%

Collaborative generous marking of coursework - 64.6%

Submitting joint work as an individual's - 49.3%

Doing another student's coursework for them - 77.3%

Collusion with another student to communicate answers - 83%

 

We live in a world that has low-trust and high-trust societies. In a high-trust society, like the UK, cheating is considered shameful and disreputable, regardless of whom you cheat. In a low-trust society, like Nigeria, cheating is wrong only when you do it to friends and relatives.

 

What happens when individuals from a low-trust society migrate to a high-trust one? If they come in sufficient numbers, their opportunities for collaborative cheating are greatly increased. Imagine you're supervising an exam in an English school, and you suspect an African student is filling in for another. He shows you his school card and another piece of ID. Both are correct. So what do you do now? Do you really want to make a fuss and risk being accused of racial profiling? No you don't.

 

Future research

 

The GCSE study by Demie (2013) leaves much to be desired. It does not provides the number of students who had to retake that exam (which must be a large number); nor does it provide a breakdown of the number of students taking it per year.

 

In any case, the GCSE is a poor substitute for an IQ test. Even if we exclude cheating, the results are distorted by legitimate activities like tutoring and coaching. The latter are more available to some students than to others. Consequently, GCSE results tell us nothing about differences in raw cognitive ability, either between individuals or between communities.

 

Chanda promises to write an article that will rule out cheating as an explanation for Nigerian success on the GCSE. Again, the issue isn't just cheating. It's any assistance that goes to some students and not to others. If you want to measure raw cognitive ability, you need a level playing field. In particular, you need a test that does not offer high achievers the lure of personal gain, which may push test-takers to do well by hook or by crook. In the UK, an African with good GCSE results has access to a wide range of good-paying jobs, in large part because of "diversity quotas" of one sort or another.

 

This motive comes out in interviews with the parents of African students:

 

● 'Without an education you cannot earn a decent salary, without qualifications you cannot get a good job. The best thing is to push your children as hard as you can.'

● 'Being a Black woman if you don't have education in this country, what job will you have to do, clean people's toilets?'  (Demie 2013, p. 13)

 

This subject should definitely be a research priority. We need IQ data on Nigerians, and not inadequate substitutes like GCSE scores. We also need data on alleles associated with educational attainment (i.e., polygenic scores). Furthermore, we need data on each of Nigeria's ethnic groups, particularly the Igbo. It's hard to fake intelligence in the real world, and the Igbo have a long history of doing better at business and other endeavors. Unfortunately, intelligent people are also better at cheating, so there is some confounding between real intelligence and the fake kind.

 

References

 

Adebayo, S.O. (2011). Common Cheating Behaviour among Nigerian University Students: A Case Study of University of Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. World Journal of Education 1(1): 144-149.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1159043.pdf

 

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ Gap Is No Longer a Black and White Issue. The Unz Review, June 25

https://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

 

Chisala, C. (2020). Nigerians, Jews and Scrabble: An Update on the IQ Debate. The Unz Review, February 27

https://www.unz.com/article/nigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate/#comment-4520966

 

Demie, F. (2013). Raising Achievement of Black African Pupils. Good Practice in Schools. London: Lambeth Research and Statistics Unit, Lambeth Council.

https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/rsu/sites/www.lambeth.gov.uk.rsu/files/Raising_the_Achievement_of_Black_African_Pupils-Good_Practice_in_Schools_2013.pdf

 

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa. The Unz Review, July 4

https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/

 

Tuffiash, M., R.W. Roring, and K.A. Ericsson. (2007). Expert performance in SCRABBLE: Implications for the study of the structure and acquisition of complex skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(3), 124-134. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-898X.13.3.124

Not what you think

Preparing for a test (Wikicommons - Excelz)



Why do West African immigrants outperform native-born whites in UK schools? This is the question posed by Chanda Chisala using data from the GCSE, the General Certificate of Secondary Education. 

To be sure, the GCSE is not the same as an IQ test. For most subjects it includes things like coursework and attendance. The test-taker is also motivated by self-interest: a high GCSE score can be a ticket to a good university and a good job. Nonetheless, Thompson (2013) has argued that the GCSE has a correlation of 0.81 with IQ. So perhaps the two are roughly equivalent.

Let's look at the GCSE results from England for 2012. They are indeed astounding for immigrant children from English-speaking Africa. Just look at the percentage difference from the mean by country of origin:

Nigerians -     +21.8
Ghanaians -     +5.5
Sierra Leone - +1.4

Source: Chisala (2019)

This academic excellence seems to be unusually concentrated among Nigerian immigrants. Are we looking at our friends from the Niger delta? Often known as the "Jews of West Africa," the Igbo have a long record of academic and economic success. This has been attributed to their openness to Western learning and the commercial opportunities it creates, although the Igbo were, in fact, a trading nation long before the colonial era (Frost 2015). They became receptive to Western learning because they had long been receptive to learning in general, much like the Japanese during the Meiji era.

