The IQ of Black Africans

The main objective of race realist "science" since its inception has been to show that blacks less intelligent than other races. Race realists regularly bend or twist data to arrive at this agenda. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the study of the IQs of Black Africans where consistency and the respect for the scientific method has been nearly absent.

Richard Lynn 

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You have probably seen a version of this map on the internet from Nazis. It's origins are important due to its implications. As we can see this map follows a very "convenient" racial hierarchy for the race realists which basically mirrors racial IQ differences in the US (where most of the studies on racial IQ differences have taken place). Asians at the top, Whites behind, Browns in the middle with Blacks at the bottom. This map suggests that the average IQ in sub-saharan Africa is 67 and that the average Black African is functionally retarded. These data points stem mainly from one man and his books - Richard Lynn. A man who has dedicated his life to spreading pseudoscientfic pioneer-fund backed propaganda. 

Methodology

The majority of this dataset comes from Lynn's 2002 book IQ and the wealth of nations. Lynn has also written other books using similar methodology about the topic at hand such as IQ and global inequality.  The aim of these books is clear - similar to how race realists try to use IQ to "explain" differences in income/wealth in the united states between racial groups, Lynn tries to use IQ to explain the differences in wealth between different nations of the world. The correlations found in the books were substantial to say the least, and given that Lynn believes that variation in IQ across races is substantially genetic in origin he aptly comes to the conclusion at the end of the book that differences in global wealth inequality can never be closed. Due to this controversial conclusion, the methodology of his books were reviewed and major flaws were discovered. For example, in his books Lynn doesn't have data for the many of the world's countries and simply estimates the IQ of the missing countries by averaging the IQs for their neighbours. Also the data for the IQs of many nations was based on very small or innapropriate samples.

 " But, even for most of the others, ‘direct evidence’ is putting it strongly, as even a cursory glance at the motley tests, dates, ages, unrepresentative samples, estimates, and corrections show. A test of 108 9–15-year olds in Barbados, of 50 13–16-year olds in Colombia, of 104 5–17-year olds in Ecuador, of 129 6–12-year olds in Egypt, of 48 10–14-year olds in Equatorial Guinea, and so on, and so on, all taken as measures of ‘national IQ’."

Nowhere is such cherrypicking and blatant disregard for the scientific method more apparent than in Lynn's assessments of the average IQs of sub-saharan Africans which range in his books from 66-68 IQ points. Jelte Wicherts did a review of the IQs of sub-saharan Africans and found Lynn's methods to be unsystematic, his meta analysis gave an average IQ of 82. Lynn immediately clapped back and tried to defend his work saying that reviews of progressive matrices tests give an average IQ of 68 for Black Africans and that Wicherts based his analysis on "elite samples". However Wicherts deliberately left out Raven's progressive matrices in his analysis. RPMs are very g-loaded and presumed to be "culture-free" due to their lack of use of verbal instructions, however this is far from the truth. Further inspection has shown this not to be the case time and time again and that RPMs have low predictive validity in Africans. Predictive validity is what makes IQ tests worth even being taken seriously in the first place, psychologists take IQ seriously because it correlates with many important life outcomes (income, wealth and especially scholastic achievement.) When this fails to be the case it becomes clear that the RPMs are not "culture-fair" and their results are invalid. Not even once does Lynn even attempt to show if measurement invariance even holds in the African samples.

 

In Wicherts' response to Lynn's response he fully bares naked Lynn's agenda and unsystematic selection of data. To Lynn any data point which shows a higher average IQ than 75 for Black Africans must be an "elite sample" meanwhile he has no problem including very low IQ but problematic studies. Here are some examples below:

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At the time of writing, it has been over 13 years since Wicherts responded to Lynn and we still await his response.  Despite unrelenting criticisms of Lynn's work from scientists, he is undeterred and continues to compile data on national IQ using the same moronic ideologies. As recently as 2019 Lynn has released more work on national IQs and has duly had his work debunked again. But he doesn't care, he is funded by dark money and will continue to shit out data that satisfies his political ideology.

