1. The Biological Basis of IQ Differences Across Populations

Research in psychometrics, behavior genetics, and neuroscience has consistently demonstrated that intelligence is highly heritable and largely biological in origin, with genetic factors explaining up to 80% of IQ variation in adulthood (Plomin & Deary, 2015). The Flynn Effect, once used as a counterargument for genetic influences, has been shown to have plateaued or even reversed in many developed nations, meaning that environmental interventions have diminishing returns.

  • Reaction time studies—which measure raw cognitive processing speed—show the same racial hierarchy as IQ, further supporting a biological basis (Jensen, 1998).
  • Brain volume studies also track closely with IQ disparities, with larger brain size correlating significantly with higher intelligence across individuals and racial groups (Rushton & Ankney, 2009).

Even when all environmental conditions are optimized, the racial IQ hierarchy remains, with East Asians averaging 103-105, Whites around 100, and sub-Saharan Africans significantly lower, even after adjusting for nutrition, education, and economic factors.

2. The Transracial Adoption Studies and the Failure of Environmental Explanations

  • The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study found that Black children adopted into affluent White families still scored a full standard deviation below their White adoptive siblings (IQ 89 vs. 106).
  • Mixed-race children scored between the two groups, at 99 IQ, suggesting a clear genetic component to racial intelligence differences.

This study, along with others, debunks the claim that poverty, education, or other environmental factors are the primary drivers of low IQ in sub-Saharan Africa or among African-descended populations.

  • If environment were the primary cause, the Black adoptees should have scored at White levels. They did not.
  • If racism or oppression were the cause, mixed-race children should have performed at the same level as Black children. They did not.
  • If White privilege explained White success, poor Whites should not perform better than wealthy Blacks. But they do.

These results confirm a strong genetic basis for observed IQ differences, meaning sub-Saharan Africa’s developmental struggles are biologically constrained and cannot be solved with conventional interventions.

3. The Persistent Dysfunction of Sub-Saharan African Societies

Sub-Saharan Africa is not held back by colonialism, resource exploitation, or Western interference, but rather by its own inherent limitations stemming from a low average IQ. The data strongly supports this.

  • Despite trillions in foreign aid, Africa has not converged with the West in technological development, governance, or economic stability.
  • Even in resource-rich nations like Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, corruption, ethnic violence, and economic mismanagement persist.
  • Countries that were once first-world, like Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) or South Africa, have collapsed under Black-majority rule despite inheriting functional first-world infrastructure.
  • African Americans, despite access to Western resources and education, still show persistent gaps in cognitive and socioeconomic outcomes compared to Whites and Asians.

This is not the result of racism or colonialism but rather a reflection of the biological constraints on intelligence that make it impossible for low-IQ populations to sustain advanced civilization.

4. Can Sub-Saharan Africa Be “Fixed”?

The simple answer is no—not without genetic intervention.

  • Even if every environmental problem were solved, sub-Saharan Africa would still be significantly below the cognitive threshold needed to sustain an advanced society.
  • An 85 IQ average is already borderline functional in complex modern societies; anything lower (like sub-Saharan Africa’s estimated 70-80 range) means persistent underdevelopment.
  • High-IQ countries like South Korea, Japan, and Germany can sustain high-tech economies with minimal corruption, while low-IQ countries cannot.
  • No amount of education or foreign aid has ever closed the racial IQ gap, which remains stable across generations and cultures.

The only long-term solution would be genetic enhancement via CRISPR or selective breeding to increase average intelligence in sub-Saharan populations. Without this, Africa will continue to require perpetual aid and external governance to maintain even basic infrastructure.

5. The Dishonesty of Leftist Academia and the Social Justice Narrative

Figures like Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, James Flynn, and Richard Lewontin intentionally distorted data to push an egalitarian narrative, often at the expense of scientific integrity. Their ideological biases—especially their Marxist and anti-hereditarian worldviews—drove them to misrepresent or suppress evidence contradicting their beliefs. This misinformation severely undermined intelligence research for decades and is still widely cited today despite being repeatedly debunked. Their key misrepresentations include:

I. Stephen Jay Gould – The Fabrication of Racist Pseudoscience Claims

  • Gould’s 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man falsely accused 19th-century scientist Samuel George Morton of fabricating skull measurements to promote racial intelligence hierarchies.
  • However, a 2011 reexamination of Morton’s original data by Jason E. Lewis et al. found that Morton’s measurements were accurate and showed no evidence of manipulation. Instead, it was Gould who misrepresented the data, deliberately altering conclusions to fit his ideological framework.
  • Gould’s claims helped cement the myth that biological intelligence differences were fabricated by racist scientists, despite overwhelming evidence supporting cognitive differences between populations.

II. Jared Diamond – Environmental Determinism and the Denial of Genetic Intelligence Differences

  • In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond completely ignored genetic factors in intelligence, instead attributing all civilizational differences solely to environmental chance—including geography, climate, and domesticable plants and animals.
  • He explicitly denied any genetic role in intelligence and falsely claimed that Papuans might be more intelligent than Europeans, despite having no IQ data to support this.
  • While geographic advantages can influence the early rise of civilizations, Diamond’s wholly environmentalist explanation collapses when examining long-term divergence in societal success, governance, and innovation.
  • His book remains a core text for race-denialists, despite modern genetic research overwhelmingly confirming population-level cognitive differences.

