Many people seem to have this impression. These arguments go back more than 10 years. This post quotes various UK newspaper articles going back to 2006:

• Underperformance of Poor White British Boys. Racial Reality. June 2, 2010

John Fuerst is probably the first hereditarian to seriously grapple with these issues:

• Partially falsified. Unwelcome Discovery. February 6, 2012
• Is (global) “race realism” still tenable?. Unwelcome Discovery. February 7, 2012.

In fact, that juicy Lynn quote that Chisala (2015) opens with, is from John’s post:

The evolutionary theory does however predict that when different races occupy approximately similar environments, such as for instance in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands, the intelligence differences will remain. This prediction has been examined in twenty three societies worldwide in Lynn (2008) and has been confirmed in every case. If a multiracial society is found where these race differences in intelligence are absent, the evolutionary and genetic theory of these differences would be falsified. Those who maintain that there are no genetic differences in intelligence between the races are urged to attempt this task. (Consistency of race differences in intelligence over millennia: A comment on Wicherts, Borsboom and Dolan, 2010)

Lynn is quite wrong here. The hereditarian claim is that there are average differences in the distribution of (true score) polygenic scores associated with ancestry, whatever these are called. One can of course pick an elite smart or particularly dull group from any ancestry group, and this sample will then be above or below their origin group and whatever other groups. NW Europeans average about 100 IQ (British norms), but West Virginian Whites average perhaps 92 IQ, while Indian immigrants in USA average perhaps 110 IQ. There is no conflict here with hereditarianism.

This fallacy goes back a long time in a related form. In the test data from WW1, it was discovered that some US states, blacks had higher scores than whites in some other states. Jensen dealt with this in 1973, naming it the Klineberg fallacy:

[From Section: The fallacy of assuming genetic homogeneity within racial groups]
A peculiar manifestation of the fallacious belief in racial genetic homogeneity is the notion that regional differences in IQ among whites must be entirely environmental and therefore, if they are of considerable magnitude, can be pointed to as evidence that racial differences must also be entirely environmental. The fallacy of this argument, of course, is that no sophisticated person today would insist that regional differences in IQ within the white (or Negro) population are entirely due to cultural and educational differences. The argument from regional differences among whites as entirely environmental to differences between racial groups as entirely environmental might be called the Klineberg fallacy, since it was Otto Klineberg (1935, 1944) who first popularized the comparison of Army Alpha test scores of whites in four Southern states, where the white Alpha medians were lowest in the nation for whites, with the test scores of Negroes in four Northern states, where the Negro Alpha medians were the highest in the nation for Negroes. (The four highest Negro medians were all above the four lowest white medians. Comparison of Negro and white medians within the same state, on the other hand, showed about the same difference as for the average Negro-white difference in the nation as a whole.) As evidence for an environmental explanation of racial differences, Klineberg (1963, p. 200) also points to an isolated group of impoverished white children living in the hollows of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia who had an average IQ lower than the Negro national mean. But of course genetic differ­ences in intelligence among subgroups of the white population are no less improbable than differences among racial groups, and this would seem especially true of relatively isolated groups in the ‘hollows’ of Appalachia. The fact that the Army Alpha is highly loaded with scholastic knowledge, correlating close to 0-70 with number of years of schooling, means that it probably reflects regional differences in mean level of education to some degree, independently of intelligence, especially in the period of World War I, when there was much greater regional variance in the quality and the number of years of schooling than exists at the present time.
[It continues with data from WW2 testing, which mostly removed this pattern]

The chief achievement of Chisala is to present a mostly non-moralistic argument in long form for popular audience and sparking a lot of debate. This is a nice contribution, debate is good. But he never bothered to follow up with more serious work. In fact, Chisala appears to have published 0 academic work.

Updated: 2020-11-07

Chanda wasn’t too pleased with this post, so he sent me a long email to express his view and argue against the above. With his agreement, I post his email here, so readers can judge for themselves.

Dear Emil,

I just recently saw your article about me on your blog. I don’t know whether to be disappointed in you yet, because I am not yet sure whether you know that what you have written is grossly inaccurate. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.

Your claim that all I have contributed to the debate is not moralizing the issue is obviously false. I’ll give you an accurate brief history of this UK debate and see if you are genuinely misinformed or just deliberately and knowingly misinforming your readers (both through your blog and repeatedly through your Twitter account.)

Firstly, there is a difference between what Fuerst was arguing at the time and what the other HBDers/bloggers before him were arguing (2012 etc). They were mostly concerned about reports that UK blacks were doing better than POOR whites in school. This was a genuine concern because in America, blacks on average do worse than poor whites, as Jensen correctly stated, even when they are children of elites. And if Africans are a standard deviation lower in IQ than black Americans, then they should do even worse (than poor whites).

However, as Fuerst pointed out to them, this was not an insurmountable problem because a good bit of migrant self-selection could probably achieve that milestone. What concerned Fuerst was new data he found showing that even AVERAGE whites (not just poor whites) were not THAT FAR above the average of black Africans. They were an equivalent of only 8 IQ POINTS above, by his calculation, when the average gap should be closer to 30 points. This was a major problem indeed.

