My wish list for research in 2024: Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa

 

Drainage basin of the Niger River (Wikicommons - Wizardist)

Social complexity was more advanced, and cognitive demands higher, in West African societies that benefited from trade via the Niger River. This was especially true for the Igbo of the Niger Delta, who dominated trade between the coast and the interior.

 

We have identified thousands of genes whose alleles are associated with cognitive ability, i.e., the capacity to process information, to recognize patterns, and to solve problems (Lee et al., 2018). By finding out which alleles are present on an individual’s genome, we can make an estimate of that person’s cognitive ability, and that estimate will show a high correlation with performance on tests in mathematics, reading, and science (r = 0.8). The same method can provide an estimate of a population’s mean cognitive ability, and that estimate will show a high correlation with the population’s mean IQ (r = 0.9) (Piffer, 2019).

 

Using this method, the anthropologist Davide Piffer has estimated the mean cognitive ability of several West African populations. Mean cognitive ability seems to increase as you go from west to east, being lowest among the Mende of Sierra Leone and progressively higher among Gambians, the Esan of Nigeria, and the Yoruba of Nigeria. The Yoruba have almost the same mean as do African Americans, who are nonetheless 20% European by ancestry (Piffer, 2021, see Figure 7).

 

This geographic pattern seems to reflect differences in societal development. From the fourth century onward, West African societies became more complex in the north and the east, i.e., within the drainage basin of the Niger. As trade along that river increased in volume and value, villages grew into towns, and social relations became more varied and complex. This social complexity was both a cause and effect of trade. As powerful individuals acquired the materials they needed to erect buildings, create works of art, and hold ceremonies to legitimize their rule, they became even more powerful and, thus, better able to purchase such materials. Social complexity was thus driven by a positive feedback loop: elite buying power led to an increase in trade, which in turn led to an increase in elite buying power (Frost, 2022; McIntosh and McIntosh, 1988, p. 123).

 

As social relations became more varied and complex in settlements along the Niger, those populations had to cope with a heavier cognitive workload. The demands of farming were giving way to those of craft production, urban architecture, and long-distance trade. Numeracy and literacy were becoming important, as were skills for manipulation and assemblage of various materials. Did that new social environment select for an increase in cognitive ability?

Evidence of high cognitive ability is especially strong among the Igbo people (formerly the Ibo), who live at the Niger’s mouth and who have historically dominated trade between the coast and the interior (Frost, 2022). Their children excel at school not only in Nigeria but also in overseas communities, such as those of the United Kingdom. They do exceptionally well on the GCSE (Chisala, 2015).

 

In addition to high cognitive ability, the Igbo are said to have a certain mindset: “the Ibo have a greater achievement motivation and are more willing to explore new avenues of power than either the Yoruba or the Hausa.” They have “a general belief in the possibility, indeed necessity, of manipulating one’s world; of determining one’s own destiny; of ‘getting up’ in the world” (Slater, 1983).  The earliest European observers, from the eighteenth century, described them as “competitive, individualistic, status-conscious, antiauthoritarian, pragmatic, and practical—a people with a strongly developed commercial sense” (Mullin, 1994, p. 286).

 

Trade thus seems to select for higher cognitive ability, either directly through new cognitive demands (i.e., pricing, bargaining, accounting) or indirectly through a resulting increase in social complexity. This has been the case not only among the Igbo but also among the Ashkenazi Jews, the Parsis, and other trading peoples (Cochran et al., 2006; Frost, 2012; Frost, 2021). As these peoples became specialized in trade, over the past millennium or so, they appear to have experienced a sharp rise in mean cognitive ability. These examples of recent evolutionary change support the view that mental and behavioral evolution did not stop back in the Pleistocene, anymore than the evolution of outward physical traits like skin color or body shape. Cognitive ability continued to evolve into the time of recorded history, albeit to different extents in different human groups (Cochran and Harpending, 2009; Hawks et al., 2007; Rinaldi, 2017).

 

Shell vessel with leopard from Igbo-Ukwu, Nigeria, ninth century (Wikicommons). This bronze artefact, like others from the same site, has an unusually high silver content with only traces of zinc, an alloy not used in Europe or the Middle East at that time. Ancestral Igbo thus seem to have developed metallurgy on their own (McIntosh and McIntosh, 1988, pp. 120-121).

 

Proposed study

 

The aim is to test the hypothesis that mean cognitive ability increased to a greater extent in those populations that were closer to the Niger, particularly the Igbo at the Niger’s mouth, where trade led to greater social complexity and higher cognitive demands during precolonial times.

 

For this study, mean cognitive ability can be estimated from genomic data, specifically from alleles associated with educational attainment (Edu PGS). The alleles identified to date are only a fraction of all those that play a role in cognitive ability, but we have identified enough of them to produce reliable estimates of mean cognitive ability within a population. With the help of data from history and prehistory, we could then outline the trajectories that mean cognitive ability has followed in different West African populations.

