Chanda Chisala and African heredity

Chanda Chisala has published “Closing the Black-White IQ Gap Debate, Part 3 : Thomas Sowell vs. Richard Lynn”. He has kindly made mention of my comments on his Parts 1 and 2, so I will respond to his two points.For background, here is what I have posted so far:

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/chanda-chisala-african-hereditarian.html
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/chisala-and-powerpoint-publishing.html

Three introductory observations:

First: Chisala refers to me as an hereditarian, and I previously referred to him quizzically as an African hereditarian, championing African cognitive elites, namely Ibo and Yoruba. In my case, and I assume in his, I am in fact “50% hereditarian/50% environmentalist, plus error”. I think we are both considering data supportive of an inherited component in human abilities.

Secondly, I think that evolution applies to all living things and that certainly includes homo sapiens. Any group, given time and relative isolation, can evolve in different ways, often according to the characteristics which are prized or required in that group. Cognitive elites can occur on any continent. (That does not mean they will be equally bright across continents). They will usually be prominent in commerce and scholarship, and be bred for their wits, in the sense that marriage choices will be very influenced by intelligence indicators such as educational and occupational attainments.

Third, when I object to “Powerpoint publishing” I am in fact indifferent as to how the summary results are displayed, so long as there is a way of getting to the full research document with methods, results and technical appendices. It is when those are absent, or very difficult to track down, that proper analysis becomes impossible.

Now to the specific points Chisala makes in response to my comments:

“currently the UK is a magnet for immigrant groups, particularly elites.”

Yes, this is so. The UK had 330,000 immigrants in the year to March 2015. They are unselected, and that is a great problem. Capable immigrants contribute significantly, but those who do not find a job are not a benefit.  In my last post I said: Not shown in the Chisala paper is that the social profile of African immigrants is probably bimodal. They have almost as many parents in the professional ranks as the UK average, but also a very large number of unemployed persons. It is an odd distribution, suggestive of at least two different sources of immigrants as regards social status.

So, the UK is attracting African elites, and also Africans unable to get work. Given the wide disparity in occupational level of Africans in the UK, you can simultaneously get elites at particular schools, and lower than average African performance in the country as a whole. In order to see whether African immigrants are representative of their countries of origin the ideal would be to have intelligence and scholastic attainment results from their countries of birth. Absent those results (though there are other data suggesting that African immigrants are more educated than average Africans) the occupational data at the very least implies heterogeneity of socio-economic status.

To get a better understanding of the scholastic achievements of immigrant groups we need to get beyond the percentage pass rates and look at the actual figures, which as far as I know are not currently released. For example Deary et al. (2007) has a scoring system based on the grades, which is far better than just pass rates, but he did not have access to the raw scores, nor was able to publish anything on racial differences. This is great pity, because it would give us much of the data we need, which could then be tracked year by year.

“A marshy island called Singapore ends up rich, and resource-rich Nigeria remains poor (and very populous). Could this be because of any differences between Chinese and African peoples?”

Yes, this is about GDP per capita, not country totals regardless of population numbers. Countries get rich in two main ways: either they innovate or they provide raw materials and holidays to countries that innovate. Germany and Japan are good examples of the first; Greece, Arabian Gulf, Nigeria, Venezuela, Cuba and Egypt are examples of the second category. The whole point is that native wit seems to contribute more than raw materials.

General observations

I think that the more detailed approach of looking at genetic sub-groups is promising, and that it is worth looking for cognitive elites wherever they can be found. I would be interested to look at good cognitive data on the Tutsis and the Hutu. The presumption is that the former are brighter than the latter. If so, this would be in concordance with the general pattern in genocide (brighter attacked by duller).

For the avoidance of doubt, if African samples representative of Africans in Africa turn out to do very well simply by coming to the West, in my view that would strongly suggest that African environments were the major cause of low African ability in Africa. Richard Lynn has always argued that poor nutrition, bad health and adverse circumstances were highly relevant. Rinderman, Woodley, Meisenberg and others have looked at ability increases in African countries, and I have discussed their work in various posts.

Ref:

Deary, Stand, Smith and Fernandes (2007) Intelligence and educational attainment. Intelligence, 35, 13-21.