In these articles Fuerst cited Lynn’s falsifiable statement that no society can be found where blacks were cognitively performing equal to whites. But as one of his readers pointed out to him, Lynn’s statement was STILL not falsified by this data. Lynn did not say no society can be found where the IQ gap is only 8; he said no society can be found where blacks are performing at white levels, so Lynn’s prediction was technically still true. What still troubled Fuerst was that the selection argument was now becoming unsatisfactory and extreme. However, with time he apparently changed his mind and decided to accept that selection could indeed explain it (a change that I mentioned in my second article).

When I saw this change in Fuerst as the pressure on him grew (and I did not know his real name at the time), it was time for me to enter the debate. And I began by first ACKNOWLEDGING what was already known all the way back to the 2010s, so that my contributions would be CLEAR. (Unfortunately, Fuerst’s blog was gone by now and I could not link to anything, to show my readers what I meant).

The first and most important thing I added to the debate was to introduce NATIONAL distinctions among Africans. I argued that the broad”Black Africans” designation (used by Fuerst et al) was misleading because you had in that group some very large populations of refugees from countries like Somalia, who had never heard a word of English in their lives, and were obviously bringing down the average scores of the whole group. And you had Nigerians, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, etc who were from former British colonies and therefore already spoke some English and only needed to adapt to the more advanced UK education system. And even within those national groups, there were some who were born in the UK and others who had arrived late to the UK, all with very different performance levels.

THIS was the first time that Lynn’s statement was *actually* FALSIFIED (when you look at the English-speaking African nationals only). ALL of them were outperforming the British whites ON AVERAGE (and not just the poor whites). At the time, Fuerst acknowledged this new contribution (about “Nigerians” etc) in the comments section of my UNZ article. He also provided me with the links to his archived pages, which I gladly included in my next article, as I obviously wanted my readers to see the history of that debate so they could clearly see what was being added to the debate.

So the only REASON I *also* included that Lynn quote in my article was precisely because my intention was to show that it was NOW *literally* falsified — when you break down black Africans and exclude Somalis etc. Before I entered the debate, if you check all those articles from 2010/2012 all the way up to Fuerst, there was NO discussion about NIGERIANS, (for example) in the HBD blogosphere – there was only discussion about BLACKS (which included Caribbean blacks) or BLACK AFRICANS – which included Somalis.

 (And I should tell you that eventually the Somali *did* learn English and their scores as a group improved drastically).

My first contribution, therefore, was a direct, literal falsification of Lynn’s genetic proposition as stated. (And it is actually a REASONABLE statement that he made, as far as genetics go. I can tell you now, “you will never find a society in this world where any group runs faster than Ethiopians in those crazy long distances” and this is indeed good empirical evidence for STRONG genetic differences between Ethiopians/North-East Africans and the rest of humanity.)

The second important contribution I made to that debate was to show precisely why the selection argument — the only argument given to explain all this — was itself untenable.

I looked at the evidence people were giving for this selection (education levels of these migrants compared to their home populations) and showed that this does not work BECAUSE we already know what the IQ of educated Africans is. (For some reason I’ve failed to get this point across to most people up to now). If, according to Lynn, Rushton, et al, the IQ of educated Africans at a top ELITE university in the most developed African country (South Africa) is only 85, then it DOES NOT MATTER even if your entire migrant population only has UNIVERSITY-EDUCATED elites: that still won’t explain their children’s performance at 100+ IQ levels. And yet, not even HALF of these migrants are educated let alone university-educated,, and you can’t even use the IQ of that ELITE university from the most developed African country as their average. Lynn gives IQs of university grads in other countries, and it is much lower than that 85.

In short, the only evidence given for why these migrants are supposedly a highly selected cognitive group (education) can only suggest that their IQ was in the upper 70’s in Africa. It is impossible to explain how they produce children above 100 IQ without contradicting yourself, especially when you consider that their children have to regress downwards from them if they are that selected. You would have to suggest that the environment in Africa had brought down their IQs by over 30 points: WHICH would be conceding to the environmental argument. (And no, I am not an ENVIRNMENTALIST, as you keep calling me; this should be evident from all my articles. I do believe that different populations do have genetic differences in any trait; but not all differences we see are genetic.)

Anyway, so I INTRODUCED that argument about the IQ of African universities and I have seen NO counter-argument that logically works.

Finally, and much more recently, I also introduced a quantitative proposition that should seal this selection argument.

Fuerst had been relying on his intuition (which was correct) that many of these selection proposals were unrealistic. But the reason he could be swayed sometimes was that there was no closed quantitative argument.

My argument, presented in my response to the VDare guy, was to check the population of people in Nigeria that would be at the level of IQ that anyone argues as the amount of selection going on, and to simply compare that to the actual number of migrants. Thus, if someone suggests that these Nigerian parents are *really* IQ 130 (so that their children could regress to 102 or whatever), we could simply check how many people in Nigeria exist around that IQ, given the mean and SD etc, and then check that against how many migrants we have. We no longer have to rely on our intuitions about what a ridiculous selection level is: the numbers themselves can tell us. If there are only 500 Nigerians at IQ of 130, but there are 200, 000 Nigerian migrants, we immediately know that this level of selection is false.

It was after I wrote that last article that Charles Murray asked for a full throttled *response* from HBDers and I have received NONE yet. And the next thing I read is that the *only* contribution I have made to that entire debate is not calling you racists?

Disappointed.

Chanda.