 

Finally, these hypothetical trajectories could be verified by retrieving and examining aDNA from archaeological sites throughout West Africa. It would be particularly interesting to determine when mean cognitive ability began to increase among ancestral Igbo, and how fast it increased. That research aim may be unrealistic, however, given the degradation of DNA in hot climates.

 

References

 

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue. The Unz Review, June 25. http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

 

Cochran, G., J. Hardy, and H. Harpending. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. Journal of Biosocial Science 38(5): 659-693. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021932005027069

 

Cochran, G. and H. Harpending. (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Basic Books: New York.

 

Frost, P. (2012). Tay-Sachs and French Canadians: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Advances in Anthropology 2(3): 132-138. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/aa.2012.23016     

 

Frost, P. (2021). Commentary on Fuerst et al: Do Human Populations Differ in Their Mental Characteristics? Mankind Quarterly 62(2). http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2021.62.2.9

 

Frost, P. (2022). West Africa and recent cognitive evolution. Peter Frost’s Newsletter, November 14. https://peterfrost.substack.com/p/west-africa-and-recent-cognitive   

 

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 104: 20753-20758. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0707650104

 

Lee, J. J., R. Wedow, A. Okbay, E. Kong, O. Maghzian, M. Zacher, et al. (2018). Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature Genetics 50(8): 1112-1121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0147-3    

 

McIntosh, S.K., and R.J. McIntosh. (1988). From stone to metal: New perspectives on the later prehistory of West Africa. Journal of World Prehistory 2(1): 89-133. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00975123    

 

Mullin, M. (1994). Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. University of Illinois Press.

 

Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data. Psych 1: 55-75. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010005

 

Piffer, D. (2021). Divergent selection on height and cognitive ability: evidence from Fst and polygenic scores. OpenPsych. April 3 https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.04.03   

 

Rinaldi, A. (2017). We're on a road to nowhere. Culture and adaptation to the environment are driving human evolution, but the destination of this journey is unpredictable. EMBO reports 18: 2094-2100. https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.201745399   

 

Slater, R. (1983). Bureaucracy, Education and the Ibo: A Review. Journal of Educational Administration and History 15(1): 46-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022062830150106    

 

Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa: the Niger's role

 

Before European contact, West African societies were more complex in the north and the east, i.e., in the Sahel and the Nigerian forest. This pattern is mirrored geographically by the frequencies of alleles associated with cognitive ability (Piffer 2021, Fig. 7).

 

 

Cognitive evolution did not end when Homo sapiens began. It continued at different rates of change and in different ways in different human populations. This is no less true for Sub-Saharan Africa, especially West Africa.

 

Before European contact, West African societies were more complex in the north and the east, i.e., in the Sahel and the Nigerian forest. Those areas saw the creation of towns, the formation of states, and increasing use of metallurgy and luxury goods from the fourth century onward.

 

This increase in social complexity used to be attributed to the influence of Arab traders from North Africa and the Middle East, but we now have archaeological evidence of urbanism and long-distance trade as far back as 300 AD—long before the arrival of Arab traders (McIntosh and McIntosh 1988, pp. 114-116). A Niger Delta site, dated to the 9th century, has yielded bronze objects that show little if any Arab influence. The bronze has an unusually high silver content and only traces of zinc, an alloy not used in either Europe or the Arab world at that time (McIntosh and McIntosh 1988, pp. 120-121). While the increase in social complexity was undoubtedly assisted by Arab traders and, later, European traders, it seems to have begun as an indigenous development along the Niger River, which served as West Africa’s main trading route between the coast and the interior:

 

In the case of the Middle Niger and the Nigerian forest, trade has figured prominently in explanations of increasing complexity. Local or regional trade in kola (at Ife) and stone and iron (at Jenne-jeno) are postulated as the small-scale beginnings of exchange systems that rapidly expanded. […] such goods were but the visible tip of a vast iceberg of archaeologically undetectable trade commodities, such as slaves, food staples, condiments, salt, and oil […]. The natural ecological zonation of the subcontinent would have encouraged exchange of foodstuffs and salt between adjacent zones from very early on. (McIntosh and McIntosh 1988, p. 122)

 

This trade accelerated with the formation of states and ruling elites. A positive feedback loop developed in which trade was “as much a symptom as a cause of complexity.”  By supplying materials for artistic and ceremonial production, it gave “elites opportunities to appropriate materials and symbols and to manipulate them in ways that legitimize their power” (McIntosh and McIntosh 1988, p. 123). Trade thus stimulated elite formation, which in turn stimulated trade.

 

Thus, as trade increased along the Niger and into adjoining areas, so did social complexity. Did this new environment select for cognitive ability? Piffer (2021, see Figure 7) calculated the polygenic scores of alleles associated with educational attainment for several West African populations. Mean cognitive ability seems to increase as one goes from west to east. The polygenic score is lowest for the Mende (Sierra Leone) and progressively higher for Gambians, the Esan (Nigeria), and the Yoruba (Nigeria). The Yoruba have almost the same polygenic score as do African Americans, even though the latter have about 20% European admixture.