Chisala (2015) provides an ethnic breakdown of GCSE results for the years 2009 to 2011:

2009: Igbo - 100%, Yoruba - 39%
2010: Igbo - 80%, Yoruba - 68%
2011: Igbo - 76%, Yoruba - 75%

The Igbo started off as top achievers, but their lead evaporated over the next two years as the Yoruba made remarkable gains. There were 90 Yoruba kids, so sampling error could hardly explain their increase from 39% to 75%. Because the Igbo kids numbered only 16, the decrease from 100% to 76% might not be significant.

Perhaps the Yoruba kids got better coaching and tutoring. Whatever the explanation, GCSE cannot be used as a proxy for IQ, at least not for Nigerians. Yes, IQ can change over the course of a lifespan, but not that fast and not that much—unless you suffer a serious accident.


Exam malpractice

There are less innocent explanations for the rapid rise in Yoruba scores. A study of students in Nigeria found that test-retest reliability ranged from 77 to 85% (Petters and Okon 2014). The authors blame the low test reliability on cheating, calling it "a plague":

Examination malpractice in Nigeria has attained a frightening proportion and it is becoming more sophisticated as years pass by. Efforts by government and stakeholders to curtail this trend have not yielded much success. If this trend is not given an urgent attention, it may utterly destroy the quality of education in Nigeria.

Bisong et al. (2009) come to similar conclusions:

The implication of this study is that the cheating tendency is becoming endemic in Nigerian society. A situation where one in every four students tends to cheat in every examination calls for a significant moral questioning of our society. Even with a high level of supervision, as the results show, students are still prone to indulge in cheating behaviour.

In their review of the literature, Bisong et al. (2009) note that "in 1980, out of the 190,000 candidates who sat the West African Examination Certificate in May and June, 46,000 candidates from Nigeria had their results nullified." Cheating is partly due to Nigerian parents, who understand the value of academic success and push their children to get good grades "by all means":

Parents expect nothing less than passing in examination from their children. There must not be failure. That is to say that he who fails is not entertained in any way. Where there is weakness or a psychological measure that one is not prepared to pass the examination, then fear begins to disturb the minds of students as to how to make it. This leads to serious reading throughout the night, pressing lectures for areas of concentration and arranging to enter the examination hall with every possible means to cheat during the examination. (Halima 2003, p. 17)

Halima (2003, p. 19) notes the harshness of penalties for cheating: "in 1983 the punishment for cheating was increased to a jail term of 21 years without the option for fine. In spite of this cheating in examination increased."


Nigeria's cognitive elite?

It has been argued, notably by Greg Cochran, that Nigerian immigrants are skimmed from the top of their country's IQ distribution (Cochran 2019). They are the best that Nigeria has to offer—la crème de la crème. To make that argument work, however, Nigerian immigrants to the UK would have to be much smarter than the average Nigerian, with an IQ more than one standard deviation higher and probably two.

There is only a rough consensus on the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africa. In their review of the literature, Wicherts et al. (2010) argue for a mean of 82, whereas Lynn (2010) puts it at 66. Rindermann (2013) favors a "best guess" of 75. Even if we take the high estimate of 82, we must still assume extreme selection to get a mean IQ above 100. Is that a reasonable assumption?  Elite individuals exist among immigrants from Nigeria, but they are not the majority: 

Socially, the Nigerian diaspora is by no means homogenous. There are those who struggle for basic means of survival such as car park attendants, cleaners and other menial workers working long hours to make ends meet. But some professionals have distinguished themselves and moved on to become members of the Black middle class. (Akinrinade and Ogen 2011)

Furthermore, some doubt may be cast on the credentials of middle-class Nigerians: "they have acquired a notorious reputation for arrogance and fraud" (Akinrinade and Ogen 2011). Finally, the cognitive elite argument fails to explain why immigrants from Nigeria do so much better than those from Ghana and Sierra Leone.


Math scores

On many GCSE components, there is much room for cheating, particularly on coursework. But what about the mathematics component? GCSE math has not had coursework since 2009. It is simply a timed test. How can one cheat on a timed test?

By impersonation. A "ghost" who knows the subject takes the exam by impersonating the student, and the actual student never takes the exam (Azuka 2014). This method requires a photo ID that combines the ghost's photo with the test-taker's name. In most cases, the fake ID is sufficient to dispel any suspicions.


Conclusion

For whatever reason, the GCSE is too volatile to be used as a proxy for IQ, particularly in the case of Nigerian students. The volatility seems to be due to cheating, as well as to the grey area of coaching and tutoring services. Cheating is rife among Nigerians in Nigeria, and it would be naïve to suppose that such behavior disappears once they relocate to another country, especially if their new country imposes none of the harsh penalties that are regularly imposed in Nigeria.

