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The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
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asianstudentassemblingroboticarmwithscrewdriverduringthelesson
Although the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was not one of the awards originally established by Alfred Nobel, most of the world's population and media treat it as such, with that impression strengthened because it is announced around the same time. Just as with the Nobel Prizes in Physics or Medicine, the award in... Read More
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Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
Let's talk about race, but let's focus on the thorniest issue of all: Race and IQ. Can you summarize the issue so that readers understand what we're talking about and explain why it is such a prickly topic? Ron Unz---For various reasons, there are few topics more taboo in modern American society than the notion... Read More
National IQs were collected by one psychologist, Richard Lynn, sitting in his study. He said he found them more interesting than collecting stamps. Early in his career he had collected intelligence test results when working in Ireland, but thought that the results would be unpalatable, (they seemed to show that brighter Irish people had emigrated... Read More
chandascrabblejews-1
Let’s begin by acknowledging a couple of kind (re)tweets from the hereditarian-HBD side on my last Unz article on IQ and race (Why Do Blacks Outperform Whites in UK Schools?): Murray tweet: Sailer tweet: After the recent death of the great James Flynn, I thought I should finally get back to writing some updated articles... Read More
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An Intellectual History of the Last One Hundred Years
One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues. He warned me that our publication had been branded a "White Supremacist website" by the Washington Post, and urged me to immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking... Read More
In the great cultural war which surrounds race and intelligence, James Flynn is on the side of the angels. I know this because he told me so. Happily, I know him well enough to know he was joking: he was admitting that he was well aware that his mostly environmentalist perspective was far more acceptable... Read More
Who? Whom? versus "What? When? Why? How?
The argument from authority is of questionable merit. Yes, some people know far more than others, but how does one establish that? Happily, there are publication and citation metrics available to help us, and a reasonable case can be made that experts exist. That does not preclude the possibility that they are all wrong. One... Read More
unlikely
Recently, I reported that Leftist journalist-enforcers had discovered an annual academic conference on subjects like genetic racial differences in intelligence had taken place, almost clandestinely, at the prestigious University College of London for four years without the SJW mob or even the university knowing about it. The usual moral panic ensued. James Thompson, the lecturer... Read More
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“This Will Not Stand”
For our Social Justice Warriors, race differences in intelligence absolutely cannot be acknowledged to be genetic. If that happens, they sense, then racial inequality in outcomes will have to be accepted as fair and their entire religion of cultural determinism, the thing that gives SJWs their power, will be discredited. This sends them into paroxysms... Read More
abodecades
Inaugurating her Politically Correct remake of National Geographic, Editrix-In-Chief Susan Goldberg wrote recently: “Some of what you find in our archives leaves you speechless, like a 1916 story about Australia. Underneath photos of two Aboriginal people, the caption reads: ‘South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.’” [Link in original].... Read More
Africans have finally ended Russia’s historical state-sponsored dominance in the fastest form of international checkers: blitz draughts. Jean Marc Ndjofang of Cameroon (pictured above) is the 2017 blitz world champion.
Arthur Jensen's generation of race hereditarians (Eysenck, Rushton, Shockley and perhaps even Charles Murray et al) were quite different in posture from many of their current young followers. Jensen, like most of his friends, apparently wished to be proved wrong about his genetic hypothesis of racial differences in IQ because he genuinely hoped that what... Read More
The SPLC headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) has been called the Father of Modern Science. So it is fitting that he was, perhaps, the first scientist to be censured and silenced by political forces represented in his day by the Catholic Church. The issue then was evidence Galileo presented supporting the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system that... Read More
bellcurve
Here’s a dictum I have read now and again on the internet: “an organization that isn’t explicitly anti-Left will eventually be swallowed up by the Left.” Here’s another I am making up on the fly (although I am sure others have said it many times before): “an organization that isn’t explicitly anti-nonwhite will eventually be... Read More
Chanda Chisala and I post about each other so often that we should be employing the same agent. Properly managed, I might finally get onto a lecture tour circuit somewhere. The Shetlands, perhaps. Below is the post to which I am referring. My reply to Chisala’s post has hardly been prompt: one source of delay,... Read More
Jim Flynn once observed that no-one was funding research into the genetics of racial differences in intelligence because they feared they would find something. Here is my psychologist’s summary of where we are as regards the genetics of intelligence in general: 10%. That is to say, by poking about in the genetic code researchers can... Read More
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The Oval Office tape of Richard Nixon and Pat Moynihan posted on YouTube and recently noted by Steve Sailer has both men saying that they know the truth about IQ and race–but can never admit it. And look what happened as a result. VDARE.com’s position: the truth shall set us free. Moynihan had sent Nixon... 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
� I have never played Scrabble. I may have tried once, but certainly gave up very quickly, before even finishing the game. I like words, but I don’t particularly like games. I can’t see the point of Scrabble, and would prefer to read a book, in which the words are assembled to convey meaning. Unscrabble.... Read More
Intelligence is worth talking about because both the reality of intelligence and perceptions regarding intelligence set limits on the possible and influence policy. For example, if the population of India on average really is below borderline retardation, the country can never amount to anything. If Latino immigrants really are as stupid as white nationalists hope,... Read More
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I am still settling in at unz.com so please forgive me if I forget my lines and bump into the furniture, because the stage is much larger than my former small theatre. Not only that, but the cast is enormous, and the commentating audience ten times larger than usual, and rowdier. No country for an... Read More
Baba Sy breaking world record for simultaneous draughts play.
