The first COVID-19 case in Africa was confirmed on February 14th, 2020, in Egypt. The first in sub-Saharan Africa appeared in Nigeria soon after. Health officials were united in a near-panic about how the novel coronavirus would roll through the world’s second most populous continent. By mid-month, the World Health Organization (WHO) listed four sub-Saharan... Read More

It is good to have an essay which sets out a point of view clearly, so Ewan Birney’s 24th October blogpost (Ewan Birney, Jennifer Raff, Adam Rutherford, Aylwyn Scally) is welcome. A summary of this sort gives discussions of racial differences a focal point. Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer It is not up to... Read More

Every truly scientific proposition offers some clear empirical conditions under which it would be falsified; otherwise, it would have to be shelved under the mystical field of unfalsifiable pseudoscience. For the racial genetic hypothesis (the proposition that test score differences between blacks and whites are in part rooted in racial genetic differences), Professor Richard Lynn... Read More

In my last article, “Scrabble Spells Doom for the Racial Hypothesis of Intelligence,� I argued that Africans should not be able to come anywhere near dominating the games of Scrabble (both English and French) or professional checkers, as they apparently do, if their real biological intelligence was anywhere near as low as their nominal IQ... Read More