Nigerian academic achievement may be genuine in some cases. This is particularly so with respect to the Igbo, who have a longstanding record of achievement within and outside school. Unfortunately, genuine ability can be cofounded with fake ability. Smart people are better at gaming the system and making themselves look smarter than they really are.

Indeed, I can't help wondering when I look at the GCSE results for Igbo students in 2009. Every single Igbo got a perfect score—that's unusual even for a smart population and even with a sample size that small. Chanda suggests that year-to-year fluctuations might have made the sample even smaller in that year. Well, perhaps.

It would be easy to say that we need more data. Additional GCSE results, however, will be just as distorted by academic fraud. We need data from real IQ tests that provide no incentive for cheating.


References

Akinrinade, S., and O. Ogen. (2011). Historicising the Nigerian Diaspora: Nigerian Migrants and Homeland Relations. Turkish Journal of Politics 2(2): 71-85.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/31034426/tjp_sayi_4.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DTurkish_Journal_of_Politics_TJP_V._2_N..pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191221%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191221T170342Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=033191eb3309b04839db9b399a1976750b779991740778b6044b92573f0b1501#page=73

Azuka, E.B. (2014). Academic Fraud among Students in Higher Education in Nigeria: Reasons, Methods Adopted and Strategies to curb it. Journal of Educational and Social Research 4(3): 289-296.
https://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/jesr/article/view/2725 

Bisong, N.N., F. Akpama, and P.B. Edet. (2009). Cheating Tendency in Examinations among Secondary School Students in Nigeria:  a case study of schools in the Odukpani Local Government Area, Cross River State. Policy Futures in Education 7(4): 410-415
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1030.3426&rep=rep1&type=pdf  
Chisala, C. (2019). Why Do Blacks Outperform Whites in UK Schools? The Unz Review, November 29
https://www.unz.com/article/reply-to-lance-welton-why-do-blacks-outperform-whites-in-uk-schools/?showcomments#comments 

Chisala, C. (2015). UK: Igbo Nigeria Academic performance destroys the myth of Black Low IQ. Afripol November 28
http://afripol.org/afripol/item/1813-uk-nigerian-academic-performance-in-destroys-the-myth-of-black-low-iq.html

Cochran, G. (2019). Selective immigration. West Hunter, March 13
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/selective-immigration/

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa? The Unz Review, July 4
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/ 

Halima, D. (2003). A study of some socio-psychological factors of cheating in examination among students of Kaduna Polytechnic. Post Graduate School Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.
http://kubanni.abu.edu.ng/jspui/bitstream/123456789/2190/1/A%20%20STUDY%20OF%20SOME%20SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL%20FACTORS%20OF%20CHEATING%20IN%20EXAMINATION%20AMONY%20STUDENTS%20OF%20%20KADUNA%20POLYTECHNIC.pdf 

Lynn, R. (2010). The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans assessed by the Progressive Matrices: A reply to Wicherts, Dolan, Carlson & van der Maas. Learning and Individual Differences 20(3): 152-154.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608010000348

Petters, J.S., and M.O. Okon. (2014). Students' Perception of Causes and Effects of Examination Malpractice in the Nigerian Educational System: The Way Forward for Quality Education. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 114: 125-129
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281305310X

Rindermann, H. (2013). African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations. Personality and Individual Differences 55: 229-233.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372.5462&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Thompson, J. (2013). IQ and GCSE Results in England R=0.81. The Unz Review, November 5
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/iq-and-gcse-results-in-england-r081/ 

Wicherts, J.M., C.V. Dolan, and H.L.J. van der Maas. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence 38: 1-20.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010b.pdf

No, blacks aren't all alike. Who said they were?

 

In 1915, Paul Robeson became the third African American ever enrolled at Rutgers College, being one of four students selected for its Cap and Skull honor society. His father was of Igbo descent (Wikicommons)

 

Chanda Chisala has written another piece on IQ and African immigrants to the UK:

One of the biggest problems I had with the commenters were readers who apparently were only exposed to the statistical concept of Regression to the Mean from outside the IQ debate. [...]. The problem is not that the black immigrant children were not regressing to the point of equaling their source population mean IQ (that's also not what hereditarians predict either), but that they were clearly not even moving (or being pulled) towards that extremely low IQ, as hereditarians predict.

The correct term is not "regression to the mean." It's "non-inheritance of acquired characteristics." In other words, each person has a single genotype and a range of possible phenotypes. A culture can push its members to either limit of this range, thus creating a phenotype unlike that of other people with the same genetic endowment. But this phenotype has to be recreated with each succeeding generation. For instance, there used to be a Chinese custom of binding a girl's foot to make it four inches long and of limited use for walking. When the custom was outlawed, the next generation of women had normal feet. The phenotype bounced back to its initial form, so to speak, much like an elastic band when you stop stretching it (see note 1).