 

Igbo achievement

 

It’s a pity that we have no polygenic data on the Igbo (formerly the Ibo), who live near the mouth of the Niger and seem to have gone the farthest on this trajectory of cognitive evolution. Indeed, they excel academically:

 

The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on "case study" model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance […] and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites. (Chisala 2015)

 

In addition to high cognitive ability, the Igbo are said to have a different mindset: “the Ibo have a greater achievement motivation and are more willing to explore new avenues of power than either the Yoruba or the Hausa.” They have “a general belief in the possibility, indeed necessity, of manipulating one’s world; of determining one’s own destiny; of ‘getting up’ in the world” (Slater 1983).

 

By the time of Nigerian independence, these characteristics had made the Igbo a dominant force in the country’s life:

 

All over Nigeria, Ibos filled urban jobs at every level far out of proportion to their numbers, as laborers and domestic servants, as bureaucrats, corporate managers, and technicians. Two-thirds of the senior jobs in the Nigerian Railway Corporation were held by Ibos. Three-quarters of Nigeria's diplomats came from the Eastern Region. So did almost half of the 4,500 students graduating from Nigerian universities in 1966. (Baker 1980)

 

The Igbos were nonetheless a minority within Nigeria, a fact reflected in the leadership that took over after independence. That leadership was resented by the Igbo, who saw it not only as beyond their control but also as corrupt, incompetent, and fraudulent. In 1966, a group of Igbo officers carried out a coup d’état and executed the Prime Minister, the Premier of the Northern Region, and the Premier of the Western Region. There then followed a counter-coup and a wave of persecution that led to the deaths of 8,000 to 30,000 Igbo and the exodus of between one and two million to their homeland in the Eastern region. When the Igbo learned that the new government would fragment their region into three parts, they revolted and declared their independence. Thus began the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).

 

Henry Kissinger (1969) summed up the situation in a memorandum to President Nixon: “The Ibos are the wandering Jews of West Africa — gifted, aggressive, Westernized; at best envied and resented, but mostly despised by the mass of their neighbors in the Federation.”

 

If we go back to the eighteenth century, and to the earliest European observations, we see that the Igbo were already viewed as “competitive, individualistic, status-conscious, antiauthoritarian, pragmatic, and practical—a people with a strongly developed commercial sense” (Mullin 1994, p. 286). West Indian slave-owners saw them as adept at learning English. “In Jamaican descriptions of all named peoples, Ibo were the most adroit in using language distinctively and in some instances deceptively” (Mullin 1994, pp. 286-287).

 

In general, cognitive ability seems to be higher in populations that specialize in trade, since the cognitive demands are likewise higher. The Igbo specialized in trade at an early date, thanks to their location on the Niger Delta and their role as middlemen in exchanges between the coast and the interior (Frost 2015).

 

References

 

Baker, P.H. (1980). Lurching toward unity. The Wilson Quarterly, 4, 70-80.

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/sites/default/files/articles/WQ_VOL4_W_1980_Article_01_2.pdf  

 

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue. The Unz Review, June 25.

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

 

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa?  Evo and Proud, July 4.

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-jews-of-west-africa.html

 

Kissinger, H.A. (1969). Memorandum, January 28. U.S. Department of State Archive.

http://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/nixon/e5/55258.htm  

 

McIntosh, S.K., and R.J. McIntosh. (1988). From stone to metal: New perspectives on the later prehistory of West Africa. Journal of World Prehistory 2(1): 89-133.

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00975123

 

Mullin, M. (1994). Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. University of Illinois Press.

 

Piffer, D. (2021). Divergent selection on height and cognitive ability: evidence from Fst and polygenic scores. OpenPsych

https://openpsych.net/files/submissions/14_Divergent_selection_on_height_and_cognitive_ability_evidence_from_Fst_and_13c3ICJ.pdf   

 

Slater, R. (1983) Bureaucracy, Education and The Ibo: A Review. Journal of Educational Administration and History 15(1): 46-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022062830150106

John Fuerst's latest paper

 

The Igbo used their location on the Niger Delta to become traders between the coast and the interior. In the 18th century, they were already described as high achievers with a strong commercial sense. Cognitive ability seems to be higher in populations that specialize in trade, probably because the cognitive demands are likewise higher.

(Map of Niger - Wikicommons)

 

 

 

I was asked to comment on a recent study by John Fuerst, Emil Kirkegaard, and Davide Piffer. This study is well worth reading. It provides the strongest evidence to date for differences in mean cognitive ability between human populations, specifically by showing how cognitive ability correlates with alleles for educational attainment and with degree of European / African / Amerindian ancestry in European Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Also worth reading is a related paper by John Fuerst, Meng Hu, and Gregory Connor.

 

The following is the abstract of my commentary:

 

Human populations may differ genetically not only in their anatomy but also in their mental characteristics. Our species is not too young for such differentiation. In fact, human genetic evolution has proceeded faster over the past 10,000 years than over the previous million. With the rise of farming, and social complexity, humans were no longer adapting solely to a limited range of natural environments. They were adapting to an ever-widening range of cultural environments, each of which imposed its demands on mind and body.