III. James Flynn – Selective Use of Bad Data to Deny Hereditarianism

  • Flynn, best known for the Flynn Effect, originally argued that the Black-White IQ gap was entirely environmental, relying almost exclusively on a single, deeply flawed study of post-WWII German orphans born to American soldiers.
  • This study supposedly showed that mixed-race children had the same IQ as White children, but Flynn ignored several critical confounding factors:
    1. A quarter of the “Black” soldiers in the study were actually North African Caucasians, meaning the “Black” children were genetically different from sub-Saharan Africans.
    2. The U.S. military pre-screened soldiers for minimum IQ, eliminating 30% of Black applicants for being too low IQ, while only 3% of Whites were excluded. This created a highly elite, unrepresentative sample of Black fathers compared to the general White population.
    3. Most other transracial adoption studies contradicted this study, showing that Black children raised in White families still scored about 15 points lower than their White peers.
  • Despite these flaws, Flynn clung to this one study while ignoring the overwhelming body of research supporting a genetic basis for intelligence differences.
  • To his credit, Flynn at least engaged in scholarly debate with hereditarians, but his insistence on an environmentalist model seriously hindered public understanding of intelligence research.

IV. Richard Lewontin – The “Race is Not Real” Fallacy

  • Lewontin’s 1972 paper “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” claimed that because 85% of human genetic variation occurs within racial groups and only 15% between them, race was biologically meaningless.
  • However, this conclusion was deeply flawed and intentionally misleading:
    • The same pattern of greater within-group variation exists in virtually all taxonomic classifications, including breeds, subspecies, and species.
    • If Lewontin’s logic were applied consistently, it would invalidate the entire field of taxonomy—which is obviously not the case.
    • For example, dog breeds show high within-breed genetic diversity, yet distinct breeds still exist with predictable traits.
  • Modern genetics has completely debunked Lewontin’s claims, showing that:
    • A few dozen ancestry-informative SNPs can accurately predict racial classification.
    • Only a few hundred SNPs are needed for near-100% accuracy in determining genetic population membership.
    • People’s self-identified race almost perfectly aligns with their genetic ancestry.
  • Despite this, Lewontin’s fallacy continues to be cited by activists and race-deniers as if it were an unassailable truth. His Marxist ideology appears to have driven him to misrepresent genetic data to support his political agenda rather than scientific accuracy.

The Lasting Damage of These Misrepresentations

  • Gould, Diamond, Flynn, and Lewontin’s ideological distortions helped create the modern denialist framework surrounding race and intelligence.
  • They knowingly suppressed or distorted evidence to push an environmentalist narrative, setting back intelligence research by decades.
  • Their work is still widely cited today in academia and media, despite overwhelming genetic and psychometric evidence contradicting them.
  • Genetic studies, twin studies, reaction-time experiments, and brain volume research have completely vindicated hereditarians like Jensen, Rushton, and Murray.
  • Yet, the taboo around racial differences in intelligence remains, largely due to the activism-driven misinformation promoted by these figures.

Science is Catching Up, but Ideological Damage Remains

The modern resurgence of research on polygenic scores, behavioral genetics, and large-scale IQ studies is beginning to undo the damage caused by these four ideologically-driven figures. However, their influence continues to be felt, as activists and academia still lean on long-debunked arguments to deny biological realities.

Mainstream academics lie or obscure evidence not because they lack data, but because the truth is politically inconvenient. The real scientific consensus aligns with Murray, Rushton, Jensen, and other hereditarians, yet political censorship ensures that mainstream discussion of these facts is silenced.

Recognizing the falsehoods promoted by Gould, Diamond, Flynn, and Lewontin is crucial to restoring scientific integrity to intelligence research and ending the suppression of inconvenient but important truths about human cognitive differences.

6. Conclusion: The Real Reason for Global Racial Inequality

The racial disparities in civilization, technological development, governance, and economic success are not due to oppression, colonialism, or environmental deprivation, but rather:

  1. Genetic differences in intelligence and behavioral traits between racial groups.
  2. The inability of low-IQ populations to create or maintain high-trust, high-functioning societies.
  3. The false promise that Western-style institutions and infrastructure can “fix” populations that are biologically unequipped to sustain them.
  4. The persistent refusal of mainstream academia and media to acknowledge these genetic realities due to political and ideological pressure.

The truth is inconvenient, but the data is clear: human populations are not equal in their cognitive abilities, and this explains the vast majority of global racial disparities.

Any effort to “close the gap” without addressing genetic intelligence differences is doomed to waste trillions more dollars, achieve nothing, and continue making excuses for inherent racial disparities that have existed for centuries.

The reality is simple: a genetically constrained average IQ of 70-80 cannot support a first-world civilization—and no amount of money, education, or political activism will change that fact.