Regression to the mean is something else. It happens because of genetic change. For instance, a man with above-average IQ will likely marry a woman with above-average IQ. But only part of their above-averageness is genetic. The rest is due to favorable circumstances. Or simply luck. So their children's IQ will likely be a bit closer to the mean of the overall population. That second generation will in turn marry people with similar IQs. And their children will likewise be closer still to the population mean. Eventually, several generations later, the descendants of that original couple will have a mean IQ that matches the population mean.

That's regression to the mean. It's a multigenerational genetic change. It's not what happens when genes stay constant and culture changes.

Chanda is really talking about what happens when a culture stops pushing people to excel. The phenotype reverts to its usual state and the pressure to excel comes only from within. This is a legitimate argument, and it may have great explanatory value. When people from certain cultures move to Western countries, the second and third generations do a lot worse than the first generation over many indicators—academic achievement, crime rates, family stability, etc. This is a frequent outcome when people move from an environment where behavior is tightly controlled by family and community to one where behavior is much more self-controlled.

Such social atomization is less toxic for people of Northwest European descent because they have adapted to it over a longer time. For at least the past millennium, they have had weaker kinship ties and stronger tendencies toward individualism than any other human population. This cultural environment has favored individuals who rely less on external means of behavior control and more on internal means, specifically guilt proneness and affective empathy (Frost, 2014).

But that isn't Chanda's argument. That's the argument he attributes to something called "the HBD position." In reality, there are at least three HBD positions:

1. African immigrants to the UK perform better than whites academically because they are a select group, either because they have elite backgrounds or because they tend to be more motivated than the people who stay behind.

2. African immigrants perform better than whites academically, but this academic performance is weakly linked to the heritable component of IQ, especially in modern Britain. Teachers tend to "over-reward" black students who satisfy basic requirements (regular attendance, assignments turned in on time, non-disruptive behavior, etc.). African parents also invest in private tutoring to improve exam results.

3. Most African immigrants perform worse than whites academically. Only certain African groups excel, notably the Igbo of Nigeria. Igbo excellence is due to their specific evolutionary history and cannot be generalized to all sub-Saharan Africans.

Are African immigrants better than the Africans left behind?

Chanda attacks the first argument, saying that the average African immigrant is very average:

I actually know that the average African immigrants to the UK from any nation or tribe are not from the African elite class, economically or intellectually (even if there is a small segment from the super-professional class)

He also points to the example of African American families. The children of middle-class and even upper-class African Americans do worse on IQ tests than the children of lower-class Euro-American families. So even if you select from the black elite, the next generation will still underperform whites.

One could counter that the African American middle class largely works for the government. In Africa, the middle class is more likely to be self-made men and women. Also, a selection effect may exist despite the averageness of most African immigrants to the UK. Even if most are average, it may be that fewer are below-average. Below a certain level of ability, many Africans may not bother to emigrate.

Fuerst (2014) has studied this question and found that black immigrants to the U.S. have a mean IQ that is one third of a standard deviation above the mean IQ of their home countries. So there is a selection effect. But it seems too weak to explain the difference in IQ—more than one standard deviation and possibly two—between African immigrants to the UK and Africans back home, unless one assumes that migration to the UK is a lot more selective than migration to the US.

What does the GCSE actually measure?

We now come to the second explanation. It is assumed in this debate that the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) is a good proxy for IQ, which in turn is a proxy for the heritable component of intelligence. Is this true? Or does the GCSE largely measure something that is culturally acquired rather than heritable? Perhaps something as simple as showing up for class, doing one's assignments, or having a private tutor. This point is raised by one commenter:

[...] black Africans in London, even if poor and living in social housing, hire private tutors for their children. White British do not, especially the working class. This much better explains the GCSE results, a very tuition friendly test [...]

Furthermore, many African immigrants may be targeting those exams they can do best on and avoiding those they are less sure about:

[...] one needs to know how many children from each racial group take the exams. For example, the pass rate for Higher Mathematics is very high, not because the exams are easy, but because they are hard, and frighten off most applicants.

Interestingly, Chanda replies to this GCSE skepticism by pointing out that the same "Nigerians" (Igbos) who do well on the GCSE also do well in Nigeria:

For example, the subgroups within the Nigerian group that are the best in Nigeria or even in the US etc are also the best on the GCSEs. Also, the Traveller white (or whatever precise race) groups are placed by the GCSEs exactly where you would expect to find them.

The Igbo factor

This brings us to the third explanation. It's the one I favor, although the other two probably play a role. African excellence in the UK seems largely driven by a single high-performing people: the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria. Let's begin with the example of Harold Ekeh, whom Chanda describes in glowing terms:

Harold Ekeh showing off his acceptance letters to all 8 Ivy League Schools. He was born in Nigeria and migrated with his parents at age 8.