 

Thus, mental characteristics do not have the same adaptive value in all environments, and differences in adaptive value will lead, over time, to genetic differences. Are the latter large enough to explain IQ differences between human populations? That question has led to studies of people who are ancestrally diverse but raised in the same environment, such as transracial adoptees. Unfortunately, the environment can never be fully equalized. We should measure genetic differences directly, and a promising step in that direction has come with research to identify alleles associated with educational attainment. There is no need to identify all of them, just a large enough sample. These “witnesses” can then be questioned to determine the strength and direction of natural selection, and its consequences.

 

Also promising is the study of IQ and ancestry in ethnically mixed groups. This research instrument is not without problems. Large continental populations often have high-achieving minorities who may contribute disproportionately to the founding of new groups or to admixture with old ones. In addition, natural selection can alter the distribution of alleles within a new group, even after a few generations.

 

References

 

Frost, P. (2021). Commentary on Fuerst et al: Do Human Populations Differ in Their Mental Characteristics? Mankind Quarterly 62(2): 366-380.

http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2021.62.2.9

https://www.academia.edu/73260728/Commentary_on_Fuerst_et_al_Do_Human_Populations_Differ_in_Their_Mental_Characteristics

 

Fuerst, J., Hu, M. & Connor, G. (2021). Genetic ancestry and general cognitive ability in a sample of American youths. Mankind Quarterly 62(1): 186-216.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Fuerst/publication/354766492_Genetic_Ancestry_and_General_Cognitive_Ability_in_a_Sample_of_American_Youths/links/614bbacaa595d06017e4bdbc/Genetic-Ancestry-and-General-Cognitive-Ability-in-a-Sample-of-American-Youths.pdf

 

Fuerst, J., Kirkegaard, E.O.W. and Piffer, D. (2021). More research needed: There is a robust causal vs. confounding problem for intelligence-associated polygenic scores in context to admixed American populations. Mankind Quarterly 62(1): 151-185.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Fuerst/publication/354767141_More_Research_Needed_There_is_a_Robust_Causal_vs_Confounding_Problem_for_Intelligence-associated_Polygenic_Scores_in_Context_to_Admixed_American_Populations/links/614bc1dfa595d06017e4c017/More-Research-Needed-There-is-a-Robust-Causal-vs-Confounding-Problem-for-Intelligence-associated-Polygenic-Scores-in-Context-to-Admixed-American-Populations.pdf  

Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa

 

If we look at alleles associated with higher educational attainment, we find more of them among the Yoruba of Nigeria than among the Mende of Sierra Leone. The reason may be differences in social evolution over the past 1,000 years, particularly in trade, urban settlement, State formation, and other forms of social complexity. 

Ife king's head (14th or early 15th century) (Wikicommons - Vassil)

 

 

How can we measure the genetic component of cognitive ability? We have long used IQ tests to get a rough idea, but they are not an ideal yardstick. Twin studies have shown that genetic factors explain about two thirds of the variance in IQ results, perhaps even less for comparisons between people of different cultural backgrounds.

 

In recent years we've found a new yardstick: the polygenic score. It's a more direct genetic measurement, being a summation of alleles that have been linked to higher educational attainment. As a method for estimating the mean cognitive ability of a population, it seems to be as good as IQ tests. Piffer (2019) found a 90% correlation between the two methods. In his latest study, he has again found the same correlation (Piffer 2021, see Figure 8).

 

Interestingly, that study shows differences in mean cognitive ability within West Africa: the Mende of Sierra Leone score much lower than the Yoruba of Nigeria. In fact, the Yoruba have almost the same polygenic score as do African Americans, even though the latter have about 20% European admixture. Unfortunately, we have no data on the Igbo of Nigeria, who are known to be high achievers at school and in other areas of life (Frost 2015).

 

These differences within West Africa support the argument that mean cognitive ability has continued to increase in some human populations, even in relatively recent times. With respect to the Yoruba, their cognitive ability may have increased in tandem with their advances in trade, urban settlement, and State formation from the tenth century onward (Akintoye 2014; McIntosh and McIntosh 1988). Meanwhile, the Mende remained at a lower level of social complexity.

 

There is one problem with using polygenic scores for West Africans, or for any non-European population. To identify alleles associated with higher educational attainment, researchers have used genomes of European origin. There is evidence, however, that the architecture of cognitive ability may differ in different human populations. The same alleles might not explain high cognitive ability in West Africans and Europeans. Indeed, Lasker et al. (2019) found a lower correlation between polygenic scores and cognitive ability in African Americans than in European Americans.

 

References

 

Akintoye, S.A. (2014). A History of the Yoruba People. Dakar: Amalion.

