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
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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
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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
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