Comparing an incomparable?

 

Stigmata Siciliana (1964), David McLure (Wikicommons)

 

 

What is the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africans? There’s no clear answer. Current estimates come from an early stage of the Flynn effect and are also distorted by qualitative differences in cognition. Furthermore, mean IQ differs among African groups.

 

 

 

At present, there is little consensus on the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Estimates have ranged from a low of 66 to a high of 82 (Lynn 2010; Wicherts et al. 2010). Rindermann (2013) put forward a "best guess" of 75, which is inexplicably much lower than the estimated African American mean of 85. Yes, African Americans are about 20% European by ancestry, but that degree of admixture would not cause a 10-point difference. Malnutrition? That might depress IQ scores in some African countries but not most.

 

Noah Carl (2022) has reopened the debate by inferring mean IQ from harmonized test scores and GDP per capita. Sub-Saharan Africa looks somewhat better on the first measure and somewhat worse on the second. Both measures correlate roughly with mean IQ, but the correlation isn’t strong enough to tell us whether the mean is 62, 75, or 82. Moreover, the first measure suffers from the same problem that plagues IQ tests: Africa is just starting to experience the secular increase in mean IQ that the West experienced during the 20th century, i.e., the Flynn effect. By how much should we increase the estimate of mean African IQ to adjust for Africa being at an earlier stage of the Flynn effect?

 

As for the second measure, GDP per capita, the ability to create wealth is determined not only by cognitive ability but also by other mental traits: future time orientation (also known as time preference), willingness to follow rules and enforce them, feelings of guilt over breaking rules, reluctance to use violence to settle disputes, tendency toward individualism rather than nepotism and familialism, and so on.

 

In a reply to Carl’s article, Emil Kirkegaard (1922) infers mean IQ from the Social Progress Index. But that measure is no less problematic than GDP per capita. Social progress is driven by a basket of mental qualities, of which cognitive ability is only one. Emil himself makes that point:

 

One cannot just impute IQs reliably from non-IQ data in order to get some kind of unbiased estimates of a region's IQ because the regions themselves may under- or overperform on international rankings for whatever reason, [including] legacy of or current communism, nonWEIRDness, low individualism, or any other difference you can imagine.

 

Emil concludes: “There’s no avoiding having to collect more African IQ data.”

 

More data would be nice, but no amount of data will provide us with a mean African IQ that can be usefully compared with the mean IQs of other populations. There are several reasons:

 

·        Again, estimates of African IQ come from an early stage of the Flynn effect. They are not comparable with estimates of IQ that come from a later stage in other populations.

·        The genetic architecture of cognition is not the same. Sub-Saharan Africans seem to have alleles for cognitive ability that do not exist in other populations. To date, such alleles have been identified only in people of European descent.

·       Recent cognitive evolution, particularly in societies near the Niger, has created differences in mean cognitive ability among African groups. It is no more meaningful to talk about a single mean African IQ than it is to talk about a single mean European IQ.

 

Differences in the stage of the Flynn effect

 

IQ data from Western societies are not comparable with IQ data from African societies. The latter are just beginning to experience the rise in mean IQ that took place earlier in the West, specifically the increase of 13.8 points between 1932 and 1978 (Flynn 1984). The Flynn effect seems to be not so much an increase in cognitive ability as an increase in familiarity with the “test paradigm” at school and, more broadly, in society. Flynn (2013) situates the cause in the modernist paradigm: “We freed ourselves from fixation on the concrete and entered a world in which the mass of people began to use logic on abstractions and universalize their moral principles.”

 

Keep in mind that competitive exams began to appear in the West only in the late 19th century, first for entry into the civil service and then more generally for the educational system (Wikpedia 2022). Previously, people entered the civil service through patronage appointments, and education took the form of apprenticeship and imitation of role models. In those days, people were less inclined to formulate questions and look for the answers. The answers were already known, and you had to learn them. In fact, there was a stigma attached to asking too many questions, especially in rapid-fire succession.

 

Differences in the genetic architecture of cognition

 

As a means to estimate cognitive ability, the IQ test is becoming superseded by the educational polygenic score. This measure is based on SNPs that have been shown to be associated with educational attainment. Your polygenic score is higher to the extent that the alleles at those SNPs are associated with higher educational attainment. It is thus a measure of innate cognitive ability. At present, we have identified 1,271 SNPs that are associated with educational attainment and which, together, explain 11-13% of the variance in educational attainment among individuals (Lee et al. 2018). The educational polygenic score has shown good reliability in predicting the IQ of individuals and even better reliability in predicting the mean IQ of populations.