Ekeh is an Igbo name, and the Igbo (formerly known as Ibo) have a long history of academic success within Nigeria (Frost, 2015). Chanda himself referred to this success in his first article:

The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on "case study" model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites. (Chisala, 2015a)

This superior achievement was widely known in Nigeria by the time of independence:

All over Nigeria, Ibos filled urban jobs at every level far out of proportion to their numbers, as laborers and domestic servants, as bureaucrats, corporate managers, and technicians. Two-thirds of the senior jobs in the Nigerian Railway Corporation were held by Ibos. Three-quarters of Nigeria's diplomats came from the Eastern Region. So did almost half of the 4,500 students graduating from Nigerian universities in 1966. The Ibos became known as the "Jews of Africa," despised—and envied—for their achievements and acquisitiveness. (Baker, 1980)

The term "Jews of Africa" recurs often in the literature. Henry Kissinger used it back in the 1960s:

The Ibos are the wandering Jews of West Africa — gifted, aggressive, Westernized; at best envied and resented, but mostly despised by the mass of their neighbors in the Federation. (Kissinger, 1969) 

To what degree is African success Igbo success? If we go back to Chanda's first article, we see that high African achievers are overwhelmingly "Nigerians" (Chisala, 2015a). This is evident in a chart that lists mean % difference from the mean English GCSE score in 2010-2011 by ethnicity:

Nigerian: +21.8

Ghanaian: +5.5
Sierra Leone: +1.4
Somali: -23.7
Congolese: -35.3

Clearly, high academic achievement is due to something that is very much present in Nigeria, a little bit in Ghana, and not at all in Somalia and Congo. Could this something be the Igbo? The Igbo make up 18% of Nigeria's population and form a large diaspora elsewhere in West Africa and farther afield. In fact, they seem to be disproportionately represented in overseas Nigerian communities, making up most of the Nigerian community in Japan and a large portion of China's Nigerian community (Wikipedia, 2015). Statistics are unfortunately lacking for the UK.

Conclusion

What happens when we remove Igbo students from the GCSE results? How well do the other Africans do? To some degree, Chanda answered that question in his first article. African excellence seems to be overwhelmingly Igbo excellence.

So why doesn't he speak of Igbo excellence? Probably because he assumes that all sub-Saharan Africans are fundamentally the same. Or maybe he assumes that all humans are fundamentally the same. Both assumptions are wrong, and neither can be construed as an "HBD position." 

We are all genetically different, even within our own families. So why the surprise that different African peoples are ... different? The Igbo have for a long time specialized in a trading lifestyle that favors a certain mental toolkit: future time orientation; numeracy, and abstract reasoning. This is gene-culture coevolution. When circumstances push people to excel in a certain way, there will be selection for people who can naturally excel in that way, without the prodding of circumstances. And it doesn't take eons of time for such evolution to work.

 

Will we hear more about the Igbo in this debate? Probably not. There is a strong desire, especially in the United Kingdom, to show that blacks are converging toward white norms of behavior, including academic performance. There is indeed some convergence, but almost all of it can be traced to the growing numbers of high-performing "Nigerians" (Igbos) and the growing numbers of biracial children (the census now has a mixed-race category, but most biracial people still self-identify as "black"). In the UK, 55% of Black Caribbean men and 40% of Black Caribbean women have a partner from another ethnic background. It's very likely that half of all "black" children in the UK are at least half-white by ancestry (Platt, 2009, p. 7).

Nor is it likely that we'll hear more about the Igbo from Chanda. As he sees it, the debate should be over. The academic excellence of Igbo students proves that the black/white IQ gap in the U.S. cannot have a genetic basis:

[It is not] a function of global racial evolution (Sub-Saharan African genes versus European genes), as most hereditarians believe, especially those who identify with the Human Biodiversity or HBD intellectual movement (generally known as "scientific racism" in academic circles, but we are avoiding such unkind terms).

Thank you, Chanda, for avoiding unkind terms. Well, I know a bit about HBD. The term was coined by Steve Sailer in the late 1990s for an email discussion group that included myself and various academics who may or may not want their names disclosed. It's hard to generalize but we were all influenced by findings that genetic evolution didn’t slow down as cultural evolution speeded up in our species. In fact, the two seemed to feed into each other. This is why genetic evolution accelerated over 100-fold about 10,000 years ago when humans began to abandon hunting and gathering for farming, which in turn led to ever more diverse societies. Our ancestors thus adapted much more to their cultural environments than to their natural environments. These findings were already circulating within our discussion group before being written up in a paper by Hawks et al. (2007) and later in a book by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending (2009).

Yes, previously it was thought that genetic evolution slowed to a crawl with the advent of culture. Therefore, groups like the Igbo couldn't possibly differ genetically from other sub-Saharan Africans, at least not for anything culture-related. But that kind of thinking wasn't HBD or even racialist. It was simply the old anthropological narrative, and it's still accepted by many anthropologists, most of whom aren't "scientific racists."