 

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa. The Unz Review, July 4

https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/

 

Lasker, J., B.J. Pesta, J.G.R. Fuerst, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). Global ancestry and cognitive ability. Psych 1(1)

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34  

 

McIntosh, S.K., and McIntosh, R.J. (1988). From stone to metal: New perspectives on the later prehistory of West Africa. Journal of World Prehistory 2: 89-133. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00975123  

 

Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data. Psych 1(1): 55-75. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010005  

 

Piffer, D. (2021). Divergent selection on height and cognitive ability: evidence from Fst and polygenic scores. OpenPsych

https://openpsych.net/files/submissions/14_Divergent_selection_on_height_and_cognitive_ability_evidence_from_Fst_and_13c3ICJ.pdf  

Nigerians, Scrabble, and the GCSE

 

Exam hall at Hull Collegiate School (Wikicommons – Robin S. Taylor). The GCSE exam is a poor measure of raw cognitive ability. If some students get tutored and others do not, there will be more environmental variance in IQ, and the exam results will say less about the genetic potential for cognitive ability.

 

 

Chanda Chisala has written more about cognitive ability in sub-Saharan Africa. His argument is straightforward:

 

[…] if it is true that on average black Africans in Africa score extremely low on scholastic/intelligence tests because they grow up with much less educational and other modern cultural resources (as Flynn would agree), then they should perform "extremely well" (by comparison) in those "g-loaded" cognitive contests that do not require too much of such quality cultural exposure (as Jensen would agree). (Chisala 2021)

 

Chanda argues that raw cognitive ability is better measured in Africa by a Scrabble championship than by an IQ test, since most Africans lack "access to well-trained teachers, big libraries, computers or even TVs" (Chisala 2021). Africans are good at Scrabble:

 

Nigeria happens to be the world's top performing nation in English Scrabble, while francophone African countries are also the most dominant in French Scrabble, despite the fact that the top players in Western countries are super-high-IQ nerds with visibly exceptional mathematical talents (Chisala 2021)

 

Correlation isn't causation. Is a high IQ needed to do well at Scrabble? Not according to this study:

 

Forty tournament-rated SCRABBLE players (20 elite, 20 average) and 40 unrated novice players completed a battery of domain-representative laboratory tasks and standardized verbal ability tests. The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance, suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task constraints. (Tuffiash, Roring, and Ericsson 2007)

 

Success at Scrabble seems to be due largely to practice and is thus a poor measure of raw cognitive ability.

 

A curious detail: Nigeria's top performers come overwhelmingly from one part of the country: the Niger Delta, which is home to the Igbo and related tribes. Since the peoples of the Niger Delta used to dominate trade between the coast and the interior, and since trade selects for cognitive ability, mean IQ should be higher in those populations that have long practiced it, like the Igbo (Frost 2015).

 

Young Nigerians in the UK - Academic achievement on the GCSE

 

Although many African immigrants do poorly in British schools, some actually do well. A study of six secondary schools in inner London found that results on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) were higher for African students who spoke Igbo, Yoruba, Luganda, and Ga than for White British students who spoke only English (Demie 2013, p. 9). Chanda sees the GCSE as a proxy for IQ and argues that IQ differences between African immigrants and White British must be highly malleable:

 

Africans speaking Luganda and Krio did better than the Chinese students in 2011. The igbo were even more impressive given their much bigger numbers (and their consistently high performance over the years, gaining a 100 percent pass rate in 2009!). The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on "case study" model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites. (Chanda 2015)

 

Igbo students stood out as high achievers on the GCSE, as did Yoruba students to a lesser extent. In both groups, however, the mean results were highly variable from one year to the next:

 

2009: Igbo - 100%, Yoruba - 39%

2010: Igbo - 80%, Yoruba - 68%

2011: Igbo - 76%, Yoruba - 75% 

(Demie 2013, p. 9)

 

Chanda attributes this variability to statistical noise caused by small sample size. If so, there should be an inverse correlation between sample size and variability. GCSE scores should be more variable for smaller groups than for larger ones. Yet the reverse seems to be true for the years 2009 to 2011:

 

Yoruba: 90 students / gain of 36 percentage points

Somali: 53 students / gain of 13 percentage points

Twi-Fante: 37 students / loss of 3 percentage points

Igbo: 16 students / loss of 24 percentage points

Krio: 12 students / gain of 4 percentage points

Tigrinya: 12 students / loss of 8 percentage points

Lingala: 12 students / loss of 5 percentage points

Ga: 8 students / gain of 9 percentage points

Swahili: 8 students / gain of 10 percentage points 

(Demie 2013, pp. 7, 9)

 

The two largest gains were made by the two largest groups: the Yoruba and the Somali. If the differences between 2009 and 2011 are statistical noise, why are the largest ones associated with the largest groups? Shouldn't we see the reverse? Shouldn't the smallest groups show the most variability?

 

Something seems to be causing those impressive GCSE gains. Since the students are not the same from one year to the next, and since the gains differ considerably from one ethnic community to another, the "something" must be the community itself. Over time, the Yoruba community became better at assisting its students, and this kind of assistance was available only in larger communities like the Yoruba.

