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This hypothesis is now quite conclusively disproven by a study using within-family African admixture and then separating out the genes responsible for skin color. The great cremieuxrecueil on x last week:
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1967752858251469117
This should make us happy, because it means that White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting lther groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes. Rather, White people are so selflessly kind that they are willing to forego their own intuition and self-benefit at the civilizational scale in the errant pursuit of universal justice. (As an aside, that trannyporn0 theory is certain in my mind, because I once messaged him on the old site and he mentioned that he was looking into IQ-by-%AA admixture data.)
I think there's an argument to be made that it shouldn't make us happy. I vaguely remember reading (though once again, I don't remember who, when or where) someone arguing online against Scott's position of IQ realism to combat anti-Semitism — that elite overrepresentation of Jews is due to their higher IQ, and thus they are not "incredibly evil senseless folks" engaged in ethnic conspiracy against the Gentiles. I vaguely recall the person I read quoting a couple of things from Turkheimer to support his argument, which is that this explanation will, if made widely known, will likely make anti-Semitism worse — not worse in quantity, but worse in quality.
Because maybe you have a few anti-Semites who only dislike Jewish overrepresentation because they think it's a product of "cheating" and ethnic conspiring, and if you convince them it's not, then they'll become okay with the statistical disparities. But, the argument goes, that's not most anti-Semites. No, it's the elite overrepresentation itself that's the core problem, and they care about Jewish "cheating" because they think it's the cause of that. And being falsely accused of something you're not doing — conspiring to keep other ethnic groups down — is very bad, and having people demand you stop doing the thing you aren't doing is very much a problem.
But it's better than the "IQ realism" alternative. Because it's one thing to have the people unhappy with elite overrepresentation think it's something the Jews are choosing to do — and thus could, theoretically, choose not to do. It's another to convince them that Jewish elite overrepresentation is a product of higher Jewish IQs, a hereditary trait they simply can't help; that it's not something the Jews are doing, it's an inevitable product of their nature. Because if you want to get rid of Jewish elite overrepresentation (whatever the cause), and Jewish elite overrepresentation is an inevitable product of the existence and presence of Jews in your society, then the only solution can be…. (Hence, the person argued, the only way to deal with anti-Semites is to censor and suppress them.)
The analogy to black-white race relations is rather straightforward. I've effortposted here before on the Kendian academic model of "racism" as synonymous with "disparate impact" (and while I tend to reference Kendi, he didn't actually say anything new, he merely said in plainer, more outsider-accessible language what previous academics had been expressing in more subtle jargon for decades prior). It doesn't matter that "White people are not incredibly evil senseless folks constantly putting other groups down and thereby making them dumber through mysterious processes" — all that matters is that we've made a society in which success correlates with IQ; that this means an ethnic group with an mean IQ of 85 will be less successful in the statistical aggregate than one of mean IQ 100 is just the way in which our society has "white supremacism" and "systemic racism" baked in. "Anti-racism" means reordering society to remove this IQ-success correlation, at least in racial aggregates.
And if you answer like many people do — especially "gray tribe" sorts — that the correlation of IQ with outcomes is because intelligence is deeply important to outcomes, particularly in a modern high-tech society like ours, and strongly correlated to competence; so that in basically any moderately-functional society, all things held equal, IQ is always going to positively correlate with good outcomes… well, then you're just arguing that no amount of (plausible) rejiggering of society will eliminate "systemic racism," and that the problem as the academics above define it — white (and Jewish and Asian) elite overrepresentation is an inevitable product of the existence of white people. And thus, the talk of "eliminating whiteness" takes on a whole new tone if you accept IQ realism.
(This is a part of a much bigger discussion on how the "liberal consensus" worldview seems to hold that peaceful coexistence requires a certain level of cognitive and genetic homogeneity, that humans be mostly fungible and most differences "skin-deep"; and that any large, hereditary gaps in things like IQ — whether currently extant, or a product of future genetic modification — would make genocide inevitable; that either the high-IQ must cleanse the world of those less intelligent, or that the low-IQ must rise up and slaughter their more-intelligent would-be overlords. Malcolm Collins touched on this point, with references to Star Trek's position on genetic enhancement, in a recent Based Camp podcast episode.)