Oh sorry, I forgot we promised to avoid that term.

Note

(1) Of course, if the cultural pressure is maintained long enough, there may be selection for individuals who naturally produce the new phenotype—with no prodding and pushing. Let’s suppose that foot binding had never been outlawed in China. Through chance mutations, some Chinese women might be born with tiny feet, and their descendants would become more and more numerous because of their better life prospects. So what began as a new phenotype could end up becoming a new genotype. Culture pushes the limits of phenotypic plasticity, and then favors genotypes that don't have to be pushed. That's gene-culture coevolution.

References 

Baker, P.H. (1980). Lurching toward unity, The Wilson Quarterly, 4, 70-80

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL4_W_1980_Article_01_2.pdf 

Chisala, C. (2015b). Closing the Black-White IQ gap debate. Part I, The Unz Review, October 5

http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-debate-part-i/ 

Chisala, C. (2015a). The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue, The Unz Review, June 25

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

Cochran, G. and H. Harpending. (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilizations Accelerated Human Evolution, Basic Books, New York. 

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa? Evo and Proud, July 4

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2015/07/the-jews-of-west-africa.html 

Frost, P. (2014). How universal is empathy? Evo and Proud, June 28

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/06/how-universal-is-empathy.html 

Fuerst, J. (2014). Ethnic/race differences in aptitude by generation in the United States: An exploratory meta-analysis, June 29, Open Differential Psychology

http://openpsych.net/ODP/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/U.S.-Ethnic-Race-Differences-in-Aptitude-by-Generation-An-Exploratory-Meta-analysis-John-Fuerst-2014-07262014FINAL.pdf 

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 104, 20753-20758.

http://harpending.humanevo.utah.edu/Documents/accel_pnas_submit.pdf 

Kissinger, H.A. (1969). Memorandum, January 28. U.S. Department of State Archive

http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e5/55258.htm 

Platt, L. (2009). Ethnicity and family. Relationships within and between ethnic groups: An analysis using the Labour Force Survey. Equality and Human Rights Commission.

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/documents/raceinbritain/ethnicity_and_family_report.pdf  

Wikipedia (2015). Igbo people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_people

The Jews of West Africa?

Bronze vessel in the form of a snail shell, 9th century, Igbo-Ukwu (Wikicommons). The Igbo developed metallurgy much earlier than the rest of West Africa.

 

There has been much talk here about Chanda Chisala's article "The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue." Much of the article focuses on the Igbo (known also as Ibo), a people who live in the Niger Delta and "are well known to be high academic achievers within Nigeria." In the United Kingdom, their children do as well in school as Chinese and Indian students:

The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on "case study" model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites. (Chisala, 2015)

The Igbo have long been known as achievers, particularly in business. Whereas trade is largely women's work in the rest of West Africa, it is dominated by Igbo of both sexes in Nigeria.

[...] In study after study, it has been documented that the Ibo, through conflict and mobility, have been very successful in enterprise. Indeed, a major study argued that the Ibo have a very high need for achievement in the business world. Still another study showed that the majority of entrepreneurs in the sample were Ibo. (Butler, 1997, p. 178)

Sabino and Hall (1999) describe them as being “competitive, individualistic, status-conscious, antiauthoritarian, pragmatic, and practical—a people with a strongly developed commercial sense.” In colonial-era literature, they were often called "the Jews of West Africa" (see note).

Prehistory

How did the Igbo become so entrepreneurial? It's possible that their location in the Niger Delta predisposed them to be go-betweens in trade between coastal and interior peoples. Similar assemblages of glass beads, many of Egyptian origin and dating to the 9th and 14th centuries, have been recovered from the Niger Delta and eastern Mali, indicating that the Niger acted as a conduit of trade from the Atlantic coast to the Sahel and thence to the Middle East (Davison,1972; Insoll and Shaw, 1997).

Archaeological sites in the Niger Delta show that advanced economic development began much earlier there than elsewhere in West Africa. This is seen in early use of metallurgy. At one metallurgical complex, dated to 765 BC, iron ore was smelted in furnaces measuring a meter wide. The molten slag was drained through conduits to pits, where it formed blocks weighing up to 43-47 kg. The operating temperatures are estimated to have varied between 1,155 and 1,450 degrees C (Holl, 2009). Some radiocarbon dates for iron smelting in this region go back to 2000 BC (Eze-Uzomaka, 2009).

This production seems to have been in excess of local needs and therefore driven by trade with other peoples:

One aspect which can be inferred from the cylindrical slag blocks left behind is that the Lejja smelters must have had excess production of iron, and this may have led to extensive trade to far and distant places, sustained over a long period of time. (Eze-Uzomaka, 2009)

This metallurgy is unusual not only in its early date for West Africa but also in its subsequent development, which reached a high level of sophistication despite a lack of borrowing from metallurgical traditions in the Middle East and Europe. This may be seen in more than 700 artefacts of bronze, copper, and iron recovered from the Igbo-Ukwu site and dated to the 9th century AD:

They are the oldest bronze artifacts known in West African and were manufactured centuries before the emergence of other known bronze producing centers such as those of Ife and Benin. The bronzes include numerous ritual vessels, pendants, crowns, breastplates, staff ornaments, swords, and fly-whisk handles.