The first logical way the American-invented cognitive game of Scrabble settles the score against radical hereditarians in the racial (Black-White) IQ gap debate is through a two step process: how do white female players compare to white male players in top-level elite Scrabble? Since many mainstream cognitive psychologists tell us that white women (like white... Read More
A few days ago I received an email from Mike Berman, a good friend and Dissident Right supporter. I reproduce it here with Mike’s permission. The precise statement of that is in Chapter 13 of The Bell Curve: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with... Read More
Justus Williams, a son of low-income Black immigrants, wins the prestigious US Junior Chess Open. Williams is more famous in chess circles for embarrassing world champion Magnus Carlsen in a friendly game (when Williams was 14 years old!)
Differential Racial and Gender Canalization Explains Group Intellectual Differences.
I have held the main idea of this article for almost a year now, and I recently noticed that some of the concepts that form the building blocks of my hypothesis are being slowly blogged about, which should hopefully make it easier for many people to understand the thrust of my argument. Before I heard... Read More
SCRABBLE World Champion (2015), Wellington Jighere, of Nigeria (on the left!).
Thomas Sowell vs. Richard Lynn
I will now respond to some hereditarian scholars who wrote some articles in response to my data and arguments on the Black-White IQ Gap (Fuerst, Frost and Thompson). I hope to cover every valid concern brought up so far, including technical issues on data reliability, etc. I will also address some of the alternative explanations... Read More
I'm a race realist. What does that mean? It means I don’t doubt that race is a real and important thing; more than that, it’sfundamental to biology. The foundational text of modern biology is Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, subtitle: “The Preservation of Favored Races in the... Read More
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Modern science has long progressed beyond relying on solely on personal experience. Nevertheless, that acknowledged, at least in some instances Yogi Berra’s quip that you can see a lot by looking around still remains relevant. The role of personal experience is particularly relevant to two contemporary scientific theories. The first is global warming, specifically the... Read More
Biiftu Dureso graduates as valedictorian of a New York magnet high school where her father, an Ethiopian immigrant, works as a janitor!
The Seattle Experiment
Although it is virtually impossible to get official data that breaks down and compares black student scholastic performance in the US at the level of sub-ethnicity or even just nations of origin (which is why we went to the UK in the first place), there was one rare moment in 2011 when this disaggregation slightly... Read More
On Breeders' Equations and Readers' Equivocations
Although I was not surprised that my article (The IQ Gap is no Longer a Black and White Issue) attracted a lot of interest, I was actually shocked that it also impressed the Google Search algorithms. It became a top “authority” not only on topical searches like “black white IQ gap”, but even on very... Read More
The fact that black immigrants to the United States have shown achievements that are superior to native black Americans has been a phenomenon studied since at least the 1970's. At first it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome. As black Africans kept immigrating into the US, they showed... Read More
Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire For the Affirmative At the American Renaissance Debate. Credit: VDare.com
Last weekend Peter Brimelow and I attended the annual American Renaissance conference in Tennessee. Peter gave a feature speech on Saturday morning, title “Immigration: Is This the Breaking Point?” Then on Saturday afternoon Peter and I formed the affirmative side in a debate on the question: “Can the American political system solve the race problem?”... Read More
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Last August for the first time in my life, I was kicked out of an organization. Intercollegiate Studies Institute is the organization that did this, as I learned from its Senior Vice President. Although I had been affiliated with his outfit as an author for more than thirty years, my caller told me that ISI... Read More
si-wadebook
The letters column of the Sunday New York Times Book Review carried a sharp attack on Nicholas Wade's best-selling new book A Troublesome Inheritance by several individuals, organizers of a denunciatory public statement that they had persuaded some 139 prominent genetic scientists to sign. Although these signatories may be credible experts in their own scientific... Read More
Last year I published Race, IQ, and Wealth, presenting the overwhelming evidence that group IQs were far more malleable and shaped by social influences than is widely acknowledged in many quarters. The result was a lengthy and ferocious Internet debate, including an overwhelmingly negative and even hostile response to my suggestions, mostly by bloggers who... Read More
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Amid the fury over the ex-Heritage staffer's work the question to ask is: was he right?
