Poking holes in a semi-prominent "race realist" YouTube video

This is a transcript from a YouTube video I never got around to making-I might make it later if I can figure out exactly how. It is a critique of this video. Enjoy!

In this post I will be examining the issue of race and intelligence, one which has been highly controversial for many decades, if not centuries. I will be doing this by debunking a 2016 video by Libertarian Realist on this subject. This video currently has about 150,000 views, and it was uploaded by Libertarian Realist, who has only about 10,000 subscribers. Now, I could have chosen a video with more views and/or by a better-known YouTuber, but I hope that by making this, I will help address these arguments whether they are made by someone with millions of subscribers or with none at all.

 

This video is a general defense of the hereditarian hypothesis, which claims that races differ in average intelligence, and that these differences are mostly genetic in origin. Given that racism has been a major societal problem for at least that long, it is understandable that claims that seem to legitimize it will be very offensive to some people. When people claim, for instance, that African Americans and/or Africans are less intelligent than whites, some people will just call it racist and move on. But you shouldn’t—you should assess the science to see whether this claim holds water.

 

I’ll try to only focus on the science-related aspects of this 43-minute video, hoping to reduce the amount of time I have to spend watching it or explaining why it’s bullshit. Thus, I will skip the first 29 seconds, which is just clips of some guy on Russia Today and Libertarian Realist himself showing that one of his past videos on this subject was apparently demonetized. Instead, I’ll talk about what the narrator says starting after all that stuff:

[Play original video]

[Pause at 0:50]

Ah, yes, the bogus “heritability” argument. The term “heritability” is one of the most misused and misunderstood terms in all of biology. People often think that if a trait is highly heritable, it must be mostly caused by genetic factors, and that the environment must not have much to do with it. This can also lead people to assume that the environment can’t affect something very much if it’s mostly or highly heritable.

 

But guess what: This isn’t true! In reality, heritability tells us none of the things I just mentioned, which is why, except in very rare cases, it is irrelevant when discussing complex traits like IQ. This is because we already know that genetic factors play a role in literally all human traits—not just IQ. And that’s not even getting into the interaction that can occur between genes and environments, which can render heritability estimates meaningless. This can also allow the

environment to have a big effect on something that is highly heritable. In addition, it is known that heritability estimates do not tell us whether group differences in any traits are genetic in origin.

 

[Resume video]

[Pause at 0:58]

I couldn’t help but wonder where this map came from—I’ve seen similar ones before. I couldn’t find it on Google Images or in any of the links in the original video’s description, but it seems to be very similar (though not identical) to this one:

The original source of this data appears to be the 2002 book IQ and Global Inequality by Richard Lynn & Tatu Vanhanen.

 

[Resume]

[Pause at 1:23]

Yup, he’s definitely basing this part on Richard Lynn’s work. You see, Lynn has reported in multiple books and articles that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is below 70. But there are some big problems with his methodology. For one thing, comparing his estimates of national IQs to those of scholastic assessment tests tends to validate his IQ estimates in all areas of the world…except in sub-Saharan Africa. A more comprehensive review of relevant studies by Wicherts et al. (2010) indicates that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is more like 82, compared to UK norms.

 

Furthermore, these claims are often based on the results of Raven’s test, which are actually percentiles, not IQs. Researchers like Rushton & Jensen have converted these percentiles into IQ scores based on the bogus assumption that these scores will be normally distributed. They’ve also ignored the fact that it is often unknown what the actual age of a child taking the test will be, as there were no birth records in sub-Saharan Africa when many of these studies were conducted.

 

[Resume]

The next few minutes of the video are random clips from TV shows, a Crash Course video, and God knows how many other random sources, but little in the way of hard science. The bits and pieces of science hidden in this part include Hank Green saying that IQ is a real and measurable phenomenon, and J. Philippe Rushton saying African 16-year-olds are as smart as European 11-year-olds. I think I should point out that the concept of “mental age” is now considered outdated, and I will quote Wicherts et al. as to why: “…mental-age IQs often do not have the same standard deviation as standardized IQs, which may result in inaccurate estimates of average IQ of samples that show a lower mean than the mean in the standardization sample”. But not only that, claims by Rushton and others that Africa has low IQs because of evolutionary adaptations to the environment there don’t stand up to scrutiny. If they did, given how slow evolution occurs, one would expect these regional differences in IQ and development to be apparent in prehistoric times as well. But in a study of archaeological data, Scott MacEachern found that such claims are not supported by the actual historical record.

 

[Resume at 4:08]

Here we see someone interviewing Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan, and showing him the same sub-Saharan African IQ estimate from Lynn’s work I discussed earlier. I was able to locate the source of the original clip as being a Norwegian documentary called “Brainwash: Race”, despite it not being included in the video description.

 

Soon afterward we hear Nisbett’s response to this point, which is that there are problems with Lynn’s convenience samples on which his IQ-of-70 estimate is based. Nisbett also says that if this estimate were valid, Africans would not be able to perform many basic agricultural tasks, and their society would not function.  

[Resume at 4:42]

[Pause at 5:28]

Notice that he did not address the issues with Lynn’s sampling on which his estimate is based. He just says that Nisbett’s only argument is that if the estimate were accurate, then African society would be in shambles. Then we see him demonstrate the dysfunctional nature of African society as a whole compared to Western standards. But the fact remains, there are concepts that are present in African societies, as Nisbett pointed out, that could not be comprehended if the average IQ of each member of that society was in the neighborhood of 70.

 

There is little doubt that African countries are not generally as developed as Western countries now, but the state of African development is comparable to that of Western countries 100 years ago.

 

As mentioned previously, the best estimate of the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is actually 82. This seems pretty low compared to the average of 100, but not when you consider that the average IQ of the Netherlands was only 80 as recently as the 1950s. It is well-known that average IQs have been rising very fast in developed countries in recent decades, which is known as the Flynn effect, and environmental factors like nutrition, urbanization, and health care may be the reason for this trend. Given that these factors haven’t improved nearly as much in sub-Saharan Africa, it is no surprise that their IQs are much lower than those of Western countries. But this doesn’t mean that this discrepancy must be mostly/entirely genetic in origin.

[Pause at 10:15]

OK, there’s a lot to unpack here, so I’ll start with the claim about the racial gap in the US not having narrowed since the 1970s. This is simply not true: A study published in 2006 found that the gap between blacks and whites had decreased in size by between 4 and 7 points from 1972 to 2002—which seems to count as being “since the 1970s”, wouldn’t you say?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOnQPXuU81Q

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1400/full

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-17194-003

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018395229872

https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609000634

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00438240500509918

Black-white IQ gap has narrowed from 1972 to 2002: http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a.pdf

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2015.1121474?scroll=top&needAccess=true

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615000082

Literacy:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.106.3.643-664

 

Sources cited in original video:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2678851?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html