 

Again, we have identified alleles associated with educational attainment only in people of European descent. For this reason, the educational polygenic score is five times worse at predicting the cognitive ability of African Americans (Lasker et al. 2019). The loss of predictive power seems greatest in the domain of language ability, according to two studies:

 

·        Guo et al. (2019, p. 27) found that the educational polygenic score is ten to eighteen times worse at predicting the verbal ability of African Americans, in comparison to White, Asian, and Hispanic White Americans. They attributed this difference to the smaller size of the African American sample, to gene-environment interactions, and to “significantly less than full coverage of African genetic variants related to cognitive ability.”

·        With a sample of school-age African Americans, Rabinowitz et al. (2019) found that the educational polygenic score fails to predict performance on a standardized reading test but does predict pursuit of postsecondary education, getting a criminal record (only among boys), and performance on a standardized math test (only for one of the three cohorts).

 

When modern humans began to spread out of Africa some 60,000 years ago, those left behind began to pursue their own trajectory of cognitive evolution. The evolutionary change seems to have been greatest in the domain of language, i.e., the ability to express oneself in speech and writing. Polygenic scores cannot predict innate reading ability because too many of the relevant alleles are exclusive to the African gene pool and remain unidentified. Other relevant alleles may simply be more important or less important in other gene pools.

 

Although the educational polygenic score is based on alleles identified in Europeans, it can still be used for rough predictions of cognitive ability among people of African descent. Lasker et al. (2019, pp. 444-445) were able to increase its predictive power for African Americans by almost a factor of three, i.e., an increase from 20% to 54% of its predictive power for European Americans. They achieved this improvement by using alleles from a much smaller subset of SNPs that are less sensitive to decay of linkage disequilibrium.

 

Differences among African groups in the trajectory of cognitive evolution

 

Within the larger African trajectory of cognitive evolution, various African populations have pursued their own sub-trajectories. This has been especially true for populations in West Africa over the past millennium and a half. Their educational polygenic scores vary as you go from west to east, being lowest among the Mende (Sierra Leone) and progressively higher among Gambians, the Esan (Nigeria), and the Yoruba (Nigeria). The Yoruba have almost the same educational polygenic score as that of African Americans, who nonetheless are about 20% admixed with Europeans (Piffer 2021, see Figure 7).

 

Before European contact, West African societies were more complex in the north and the east, i.e., in the Sahel and the Nigerian forest. Those areas saw the creation of towns, the formation of states, and an increasing use of metallurgy and luxury goods from the fourth century onward. The increase in social complexity seems to have been driven by the development of trade along the Niger, which served as the main trading route between the coast and the interior (Frost 2022).

 

In West Africa, cognitive evolution seems to have gone the farthest among the Igbo of the Niger delta. We have no educational polygenic data on them, but their record of academic achievement in Nigeria, the UK, and elsewhere indicates an unusually high level of cognitive ability (Chisala 2015).

 

Conclusion

 

We should get more data, while recognizing the limits of what the data may tell us. IQ tests will always be problematic, and future research should focus on educational polygenic scores. In particular, we need to identify relevant alleles in non-European populations. Some of those alleles may be population-specific, and others may be universal but more important in some populations than in others. Finally, Africa is not a monolith. Different African populations have pursued different trajectories of cognitive evolution.

 

 

References

 

Carl, N. (2022). How useful are national IQs? Noah’s Newsletter, July 13. https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/how-useful-are-national-iqs  

 

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/   

 

Flynn, J.R. (1984). The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932–1978. Psychological Bulletin 95(1):29–51. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.95.1.29  

 

Flynn, J.R. (2013). The “Flynn Effect” and Flynn’s paradox. Intelligence 41: 851-857. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.intell.2013.06.014   

 

Frost, P. (2021). Polygenic scores and Black Americans. Evo and Proud, April 27. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2021/04/polygenic-scores-and-black-americans.html   

 

Frost, P. (2022). Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa: the Niger’s role. Evo and Proud, April 30. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2022/04/recent-cognitive-evolution-in-west.html  

 