Amid loud cries of “Witch! Witch! Burn the Witch!” an enraged throng of ideological activists and media pundits late last week besieged the fortress-like DC headquarters of the conservative Heritage Foundation, demanding the person of one Jason Richwine, Ph.D., employed there as a senior policy analyst. The High Lords of Heritage, deeply concerned about any... Read More
For a combination of demographic and ideological reasons few topics in American public life are more explosive than those involving race. Racial factors obviously underlie a wide range of major public policy issues yet are almost always ignored by nearly all participants. However, every now and then a careless statement or uncovered document will suddenly... Read More
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A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom.
During the three decades following Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, China achieved the fastest sustained rate of economic growth in human history, with the resulting 40-fold rise in the size of China’s economy leaving it poised to surpass America’s as the largest in the world. A billion ordinary Han Chinese have lifted themselves economically from oxen... Read More
With my long sequence of articles and columns on Race/IQ having now apparently wound to a close, I thought I'd provide a full collection of the entire series and accompanying debate for convenient future access, not least for myself. Running almost a dozen separate items across nine weeks and totalling some 23,000 words, the pieces... Read More
Although the vast majority of the angry responses greeting my Race/IQ article focused on a few of the ethnicities I had examined---Irish, Mexicans, Italians---my coverage had actually been quite broad, and I presented a large number of IQ gaps whose existence seemed inexplicible from a strictly genetic perspective. Indeed, the first example I cited was... Read More
Although the claims regarding Irish IQ had unexpectedly attracted so many of the angry attacks on my recent Race/IQ series, it seemed quite obvious to me that this represented merely a stalking-horse for the related question of Mexican IQ. In my original article, I had pointed out that up to the early 1970s, both Mexicans... Read More
One of the many surprises I've encountered when reading the dozens of web pages and many hundreds of comments attacking my Race/IQ analysis is the overwhelming focus of these critics upon my Irish data. Although I discuss similar ethnic IQ evidence regarding the Greeks, Balkan Slavs, Southern Italians, Dutch, Germans, and various other European peoples,... Read More
Given the vast outpouring of agitated and angry remarks by those bloggers and commenters whose long-cherished beliefs have been challenged by my Race/IQ article, it's always very nice to discover a supportive voice, even if I might not necessary agree with absolutely every single point made. For example, Jason Antrosio's popular academic blog "Living Anthropologically"... Read More
Richard Lynn has now produced a lengthy and detailed rebuttal to my article Race, IQ & Wealth questioning his theories, as has Helmuth Nyborg, another leading IQ expert and strong supporter of Lynn. Their analyses have been published or highlighted on several prominent racialist websites, and I am herein providing my own rejoinder. First, I... Read More
As I've often told my friends over the years, the careful investigation of racial and ethnic differences presents huge difficulties in present-day American society. On the one hand, the topic is a very interesting and important one, especially in a society with America's enormous diversity, but the powerful social taboos surrounding such discussions have dissuaded... Read More
If New York is America's finance capital, with Los Angeles filling the same role for entertainment and Silicon Valley for technology, then surely the Boston area constitutes our center of academic and intellectual life, being home to a host of top universities such as Harvard, MIT, BU, Tufts, and many others. Partly for this reason,... Read More
As I have recently mentioned to several people, I had been aware of the large anomalies and logical inconsistences in the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ model for nearly a decade, and had repeatedly pointed them out on various Internet discussion forums. But since nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what I was saying, I finally decided... Read More
The central finding of my recent article "Race, IQ, and Wealth" was a simple one. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen today rank as perhaps the world's leading academic advocates of the theory that the innate IQ of a given nation is fixed and determines its international success on a host of major economic and social... Read More
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In “Race, IQ, and Wealth,” I examined the pattern of IQ scores for various European peoples as presented by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and the Wealth of Nations and noted the considerable evidence for a large socio-economic influence. In nearly all cases, impoverished, rural populations seemed to exhibit far lower IQ scores... Read More
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What the facts tell us about a taboo subject
At the end of April, Charles Kenny, a former World Bank economist specializing in international development, published a blistering attack in Foreign Policy entitled “Dumb and Dumber,” with the accusatory subtitle “Are development experts becoming racists?” Kenny charged that a growing number of development economists were turning towards genetic and other intrinsic human traits as... Read More
[The flap over geneticist Jim Watson's remarks about race differences in IQ has generated some interesting mainstream comment. Some highly respectable outlets — the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Slate.com — have stepped away from the traditional "Shocked! Scandalized!" template to actually look at the science and say interesting things about it. This dawning... Read More
Topic Classics
A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom.
What the facts tell us about a taboo subject