The Igbo-Ukwu bronzes amazed the world with a very high level of technical and artistic proficiency and sophistication which was at this time distinctly more advanced than bronze casting in Europe.

[...] Apparently the metal workers of ancient Igbo-Ukwu were not aware of commonly used techniques such as wire making, soldering or riveting which suggests an independent development and long isolation of their metal working tradition.

[...] Some of the techniques used by the ancient smiths are not known to have been used outside Igbo-Ukwu such as the production of complex objects in stages with the different parts later fixed together by brazing or by casting linking sections to join them. (Wikipedia, 2015) 

Contact with European traders

Thus, even before the first European contacts in the 16th century, the Igbo were already the focus of a network of trading relationships that extended outward from the Niger Delta. European traders became integrated into this trade network, thereby enabling the Igbo to emerge as valued middlemen in the slave trade: 

The peoples of south-eastern Nigeria have been involved in trade for as long as there are any records. The archaeological sites at Igbo-Ukwu and other evidence reveal long distance trade in metal and beads, as well as regional trade in salt, cloth, and beads at an early date. The lower Niger River and its Delta featured prominently in this early trade, and evidence is offered to suggest a continuity in the basic modes of trade on the lower Niger from c. A.D. 1500 to the mid-nineteenth century. An attempt to sketch the basic economic institutions of the Igbo hinterland before the height of the slave trade stresses regional trading networks in salt, cloth, and metal, the use of currencies, and a nexus of religious and economic institutions and persons. It is argued that while the growth of the slave trade appears to have been handled without major changes in the overall patterns of trade along the lower Niger, in the Igbo hinterland a new marketing 'grid', dominated by the Arochuku traders, was created using the pre-existent regional trading networks and religious values as a base. (Northrop, 1972)

British colonial rule

Great Britain took over Nigeria initially as part of its effort to outlaw the slave trade. Lagos was annexed in 1861 and a sphere of influence over the country was recognized in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, although a protectorate would not be proclaimed until 1901.

This new political environment favored the Igbo, whose initiative, self-discipline, and future orientation predisposed them to succeed not only in their homeland but also elsewhere in Nigeria, where they soon became dominant as merchants and civil servants. They thus took on a role like that of middleman minorities elsewhere in the empire, such as the Parsis in western India, the Chinese in Malaya, and the South Asians in East Africa. By the 1930s, one Igbo boasted that "the Ibo domination of Nigeria is a matter of time" (Ibrahim, 2000, p. 56). This trend even affected the army. By independence, 24 of the 52 senior army officers of the rank of major and above were Igbos (Ibrahim, 2000,p. 55).

This dominance led to jealousy among Nigerians in the north and west, who accused the Igbo of unfair business practices:

In the private sector they [the Hausa Muslims] are open to the exploitation of the Ibo control of the modern sector of private business activities. Ibos fix prices unilaterally by which Hausa money is siphoned daily. The Hausa are reduced to utter poverty and a large percentage of them rendered street beggars. (quoted in Ibrahim, 2000, p. 52)

According to Arthur Nwankwo (1985:9) "Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo", a phenomenon that Chinua Achebe had dubbed "the Igbo problem". They argue that the Igbos are more cosmopolitan, more adapted to other cultures, more individualistic and competitive, more receptive to change and more prone to settle and work in other parts of the country but the myth persists that they are aggressive, arrogant and clannish. (Ibrahim, 2000, p.55)

Independence, civil war, and the aftermath

Independence came to Nigeria in 1960, and with it growing disillusionment among many Igbo, particularly with the perceived instability and corruption of the political process. In 1966, Igbo officers staged a coup and seized control of the country, killing the prime minister and the premiers of the northern and western regions. Northern army officers then staged a countercoup, and Igbo began to flee northern cities in the wake of persecution.

The next year, in 1967, the Igbo seceded and formed their own country, the Republic of Biafra. They lost the ensuing civil war at the cost of a million civilian deaths and a devastated homeland. Nonetheless, they are today building on "the remarkable Igbo economic and commercial élan that has occurred since the end of the civil war" (Ibrahim, 2000, p. 56).