Guo, G., Lin, M.J., and K.M. Harris. (2019). Socioeconomic and Genomic Roots of Verbal Ability. bioRxiv, 544411. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/544411v1  

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W. (2022). African IQs without African IQs: it’s complicated. Just Emil Kirkegaard Things. August 7. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/african-iqs-without-african-iqs-its?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email  

 

Lasker, J., B.J. Pesta, J.G.R. Fuerst, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). Global ancestry and cognitive ability. Psych 1(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010034  

 

Lee, J. J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, et al. (2018). Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature Genetics 50(8): 1112-1121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0147-3

 

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://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2010.03.009   

 

Piffer, D. (2021). Divergent selection on height and cognitive ability: evidence from Fst and polygenic scores. OpenPsych. https://openpsych.net/files/submissions/14_Divergent_selection_on_height_and_cognitive_ability_evidence_from_Fst_and_13c3ICJ.pdf     

 

Rabinowitz, J.A., S.I.C. Kuo, W. Felder, R.J. Musci, A. Bettencourt, K. Benke, ... and A. Kouzis. (2019). Associations between an educational attainment polygenic score with educational attainment in an African American sample. Genes, Brain and Behavior, e12558. https://doi.org/10.1111/gbb.12558   

 

Rindermann, H. (2013). African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations. Personality and Individual Differences 55: 229-233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.06.022   

 

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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2009.05.002   

 

Wikipedia. (2022). Imperial examination – Influence - West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#West  

Why universal human rights aren't universal

Jean Piaget (1896-1980). A renowned Swiss psychologist, he argued that moral development is linked to cognitive development.

Are intelligence and morality interlinked? This was what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget concluded from his studies of child development. With increasing age, children develop not only intellectually but also morally, growing out of infantile self-centredness and into adult decentered-ness:

According to Piaget, moral development — the ability to judge ethical problems in an impartial and unbiased way — relies on prior cognitive development. Indeed, cognitive and moral development are structurally similar. In both is acquired a well-founded, reasonable structure. As Jean Piaget (1948/1932, p. 404) stated: "Parallelism exists between moral and intellectual development: ... Logic is the morality of thought just as morality is the logic of action." And this parallelism is based on the cognitive nature of morality, e.g. to behave ethically one has to take the perspective of third parties. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 32)

This view has become popular and is even central to much of present-day thinking. If people are better educated, they will presumably become not only smarter but also more empathic and, thus, more considerate of their fellow humans. This view, as popular as it is, doesn't seem quite true. Many of us have known people who are intelligent and yet lacking in empathy. We call them psychopaths. Usually, they're explained away as aberrations. They're sick, aren't they? In reality, the line between 'normal' and 'psychopath' is arbitrary—like most mental traits, the capacity for empathy is distributed continuously along a bell curve. Lots of seemingly normal people have little empathy.

Nor does Piaget's view seem true if we look farther afield. Many moral systems attach little importance to empathy. Indeed, of all the world religions, Christianity seems unique in advocating the moral duty not only to help others but also to feel their pain, even when they aren't fellow Christians. Yes, most Christians fail to meet this standard of universal selflessness, but other religions don't set the bar so high. 

Indeed, the ideal of universal selflessness isn’t at all universal. It developed essentially within a single cultural context, the Christian world:

In Judaism and Christianity, "God created man in his own image" (Gen1:27 ESV). Humans being the image of God, "God-likeness", implies treating humans in a respectful way. Of course, at first blush, history reveals large discrepancies between the message of Christianity and the actual behavior of Christians. However, this does not mean that such behavior was consistent with the Christian message, and in many cases it was criticized by prominent Christians at the time. The Christian message had a corrective function. For instance, the inhumane treatment of American Indians by Spanish colonists was criticized by the Dominican priest Bartholomé de Las Casas (as mentioned above). The abolitionist movement was organized by Protestants and led by the Evangelical Christian William Wilberforce. The horrors of war were mitigated by charities such as the Red Cross, which was founded by the evangelical Christian, Henry Dunant. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 34)

The Muslim world imported as many slaves as did the Christian world, yet a Muslim abolitionist movement never arose, and the trade was ultimately abolished worldwide through the intervention of Christian nations, particularly Great Britain. Today, the slave trade has left no legacy of guilt among Muslims, while it definitely has in those nations that strove to bring it to an end.