Attempts to defend Lynn

Despite how widely debunked Lynn's data is, many hereditarians refuse to let it go. Recently many scientists have tried to defend Lynn's data's legitimacy (Warne 2022, Angrist 2021) by comparing international scholastic tests between nations and using these as proxies for IQ. Firstly I would like to point out how comically hypocritical this is for hereditarians, as they eschew meta analysises of full scale IQ tests administered by Wicherts on African IQ for scholastic tests. In the case of the Black-White IQ gap in the united states they do the opposite, while there is evidence that gaps have closed significantly on scholastic tests like the NAEP or SAT over the decades, hereditarians say this doesn't matter because these gaps are supposedly not closing on the almighty g-factor (I will address this in a different post). However when you are politically driven, these things become irrelevant. 

One of the main issues in using these comparisons is that developing countries face significant challenges which would impair a fair comparison of scholastic acheivement. Higher poverty,insecurity, gender imbalances as well as far worse education systems hamper effective comparisons. If we follow the psychologists' generic definitions of intelligence as basically "the ability to reason or solve problems" then these factors hamper effective comparisons. Another often neglected aspect is the way SSA countries are structured. Due to a legacy of colonialism most countries in this region do not have borders which match ethnolinguistic identity, which has lead to children being instructed in languages they are not familiar with. Russel Warne even acknowledges this:

However Warne doesn't acknowledge that this would not only translate into a penalty in reading but basically every other subject. The language of instruction in most African countries is that of the former colonizer, which most students are not fluent in. Only 53-60% of Nigerians speak a form of English, and this counts speakers of Nigerian pidgin- an English based creole which is used for unofficial purposes. I personally estimate from my personal experience of growing up in Nigeria that only 20-25% of Nigerians can actually speak standard English. Outside of major urban areas like Lagos, PH, Abuja etc. English is barely used. I have visited my village of Ado-Awaye numerous times and most people cannot speak English and those who can, mainly use pidgin , Yoruba is the exclusive language of communication. Yet all national tests are administered in English, and all classes are taught in it as it is the sole language of instruction. This is the case for most African countries. However there is one language indigenous to Africa which has stands as an exception to this - Kiswahili. Kiswahili is spoken all over East and Southern Africa and is an official language in countries ranging from Congo to Tanzania. However what is unique about Swahili is that it is a language of instruction in Kenya and Tanzania with over 80% of the countries' populations speaking it as a first or second language, this has enabled the children from these countries to have relatively higher test scores when compared to other African countries, because they are instructed in a language they understand from a young age and are therefore able to grasp concepts faster, in fact in some international tests like SACMEQ children in Tanzania have the exams administered to them in Swahili.

Kenyan and Tanzanian kids score similar to that of many Latin American countries (whose language of instruction is mainly Spanish and Portuguese) for this reason. This is probably the reason for Kenya and Tanzania's relatively high literacy rates compared to most other African nations (both above 80% compared to 40% in West Africa).

In summary all the evidence compiled points to a full scale IQ of about 80-82 in sub-saharan Africa. While clearly lower than that of East Asians and Europeans this is no surprise considering the lower levels of human development in SSA and as human development rises we should expect to see further gains in IQ, in fact we already have evidence of massive IQ gains due to development in places like Kenya.

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Many Hereditarians have issues with Wicherts' data because they feel it is too close to their figure of 85 for African-American IQ who live in one of the richest nations in the world and have European admixture (which according to hereditarian theory should raise their IQ?). However hereditarians have many series of data that contradict this logic. Richard Lynn actually estimates the average IQ of Turkey to be about 92 as shown in figure 3. However Turkish people in the Netherlands have an IQ of 78 on average. How does this make sense? Netherlands has over 6 times the GDP per capita of Turkey and a far higher standard of living and education system, yet the Turks living there have a full standard deviation lower IQ, even lower than the poorest regions in Turkey?  He has also argued that Mestizo-Mexicans have an IQ of 94 which is higher than the average IQ of all Mexicans in the United States (which is far more prosperous.) Could it just be that the concept of comparing IQ across countries is inherently flawed?