 

The most obvious forms of assistance are tutoring and coaching. Such assistance is mentioned by parents in interviews for the above study:

 

Parent A: Father of daughter in Year 9. Generally supportive of the school which was not his first choice but is supplementing his daughter's education with a home tutor. He also calls on his extended family, his oldest son who is a graduate is also expected to help. (Demie 2013, p. 14)

 

Although tutoring and coaching are perfectly legitimate, they invalidate the GCSE as a means to measure IQ, particularly its genetic component. If some students get tutored and others do not, there will be more environmental variance in IQ, and the exam results will say less about the genetic potential for cognitive ability. Therefore, GCSE results tell us what we already know: if you get tutored and coached before an exam, you'll do better.

 

Are tutoring and coaching the only forms of community assistance? There is another one: impersonation. In other words, the parents hire a smart student from their community to take the exam in their child's place. This strategy is feasible only if the community has enough individuals who are (1) intelligent and (2) similar in age and appearance to the student in question. Such individuals are lacking in a small community, as are the middlemen who can refer an anxious parent to a suitable source of assistance.

 

How common is this strategy? Adebayo (2013) studied cheating behavior among Nigerian university students and British university students. He found that impersonation services were used or provided by 20% of the former and 1% of the latter. In general, cheating took non-collaborative forms among British students and collaborative forms among Nigerian students:

 

These include behaviours like writing somebody's coursework, colluding with others to communicate answers to one another, over marking one another's course work etc. This is quite different from plagiarism and non-collaborative cheating characteristic of the British sample reported by Newstead et al (1996). Reasons for these differences may be attributable to differences in population, differences in cultural ethnic, differences in emphasis placed on examination as part of educational assessment (Adebayo 2013, p. 146)

 

Adebayo (2013, p. 148) found high rates of collaborative cheating among Nigerian students:

 

Permitting own coursework to be copied - 72.6%

Copying another student's coursework with consent - 47.3%

Collaborative generous marking of coursework - 64.6%

Submitting joint work as an individual's - 49.3%

Doing another student's coursework for them - 77.3%

Collusion with another student to communicate answers - 83%

 

We live in a world that has low-trust and high-trust societies. In a high-trust society, like the UK, cheating is considered shameful and disreputable, regardless of whom you cheat. In a low-trust society, like Nigeria, cheating is wrong only when you do it to friends and relatives.

 

What happens when individuals from a low-trust society migrate to a high-trust one? If they come in sufficient numbers, their opportunities for collaborative cheating are greatly increased. Imagine you're supervising an exam in an English school, and you suspect an African student is filling in for another. He shows you his school card and another piece of ID. Both are correct. So what do you do now? Do you really want to make a fuss and risk being accused of racial profiling? No you don't.

 

Future research

 

The GCSE study by Demie (2013) leaves much to be desired. It does not provides the number of students who had to retake that exam (which must be a large number); nor does it provide a breakdown of the number of students taking it per year.

 

In any case, the GCSE is a poor substitute for an IQ test. Even if we exclude cheating, the results are distorted by legitimate activities like tutoring and coaching. The latter are more available to some students than to others. Consequently, GCSE results tell us nothing about differences in raw cognitive ability, either between individuals or between communities.

 

Chanda promises to write an article that will rule out cheating as an explanation for Nigerian success on the GCSE. Again, the issue isn't just cheating. It's any assistance that goes to some students and not to others. If you want to measure raw cognitive ability, you need a level playing field. In particular, you need a test that does not offer high achievers the lure of personal gain, which may push test-takers to do well by hook or by crook. In the UK, an African with good GCSE results has access to a wide range of good-paying jobs, in large part because of "diversity quotas" of one sort or another.

 

This motive comes out in interviews with the parents of African students:

 

● 'Without an education you cannot earn a decent salary, without qualifications you cannot get a good job. The best thing is to push your children as hard as you can.'

● 'Being a Black woman if you don't have education in this country, what job will you have to do, clean people's toilets?'  (Demie 2013, p. 13)

 

This subject should definitely be a research priority. We need IQ data on Nigerians, and not inadequate substitutes like GCSE scores. We also need data on alleles associated with educational attainment (i.e., polygenic scores). Furthermore, we need data on each of Nigeria's ethnic groups, particularly the Igbo. It's hard to fake intelligence in the real world, and the Igbo have a long history of doing better at business and other endeavors. Unfortunately, intelligent people are also better at cheating, so there is some confounding between real intelligence and the fake kind.

 

References

 

Adebayo, S.O. (2011). Common Cheating Behaviour among Nigerian University Students: A Case Study of University of Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. World Journal of Education 1(1): 144-149.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1159043.pdf

 

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ Gap Is No Longer a Black and White Issue. The Unz Review, June 25

https://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

 

Chisala, C. (2020). Nigerians, Jews and Scrabble: An Update on the IQ Debate. The Unz Review, February 27

https://www.unz.com/article/nigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate/#comment-4520966

 

Demie, F. (2013). Raising Achievement of Black African Pupils. Good Practice in Schools. London: Lambeth Research and Statistics Unit, Lambeth Council.

https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/rsu/sites/www.lambeth.gov.uk.rsu/files/Raising_the_Achievement_of_Black_African_Pupils-Good_Practice_in_Schools_2013.pdf

 

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa. The Unz Review, July 4

https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/

 

Tuffiash, M., R.W. Roring, and K.A. Ericsson. (2007). Expert performance in SCRABBLE: Implications for the study of the structure and acquisition of complex skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(3), 124-134. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-898X.13.3.124

Not what you think

Preparing for a test (Wikicommons - Excelz)



Why do West African immigrants outperform native-born whites in UK schools? This is the question posed by Chanda Chisala using data from the GCSE, the General Certificate of Secondary Education. 