This apparent paradox has led Heiner Rindermann—a well-known psychologist in HBD circles—to challenge the Piagetian idea that moral development is linked to intellectual development. These two mental traits are distinct and have followed their own trajectories in different moral traditions.

To prove his point, he teamed up with sociologist Noah Carl to study how respect for human rights is related, cross-culturally, to cognitive ability and religion. They found a stronger relationship with religion than with cognitive ability. Specifically, the percentage of Christians in a society had a stronger positive impact (r = .62) on respect for human rights (Rindermann and Carl 2018) than did educational level (r = .54) or cognitive ability (r = .50 to .51).

One can quibble about the methodology. The study defines human rights largely as the right to make choices on one's own, regardless of existing social norms. Freedom of religion, for instance, is defined as the freedom not only to practice one's religion but also to convert to another. As the authors themselves note, this is not a legitimate freedom in much of the world, unless one is converting to the majority religion. Freedom doesn’t mean that a minority is free to become the majority.

Nonetheless, there does seem to be a correlation between Christianity and respect for human rights as long as we define the latter, at least in part, as maximization of personal choice and autonomy. 

Is Christianity confounded with European ancestry?

Correlation isn't causation. Couldn't Christianity be a proxy for "European-ness"? Indeed, most Christians are at least partly of European ancestry, and even more live in societies founded and still largely run by people of European origin.

To control for this confounding factor, one could compare Christian and non-Christian societies within a region where European ancestry is minimal. Sub-Saharan Africa comes to mind. Even in South Africa, the European minority is down to the single digits.

Rindermann and Carl (2018, p. 60) did make that comparison:

Within sub-Saharan Africa [...] the percentage of Christians is still positively (but weakly) related to human rights (r = .10; N = 48), and the percentage of Muslims is still negatively (but weakly) related to human rights (r = -.12).

Those correlations are indeed weak. Moreover, the one between Christianity and respect for human rights is largely due to the relatively stable societies of southern Africa, i.e., South Africa itself, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Those societies enjoy a judicial and administrative legacy that may not last much longer, given recent events and the example of Zimbabwe.

To be honest, I feel little in common with fellow Christians like Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe. Ironically, both of them have a better claim to being Christian than I do, since I refused to be confirmed after attending my confirmation classes.

Is European ancestry confounded with a genetically influenced trait?

If European ancestry is a confounding factor, could it be a proxy for some unknown genetically influenced trait? Rindermann and Carl tried to answer this question by estimating the average "skin brightness" of each country.

Skin brightness is more highly correlated with human rights than is cranial capacity (r = .25 vs. .18). Of course, skin color itself is unlikely to exert any effect; it constitutes a marker for evolutionary pressures that may be associated with culture. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 53)

This is, I suspect, a reference to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and his belief that humans had to become more intelligent as they spread into harsher northern climates: "those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization" Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume II, Section 92.

Rindermann and Carl seem to be assuming that European skin became white solely as an adaptation to the northern natural environment. They also seem to be assuming that moral development is linked to cognitive development—the very hypothesis they want to test.

A better genetic marker would be the long allele for the 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter gene. It's less frequent in collectivistic cultures than in individualistic cultures, the latter being the cultures of western and northern Europe—the same cultures that value so much the rights of the individual (Chiao and Blizinsky 2010). In a study of American toddlers, carriers of the short allele were more likely to imitate the way other people behaved (Schroeder et al. 2016).

The study provides additional evidence for the view that Christianity, in itself, doesn't explain why Europeans, and especially northwest Europeans, see all individuals as being endowed with the same rights. Of the three branches of Christianity, Protestantism has the strongest correlation with respect for human rights (r = .48), followed by Catholicism (r = .42), and finally Orthodoxy (r = -.07) (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 52). This suggests that Christianity changed as its geocenter progressively moved from the Middle East to southern Europe and then to northwest Europe, along the way becoming more focused on the individual and on individual responsibility. 

