re: #137 Dark_Falcon

The thing about John Derbyshire is that he’s actually not a White Supremacist. His wife is entirely Han Chinese and thus his two children are mixed race. His racism is much more what I call “Hierarchical Racism”: A racism that puts East Asians and West Europeans at the top of the pyramid, and Sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom.

Such racism is just as morally wrong as White Supremacism, but it normally rests on pseudo-scientific foundations (it normally does not have a religious character) and it has a smaller target list. Still, it is entirely evil.

You’re probably right. Derby seems to believe in a largely genetic nature of the interracial IQ gap. And in this he is not in step with science.

After the Bell Curve was published, APA published this report summarizing mainstream views on intelligence, in which they wrote about the gap:

http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/research/Correlation/Intelligence.pdf

African American IQ scores have long averaged about 15 points below those of Whites, with correspondingly lower scores on academic achievement tests. In recent years the achievement-test gap has narrowed appreciably. It is possible that the IQ-score differential is narrowing as well, but this has not been clearly established. The cause of that differential is not known; it is apparently not due to any simple form of bias in the content or administration of the tests themselves. The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally-based explanations of the Black/White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available

Moreover, new research indicates the gap is closing:

http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/dickens/20060619_IQ.pdf

It is often asserted that blacks have made no IQ gains on whites, despite relative environmental gains, and that this adds credibility to the case that the black/white IQ gap has genetic origins. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure black IQ trends. We analyze data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These suggest that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of black cognitive ability.

But he would probably dismiss this as a politically correct conspiracy.