To be sure, the GCSE is not the same as an IQ test. For most subjects it includes things like coursework and attendance. The test-taker is also motivated by self-interest: a high GCSE score can be a ticket to a good university and a good job. Nonetheless, Thompson (2013) has argued that the GCSE has a correlation of 0.81 with IQ. So perhaps the two are roughly equivalent.

Let's look at the GCSE results from England for 2012. They are indeed astounding for immigrant children from English-speaking Africa. Just look at the percentage difference from the mean by country of origin:

Nigerians -     +21.8
Ghanaians -     +5.5
Sierra Leone - +1.4

Source: Chisala (2019)

This academic excellence seems to be unusually concentrated among Nigerian immigrants. Are we looking at our friends from the Niger delta? Often known as the "Jews of West Africa," the Igbo have a long record of academic and economic success. This has been attributed to their openness to Western learning and the commercial opportunities it creates, although the Igbo were, in fact, a trading nation long before the colonial era (Frost 2015). They became receptive to Western learning because they had long been receptive to learning in general, much like the Japanese during the Meiji era.

Chisala (2015) provides an ethnic breakdown of GCSE results for the years 2009 to 2011:

2009: Igbo - 100%, Yoruba - 39%
2010: Igbo - 80%, Yoruba - 68%
2011: Igbo - 76%, Yoruba - 75%

The Igbo started off as top achievers, but their lead evaporated over the next two years as the Yoruba made remarkable gains. There were 90 Yoruba kids, so sampling error could hardly explain their increase from 39% to 75%. Because the Igbo kids numbered only 16, the decrease from 100% to 76% might not be significant.

Perhaps the Yoruba kids got better coaching and tutoring. Whatever the explanation, GCSE cannot be used as a proxy for IQ, at least not for Nigerians. Yes, IQ can change over the course of a lifespan, but not that fast and not that much—unless you suffer a serious accident.


Exam malpractice

There are less innocent explanations for the rapid rise in Yoruba scores. A study of students in Nigeria found that test-retest reliability ranged from 77 to 85% (Petters and Okon 2014). The authors blame the low test reliability on cheating, calling it "a plague":

Examination malpractice in Nigeria has attained a frightening proportion and it is becoming more sophisticated as years pass by. Efforts by government and stakeholders to curtail this trend have not yielded much success. If this trend is not given an urgent attention, it may utterly destroy the quality of education in Nigeria.

Bisong et al. (2009) come to similar conclusions:

The implication of this study is that the cheating tendency is becoming endemic in Nigerian society. A situation where one in every four students tends to cheat in every examination calls for a significant moral questioning of our society. Even with a high level of supervision, as the results show, students are still prone to indulge in cheating behaviour.

In their review of the literature, Bisong et al. (2009) note that "in 1980, out of the 190,000 candidates who sat the West African Examination Certificate in May and June, 46,000 candidates from Nigeria had their results nullified." Cheating is partly due to Nigerian parents, who understand the value of academic success and push their children to get good grades "by all means":

Parents expect nothing less than passing in examination from their children. There must not be failure. That is to say that he who fails is not entertained in any way. Where there is weakness or a psychological measure that one is not prepared to pass the examination, then fear begins to disturb the minds of students as to how to make it. This leads to serious reading throughout the night, pressing lectures for areas of concentration and arranging to enter the examination hall with every possible means to cheat during the examination. (Halima 2003, p. 17)

Halima (2003, p. 19) notes the harshness of penalties for cheating: "in 1983 the punishment for cheating was increased to a jail term of 21 years without the option for fine. In spite of this cheating in examination increased."


Nigeria's cognitive elite?

It has been argued, notably by Greg Cochran, that Nigerian immigrants are skimmed from the top of their country's IQ distribution (Cochran 2019). They are the best that Nigeria has to offer—la crème de la crème. To make that argument work, however, Nigerian immigrants to the UK would have to be much smarter than the average Nigerian, with an IQ more than one standard deviation higher and probably two.