Thing is, we've been trying the experiment of suppressing "IQ Realism", pretending all groups are the same, and rejiggering things so it's not as obvious they aren't. It has led us to some nasty bits of the Culture War, resentment among whites discriminated against, doctors who couldn't pass the MCAT if they were white, possibly the Jackson water crises, etc. Chirugh's maxim applies: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
The lighter version -- "IQ Realism" is suppressed and the disparate outcomes allowed to exist but waved away for various other reasons -- worked better in some senses, but it was not stable. Perhaps it could be re-established somehow, but I suspect the conspiracy required would be too difficult to maintain.
For Jews, I suspect there's less of a problem. Outbreeding among the Ashkenazi is reducing their IQ advantage, and this is probably good (overall, not for IQ specifically) for the hybrid generations as well, as the Ashkenazi show a number of genetic diseases resulting from a small inbred population.
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Surely this proves too much. Either Cremieux thinks percentage of African ancestry is entirely unrelated to how African anyone looks (in which case, uh…), or he needs some sort of convoluted “threshold” model in which percentage of African ancestry determines how African someone looks in general, but between-siblings differences are always too small to result in a visibly-distinct degree of African appearance (though somehow they aren’t too small to produce a noticeable difference in intelligence?)
As someone who actually studied (independently, there's no way I could get a degree in it) HBD the actual answer to this is that while how African someone looks isn't entirely unrelated to their ancestry it isn't completely dependent upon it either. There's a wide variety of environmental (including the uterine environment) causes which can impact physical appearance, and social recognition of race (i.e. "they look somalian") can be dramatically altered by personal choice - if you clone an african and let one of them grow up in a tribe of bushmen while the other grows up as a member of the British aristocracy there'll be a noticeable difference in appearance despite identical genetics.
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Delicious horseshoe theory if Cremieux is indeed arguing "(observed) race is just a social construct, sweety"...
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If there are is a genetic component in some African ancestry (although which part of Africa, as there is a huge amount of genetic diversity even within single countries?) that is correlated with lower IQ, it would still be one of many factors involved, and does not mean culture and discrimination is not a factor.
What are you or @ArjinFerman suggesting we do with that information?
To the extent I'm interested in bringing up the subject at all, it's only as a trump card against any future attempt to resurrect "white privilege" and "systemic racism" arguments, and as happened in this case, to refute bad "purely socio-economic factors, of course" arguments.
If you're interested in my solutions to the problem, they boil down to the equal application of the rule of law, regardless of race, swiftly, and harshly. I've long advocated for the Bukele Option / Salvador Solution over the application of genetics to the problem of crime (which is mostly a liberal idea - see "abortions caused a drop in the crime rate"). If that's too spicy, I can maybe be persuaded to go as soft as Thomas Sowell.
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I think the logical suggestion would be to enforce the law, accepting that racial disparities in enforcement may be unavoidable.
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Nothing crazy: cancel affirmative action, restrict immigration accordingly, do away with guilt narratives about disparate outcomes. I feel like progressives think that the worst case scenario of affirmative action is slightly slower progress, at a pace which doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If only! The worst case scenario is that the Chinese gain global hegemony and completely control the trajectory of the mankind because the pace of technological change all but prevents new competitors from arising. So we’re in the midst of a life of death struggle against a different civilization for world domination. And the Han are pretty cool and peaceful, maybe their foreign policy decisions even justify their victory, but I’d rather not have a Total Han Victory over the rest of history.
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Is the claim this data was studied between siblings of the same parents? Because with enough genes at play this sounds like trying to divide by coinflips by heads count: easy for single-coin games (eye color, etc), but if you're flipping thousands of coins you're going to end up with about the same number every time.
But I'm not a geneticist, so feel free to tell me where I'm wrong.
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