Yet mistrust remains: "the North and the West have a deep-seated mistrust of the Igbo and so are bent on restricting, containing, and denying the Igbo their political right. Added to this is their subtle message to other minority groups: the Igbo, as a group, are not to be trusted!" (Abidde, 2004). This mistrust is founded on a not unjustified perception that the Igbo will prevail on any level playing field:

Collectively, the Igbo are wealthy, educated, and intelligent. These are people with global influence, strength of character, élan and self confidence. The Igbo nation has attributes most other Nigerian nations can only dream of; and are what most other nations are not. The Igbo made and makes Nigeria better. Any wonder then that the Igbo can do without Nigeria; but Nigeria and her myriad nationalities cannot do without the Igbo? Take the Igbo out of the Nigeria equation, and Nigeria will be a wobbling giant gasping for air! (Abidde, 2004)

Today, there is growing recognition in Nigeria that the Igbo can and should be given more political and economic power, but there is still a fear that they will use such power selfishly and not for the good of all Nigerians.

Conclusion

Chanda Chisala uses the Igbo example to refute the "hereditarian-HBD" argument. In doing so, he comes closer to the HBD position than he may realize. Recent work on gene-culture coevolution has shown that the average mental makeup of human populations can change significantly over a short span of historical time. This notably seems to have happened with the Ashkenazi Jews and the English between the Middle Ages and the 19th century (Clark et al., 2007; Cochran et al., 2006).

Why couldn't a similar process have happened with the Igbo? Why assume that sub-Saharan Africa is a monolith whose diverse populations have evolved in exactly the same way? We know that human genetic evolution didn't slow down with the coming of culture. It actually sped up (Hawks et al., 2007). For the most part, we humans have diversified genetically in response to differences in cultural environment and not to differences in natural environment. It is therefore plausible that the different cultures of Africa have had different effects on the gene pools of their respective populations.

I can hear the answer to my question: "You guys are the ones who think all blacks are alike!" Well, that isn't what I think.

On a final note, I couldn't help noticing the many commenters who complimented Chanda on sticking it to the HBD crowd. Don't they understand the logical contraposition? If it can be shown that some African groups have higher cognitive ability, doesn't the converse become plausible and even expectable?

Note

It may be that a similar sort of nickname had evolved into the word "Igbo" itself: "[...] some Ibo claim that the word "Hebrew" must have been mutilated to "Ubru" or "Ibru," then to "Uburu," and later to "Ibo."" (Butler, 1997, pp. 177-178). This is plausible, given that the Igbo initially had a weak sense of collective identity and may not have had a native name for themselves, thus inclining them to take a name given by outsiders. There are examples of this sort of thing elsewhere in Africa. The Tukulor of Senegal, for instance, were originally called the "two colors" by European travellers because some of them were light-skinned and others dark-skinned. 

References 

Abidde, S.O. (2004). The Nigerian Presidency and the Igbo Nation, Gamji

http://www.gamji.com/article3000/NEWS3755.htm 

Butler, J.S. (1997). Why Booker T. Washington was right. A reconsideration of the economics of race," in T.D. Boston (ed.) A Different Vision: African American economic thought, Volume 1, (pp. 174-193), Psychology Press

https://books.google.ca/books?id=WMwRwp9QImAC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false  

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue, The Unz Review, June 25

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. 

Cochran, G., J. Hardy, and H. Harpending. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science, 38, 659-693.

http://harpending.humanevo.utah.edu/trial.link/Ashkenazi.pdf

Davison, C.C. (1972). Glass beads in African archaeology: Results of neutron activation analysis, supplemented by results of X-ray fluorescence analysis, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California

http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/04/055/4055606.pdf  

Eze-Uzomaka, P. (2009). Iron and its influence on the prehistoric site of Lejja, World of Iron Conference

https://www.academia.edu/4103707/Iron_and_its_influence_on_the_prehistoric_site_of_Lejja 

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 104, 20753-20758.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/5761823_Recent_acceleration_of_human_adaptive_evolution/file/9c9605240c4bb57b55.pdf 

Holl, A. F.C. (2009). Early West African Metallurgies: New Data and Old Orthodoxy, Journal of World Prehistory, 22, 415-438

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Augustin_Holl/publication/226180393_Early_West_African_Metallurgies_New_Data_and_Old_Orthodoxy/links/00b7d52d503ee77a4c000000.pdf  

Ibrahim, J. (2000). The transformation of ethno-regional identities in Nigeria, in A. Jegga (ed.) Identity Transformation and Identity Politics Under Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, (pp. 41-61), Nordic Africa Institute.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=fUWLQv8-H70C&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false 

Insoll, T. and T. Shaw. (1997). Gao and Igbo-Ukwu: Beads, interregional trade, and beyond, African Archaeological Review, 14, 9-23

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02968364 

Northrup, D. (1972). The growth of trade among the Igbo before 1880, The Journal of African History, 13,217-236.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=3234276&fileId=S0021853700011439

Sabino, R. and J. Hall. (1999). The path not taken: Cultural identity in the interesting life of Olaudah Equiano, MELUS, 24, 5-19. 

Wikipedia. (2015). Archaeology of Igbo-Ukwu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_of_Igbo-Ukwu