There is only a rough consensus on the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africa. In their review of the literature, Wicherts et al. (2010) argue for a mean of 82, whereas Lynn (2010) puts it at 66. Rindermann (2013) favors a "best guess" of 75. Even if we take the high estimate of 82, we must still assume extreme selection to get a mean IQ above 100. Is that a reasonable assumption?  Elite individuals exist among immigrants from Nigeria, but they are not the majority: 

Socially, the Nigerian diaspora is by no means homogenous. There are those who struggle for basic means of survival such as car park attendants, cleaners and other menial workers working long hours to make ends meet. But some professionals have distinguished themselves and moved on to become members of the Black middle class. (Akinrinade and Ogen 2011)

Furthermore, some doubt may be cast on the credentials of middle-class Nigerians: "they have acquired a notorious reputation for arrogance and fraud" (Akinrinade and Ogen 2011). Finally, the cognitive elite argument fails to explain why immigrants from Nigeria do so much better than those from Ghana and Sierra Leone.


Math scores

On many GCSE components, there is much room for cheating, particularly on coursework. But what about the mathematics component? GCSE math has not had coursework since 2009. It is simply a timed test. How can one cheat on a timed test?

By impersonation. A "ghost" who knows the subject takes the exam by impersonating the student, and the actual student never takes the exam (Azuka 2014). This method requires a photo ID that combines the ghost's photo with the test-taker's name. In most cases, the fake ID is sufficient to dispel any suspicions.


Conclusion

For whatever reason, the GCSE is too volatile to be used as a proxy for IQ, particularly in the case of Nigerian students. The volatility seems to be due to cheating, as well as to the grey area of coaching and tutoring services. Cheating is rife among Nigerians in Nigeria, and it would be naïve to suppose that such behavior disappears once they relocate to another country, especially if their new country imposes none of the harsh penalties that are regularly imposed in Nigeria.

Nigerian academic achievement may be genuine in some cases. This is particularly so with respect to the Igbo, who have a longstanding record of achievement within and outside school. Unfortunately, genuine ability can be cofounded with fake ability. Smart people are better at gaming the system and making themselves look smarter than they really are.

Indeed, I can't help wondering when I look at the GCSE results for Igbo students in 2009. Every single Igbo got a perfect score—that's unusual even for a smart population and even with a sample size that small. Chanda suggests that year-to-year fluctuations might have made the sample even smaller in that year. Well, perhaps.

It would be easy to say that we need more data. Additional GCSE results, however, will be just as distorted by academic fraud. We need data from real IQ tests that provide no incentive for cheating.


References

Akinrinade, S., and O. Ogen. (2011). Historicising the Nigerian Diaspora: Nigerian Migrants and Homeland Relations. Turkish Journal of Politics 2(2): 71-85.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/31034426/tjp_sayi_4.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DTurkish_Journal_of_Politics_TJP_V._2_N..pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191221%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191221T170342Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=033191eb3309b04839db9b399a1976750b779991740778b6044b92573f0b1501#page=73

Azuka, E.B. (2014). Academic Fraud among Students in Higher Education in Nigeria: Reasons, Methods Adopted and Strategies to curb it. Journal of Educational and Social Research 4(3): 289-296.
https://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/jesr/article/view/2725 

Bisong, N.N., F. Akpama, and P.B. Edet. (2009). Cheating Tendency in Examinations among Secondary School Students in Nigeria:  a case study of schools in the Odukpani Local Government Area, Cross River State. Policy Futures in Education 7(4): 410-415
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1030.3426&rep=rep1&type=pdf  
Chisala, C. (2019). Why Do Blacks Outperform Whites in UK Schools? The Unz Review, November 29
https://www.unz.com/article/reply-to-lance-welton-why-do-blacks-outperform-whites-in-uk-schools/?showcomments#comments 

Chisala, C. (2015). UK: Igbo Nigeria Academic performance destroys the myth of Black Low IQ. Afripol November 28
http://afripol.org/afripol/item/1813-uk-nigerian-academic-performance-in-destroys-the-myth-of-black-low-iq.html

Cochran, G. (2019). Selective immigration. West Hunter, March 13
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/selective-immigration/

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa? The Unz Review, July 4
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/ 

Halima, D. (2003). A study of some socio-psychological factors of cheating in examination among students of Kaduna Polytechnic. Post Graduate School Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.
http://kubanni.abu.edu.ng/jspui/bitstream/123456789/2190/1/A%20%20STUDY%20OF%20SOME%20SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL%20FACTORS%20OF%20CHEATING%20IN%20EXAMINATION%20AMONY%20STUDENTS%20OF%20%20KADUNA%20POLYTECHNIC.pdf 

Lynn, R. (2010). The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans assessed by the Progressive Matrices: A reply to Wicherts, Dolan, Carlson & van der Maas. Learning and Individual Differences 20(3): 152-154.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608010000348

Petters, J.S., and M.O. Okon. (2014). Students' Perception of Causes and Effects of Examination Malpractice in the Nigerian Educational System: The Way Forward for Quality Education. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 114: 125-129
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281305310X

Rindermann, H. (2013). African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations. Personality and Individual Differences 55: 229-233.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372.5462&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Thompson, J. (2013). IQ and GCSE Results in England R=0.81. The Unz Review, November 5
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/iq-and-gcse-results-in-england-r081/ 

Wicherts, J.M., C.V. Dolan, and H.L.J. van der Maas. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence 38: 1-20.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010b.pdf