Within Christianity, Protestantism stresses conscience, individual guilt, internal control, autonomy and self-responsibility (Weber, 2008/1904). All these traits are conducive for liberty, the rule of law, democracy and human rights (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 34)

[...] in Protestant countries, trust is higher, corruption is lower and levels of social and economic freedom are higher (Delhey & Newton, 2005; Harrison, 2013). People tend to be more self-controlled, having internalized social rules, meaning that harsh and violent control by the state is not needed. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 37)

The two authors are aware of the Hajnal Line and its relationship to a suite of psychological and behavioral traits. In societies north and west of a line running approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg, social relations have long shown a certain pattern:

- men and women marry relatively late

- many people never marry

- children usually leave the nuclear family to form new households

- households often have non-kin members

This is the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP). Everyone is single for at least part of adulthood, many stay single their entire lives, and a significant proportion of households have members not belonging to the immediate family or even to kin. In short, an individual is less fettered by the bonds of kinship even within his or her household (Frost 2017).

This led to late marriage, high rates of childlessness (of about half of the cohort), more rights for women, and large investments in education. Going further than Hajnal himself did, it arguably also enhanced delay of gratification, self-control (especially of sexuality), conscientiousness, frugality, industry and cognitive ability. The causes of this marriage pattern can be traced to Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions, to the interests of the church, and to the interests of landlords and guilds. (Rindermann and Carl 2018, p. 39)

The above view is also the one held by *hbd chick, i.e., the WEMP developed after the introduction of Christianity and was, at least in part, a consequence of medieval Christian practices and institutions. Yet there is good evidence for the existence of the WEMP as early as ninth-century France and fragmentary evidence even earlier (Frost 2017). I have argued that the arrow of causality points in the other direction: a pre-existing mindset in northwest Europe was carried over into Christianity, much like the Christmas tree and other pagan traditions. Later, as the center of Christendom moved west and north, this mindset gained importance within Western Christianity and pushed it more and more toward the idea of individual salvation and an individual relationship with God. 

The northwest European mindset is characterized essentially by four interrelated mental traits:

Independent social orientation - independence of the self from others, including stronger motivation toward self-expression, self-esteem, and self-efficacy and emphasis on personal happiness rather than social happiness. 

Universal rule adherence - capacity to obey universal and absolute moral rules, i.e., moral universalism and moral absolutism, as opposed to situational morality based on kinship. These rules are enforced by monitoring not only others but also oneself. Rule-breakers may be branded as morally worthless and expelled.

Affective empathy - capacity to experience the emotional states of other people in order to prevent harm and to provide help if needed. Help is conditional on the other person being judged morally worthy.

Guilt proneness - capacity to self-monitor thoughts and behavior for rule adherence in order to self-judge and, if necessary, to self-punish.

Conclusion

Are universal human rights truly universal? If we look at cultures across space and time, we find that the notion of human rights was nonexistent in most cultures and historical periods. Not until the 18th and 19th centuries did some countries codify this notion in law, although it clearly has antecedents that go farther back, at least to the formulation of canon law by the Catholic Church and perhaps farther. Northwest Europeans seem to have long been predisposed to think in terms of individual rights and universal moral rules.

Since the early 19th century, we in the West have tried to impose these rights on the entire world, initially through the suppression of the slave trade and then through the efforts of missionaries and colonial authorities to ban certain practices, like the custom of sati in India. Such efforts became an integral part of Western imperialism and "the white man's burden."

Although this burden has since been taken up by truly international bodies, like the U.N., the notion of universal human rights still reflects a Western view of people as atomized individuals who mainly seek to maximize their wealth, happiness, and personal autonomy. This is not how most humans view the purpose of existence. For that matter, this view was not originally held by northwest Europeans, whose understanding of moral universalism has steadily radicalized and expanded in scope over time.

References

Chiao, J.Y. and Blizinsky, K.D. (2010). Culture-gene coevolution of individualism-collectivism and the serotonin transporter gene. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277: 529-537.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/277/1681/529.short

Frost, P. (2017). The Hajnal line and gene-culture coevolution in northwest Europe, Advances in Anthropology 7: 154-174.

http://file.scirp.org/pdf/AA_2017082915090955.pdf

Rindermann, H. and N. Carl. (2018). Human rights: Why countries differ, Comparative Sociology 17: 29-69.

Schopenhauer, A. (1974)[1851]. Parerga and Paralipomena, English translation by E. F. J. Payne, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2 volumes.

Schroeder, K.B., Asherson, P., Blake, P.R., Fenstermacher, S.K., and Saudino, K.J. (2016). Variant at serotonin transporter gene predicts increased imitation in toddlers: relevance to the human capacity for cumulative culture. Biology Letters 12(4).

http://europepmc.org/articles/pmc4881356