Vdare and American Renaissance On IQ Fetishism By Brian Simpson

     Vdare.com, which is, along with American Renaissance, is said to be “associated with white supremacy,” has published an article arguing that “Evolution has made Jews more intelligent than white people. Race differences in IQ are genetic. And in that IQ is strongly genetic and races are genetic clusters.” This is not precise expression in my opinion,  but I pass over that.
  https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/vdare
  https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-higher-jewish-intelligence-is-genetic?scroll_to_paragraph=5

     This is the gloss provided by journalist Lance Welton, about the paper: “Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared with Catholics and Lutherans,”
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330601752_Polygenic_Scores_Mediate_the_Jewish_Phenotypic_Advantage_in_Educational_Attainment_and_Cognitive_Ability_Compared_With_Catholics_and_Lutherans

Like much of the falsehoods published in psychology, and I refer to a paper showing that most published research findings in this field (and other disciplines) are false, this claim faces the same methodological difficulties:
  https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

     This claim faces vitiating methodological difficulties right from the title. The idea that there are genetically distinct groups, “Jews,” “Catholic” and “Lutherans,” is not justifiable. For example, the likes of Welton and the American Renaissance/Vdare crew, draw a genetic distinction between whites and Ashkenazi Jews, yet genetic studies generally accept that there has been a high degree of intermixture between Ashkenazi Jews and European populations, even if the ultra-vague term “white” (for genetic and scientific, not political purposes) is taken to mean “European.”
  https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006644

     This creates an insuperable methodological problem for the so-called race realist IQ fetish types of Vdare and American Renaissance, since if the populations merge indistinguishably into each other, who is to say what genes from whom cause what? There is a good case for arguing that genetically Ashkenazi Jews are “white,” although the anti-Semites will not like this, but if so,  the race realist IQ ideology is incoherent. I have always felt that there must be something conceptually wrong with the IQ racket, since the IQ of Australian Aborigines, for example is taken by race realist IQ guru Richard Lynn to be around 68.8, which represents dysfunction intelligence (compared to “whites”). The Left call this out as racist, but what they should have done is to use this as a reduction to absurdity of the IQ racket itself. It is absurd to suppose that the Aboriginal people have a “moron’ level of IQ because there is simply no way that they could survive in one of the harshest environments on earth without a high degree of information processing problem solving. This is important since the race realists are willing to give an evolutionary explanation for alleged IQ differences between Ashkenazi Jews and “whites,” with higher IQ relating to increased Darwinian fitness and survival value. 

     In conclusion, although I agree that races exist as biological entities, I am suspicious of the IQ ranking theology, and have argued against it many times at this site. IQ for mathematical reasons, is impossible, and ultimately incoherent:
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016517657990212X

     On the IQ issue, I agree with the Left, but for different reasons, that the IQ racket primarily serves sectional, ideological  interests. Who benefits, cui bono?

All Blog Posts Authorised by K. W. Grundy
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