IQ and the Flynn Effect

Dear Gavin,

I knew it would be just a matter of time before you ran into the IQ bros. “Whites are superior, whites have a higher IQ on average, whites are supreme, whites rock, and there you go.” I sometimes have thought it would be bracing and quite festive to scoop some of these fellows up and make them take an IQ test.

In order to talk about this, I need to back up a little in order to give you a little bit of history. Back in 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published a book called The Bell Curve. Because there are in fact disparities between ethnic groups when it comes to IQ tests, and because the book talked openly about such disparities, there was of course a firestorm. Any kind of discussion of cognitive abilities as applied to blacks, whites, Asians and Jews is fraught with . . . well, with fraughtness.

So to just dump our problem out on the table, if we go by IQ, the smartest group (on average) appears to be East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews. Whites come in second, then Hispanics, then Native Americans, and then African Americans. The white average is 100, the black average is between 85 and 90, the Ashkenazi average is somewhere between 107 and 115, and East Asians are at 106. A certain kind of bigot is going to be really stumped by all of this because when it comes to the Jews, the tests are clearly bogus and rigged, and when it comes to blacks, they are to be treated like the Scroll of Truth. It is not surprising that such a bigot generally has trouble on the part of the test that says things like “one of these things is not like the others.”

Nevertheless some whites like to take pride in the fact that the white IQ is, on average, higher than the average for blacks. Before getting into the weeds on this, let me first note a logical problem when it comes to those who like to take pride in averages. It is possible to drown in a river that is on average 16 inches deep. Then there was that night when Michael Jordan had his career high with 69 points. His teammate, Stacey King, made this accurate observation, “I’ll always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined to score 70 points.”

And so speaking of rivers, let us compare two rivers, one of them on average 20 feet deep and the other one 25 feet deep. What kind of sense would it make for one part of the deeper river, a portion that is only 2 feet deep, to boast vaingloriously over against the entirety of the other river, 80% of which was deeper than he was?

The way this matters is that if the mean for whites is a score of 100, and you draw it out in a bell curve, and the mean for blacks is 90, and you superimpose the second graph on top of the first one, what you have is a clear disparity between the two populations. But even without getting to the malleability of IQ scores, which we will get to in a minute, this one graph still doesn’t establish what a chortling bigot thinks it does. Let us be generous to our bigot, and place him plumb square on the 100 mean. This means that 25-30% of blacks are smarter than he is. Remember how you can drown in a river that is on average 16 inches deep.

Now all of this has to do with IQ tests as they are administered today. Additional challenges appear when we look at the results of the tests over time.

But before getting into that, there are two things to note about IQ tests—one a disclaimer and the other a “credit where its due” point. First, the IQ tests came of age during a time when everybody was frantic to be all scientific-like, attempting to quantify everything. This lent itself to the abuse of thinking that the IQ of an individual could be measured in the same way that we check the level of oil in a car with a dipstick. But it ain’t that simple.

At the same time, the second point is that IQ tests really do measure something, and the “something” that they measure really is a predictor of likely achievements throughout the course of life. They do predict success and failure (generally), but what they don’t do is break out all the factors that resulted in the various test scores. Those factors would include (obviously) native quickness, but the results are also affected by culture, family integrity, poverty, nutrition, and culture again. In other words, when it comes to the nature/nurture debate, IQ tests don’t give us a clean measurement of just nature. They measure something about the the mix of everything. There is such a thing as hard-wired intelligence, obviously, but there is clearly a lot more going on than that. IQ is not simply a matter of hardware.

We can see this plainly when we look at the history of IQ test scores. The mean of the IQ test has to be 100, and so if there is progress (or regress) over time, the test needs to be re-normed. Tests like the SAT have been renormed in a way that hides the decline of educational standards, and IQ tests have been renormed in a way that masks the improvement. With IQ tests, this has happened over the course of the 20th century, with the result that, as James Flynn once put it, “if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average IQ of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average IQ of 130.”

And we have a lot of data for this from the early days because the Army tested over 2 million recruits at the time of the First World War.

The problem with this is that 70 is on the threshold of retardation, and 130 is on the brink of gifted. Are we ready to maintain that the average intelligence of whites at the time of the First World War was borderline retarded? That would be absurd.

Or as Murray and Herrnstein put it:

Our prevailing egalitarianism wants to insist that if we just funded a few more programs, we will soon be able to fix all such disparities, and everybody could then be just about the same.

So there is an inescapable ethnic aspect to all of this. But that inescapable aspect is no friend to the mind of the bigot. The average black person today taking the test is equivalent to the average white person a century ago—including the great great great grandfather of the bigot. Clearly the genes that determine the color of a person’s skin do not determine that person’s performance on an IQ test in the same way.

So how should we look at all this from a biblical perspective? There are two basic things to take into account. The first is that dogmatic egalitarianism is obviously false. There are differences of ability between individuals, as well as differences between different ethnic and/or demographic groups. But the Christian response should be to attribute this to the grace of God, and not to anything innate. Whites of European descent are functioning in a culture that has been dominated by the gospel for 15 centuries. God did in fact enlarge Japheth (Gen. 9:27), and all of it has been unmerited grace. At the same time, African blacks are functioning in a culture that has been affected by the gospel for only 1 or 2 centuries. In the providence of God, the gospel spread from Jerusalem, and after doing so, took the deepest root to the north and the west. That has had an impact.

When the gospel has had its way in the Orient, and in Africa, they will have their own glories, and we in the West will rejoice in what they have been given. But in the meantime, there is nothing bigoted in recognizing that certain cultures are superior to others. All you need is eyes in your head. But they are superior only by grace and through grace. Paul notes that the culture of the Cretans was a real problem, and one that Titus needed to address.

But note also that Titus could address it, with the result that the Cretans could become sound in the faith. Cultures can change, and do change, when the gospel comes.

But when a people forget grace, and walk away from God and into vainglorious ethnic pufferies, sliding back into a bronze-age neo-paganism, the color of their white skin won’t preserve anything. They have chosen the road to a major demographic downgrade. Eighteen years from now, when one of Andrew Tate’s bastards shows up to take his IQ test, and his preparation for that test has been to get another tattoo, chew some betel nut, and to run a bone through his septum, the chances are good that he is only helping to get us all back to World War 1 levels.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson