Race and Evolution

by Stephen Sanderson

Given the nature of the differences between whites and blacks, a racially egalitarian society is not possible. Attempts to blame whites for racial inequalities are not only based on a falsehood, but are insulting and demeaning to whites, who have been demonized and vilified for something they

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that whites and blacks simply have different biological natures, and these differences make racial equality impossible. This is terribly unfortunate,

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process. I think we will find a way to use our understanding of the biology of race differences to promote, if not racial equality, at least a greater degree of racial harmony. If it comes to be understood by blacks that

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idea of equality is baked into the very fabric of modern societies, but it is one of the most pernicious doctrines ever formulated. We are not all the same and we should learn to live with that fact. Whites

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Genetic evidence shows that there is more variation within groups or populations than between or among them, about 94 percent within so-called racial groups and only 6 percent between them.

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AAA point 1. The argument that there are no significant race differences because most genetic variation occurs within populations rather than between them was first made by the Marxist geneticist Richard Lewontin and has since been repeated by many other race deniers.3 Lewontin carried out statistical analyses showing that genetic diversity

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AAPA point 7. Whether the world’s peoples possess equal potential for adopting and assimilating any culture is highly dubious. At the time when colonialism ended it was charged that sub-Saharan Africans would be unable to maintain European political institutions, and this has proved to be the case inasmuch as most African governments today are brutal dictatorships riddled with corruption.

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But Cartmill makes a truly shocking statement. He notes that proponents of biological race associate it with geographical regions; race differences evolved in different regions as adaptations to specific features of the natural environment and the challenges these features presented. But race cannot be associated with geography because different “races” are found in the same geographical region. “Blacks,” “whites,” “Asian-Americans,” and “Amerindians,” for example, are all found in North America, and as a result “definitions of races as geographically delimited populations marked by distinctive phenotypes cannot correspond to any current reality.”26 What sophistry! No serious scholar could possibly make such a foolish argument, and thus it has to be taken as deliberate deception. Those who define races as biologically distinct populations associated with particular geographical regions obviously mean that race differences arose in the distant past as adaptations to particular regions! The fact that different races may today be found in the same geographical region is clearly the result of human migrations, many of which are relatively recent. As a professor at an elite university, Cartmill would most certainly know this—indeed, an ordinary high school student would know it—which is why I call his argument a deliberate deception.

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George Farkas and Keven Vicknair, sociologists at the University of Texas at Dallas, found the same basic pattern.63 They suggested that wage disparities between blacks and whites might be explained by differences in cognitive skills rather than by discrimination. They tested their theory by using data from a large national sample of male workers between the ages of 26 and 33 for the year 1991. In their statistical analysis they found that discrimination did initially appear to be one of the factors that explained wage gaps, but this was only because the possible role of cognitive skills was ignored. When cognitive skills were taken into account (statistically controlled), the wage gap not only disappeared but actually shifted slightly in favor of blacks. In other words, when blacks and whites were compared at the same level of cognitive skill, blacks actually outearned whites! The authors’ grand conclusion was that blacks as a whole earn less than whites because of poorer cognitive skills. (In referring to cognitive skills the authors say they are not talking about IQ but about the kinds of cognitive skills taught in schools, such as reading, mathematics, and analytical reasoning. However, Farkas and Vicknair say they measure cognitive skills “as the average score on tests of word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetic reasoning, and mathematical knowledge.” These are really intelligence

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Also, low IQ often affects the way blacks conduct themselves in the courtroom. They may behave in ways that demonstrate little contrition and a lack of understanding of the seriousness of their wrongful behavior, thus suggesting to judges and juries that a harsher sentence is appropriate.

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Bad theories offer no hope of successful practical application.

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There is every reason to think that the black-white-Asian IQ differences are largely genetic. Racial group differences in intelligence appear early in life, and the size of the black-white difference does not change in any significant way from age 3 through late adulthood. The degree of IQ heritability is essentially the same in blacks as in whites, and the black-white gap is greatest on those tests with the highest g loadings (and g is highly heritable).116 Moreover, the size of the white-black difference actually increases as SES increases. As Jensen comments, “In every large-scale study, when black and white children were matched within each level on the scale of the parents’ SES, the children’s mean W-B-IQ differences increased, going from the lowest to the highest level of SES.”117 In a study of children

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Blacks in predominantly black countries therefore score nearly two full standard deviations below whites and one standard deviation below American blacks. Why do American blacks score higher than sub-Saharan Africans and Afro-Caribbeans? It is primarily because American blacks have an average admixture of 20-25 percent white genes.135 Their IQs have been enhanced by this admixture so that they occupy an intermediate position between whites and those blacks without any white ancestry. But social environment is important also, as the environments of American blacks are considerably better than the environments of African blacks.

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Individuals of low IQ typically find academic work unpleasant, if downright punitive, and tend to avoid it as much as possible.146

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sum, the societal and global data show the same thing as the individual data. The aggregate IQ level of a society is crucial to its success and being of black African descent unfortunately greatly inhibits success at the societal level. These data are of great relevance for discussions of the racial dilemma in the United States because they show that throughout the world blacks are far less successful than whites. This is largely because of low intelligence, but there are other characteristics of blacks that are important as well, as we will see.

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Concerning meeting financial obligations, one study of the United States found that 56 percent of blacks had defaulted on a student loan compared to just 15 percent of whites. Another U.S. study found that 48 percent of blacks had poor credit ratings compared to 27 percent of whites.

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Compared to whites, blacks engage in more reckless behavior. In the United States, for example, they are about twice as likely as whites to suffer automobile injuries that result from drunk driving, speeding, running red lights, and failure to wear seat belts. Blacks are also more reckless in their sexual behavior, especially as indicated by their frequent failure to use contraception. Black Africans are notorious for their disdain for condoms, which is one of the main reasons for the very high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Blacks are much more likely to engage in gambling, especially pathological gambling. The DSM identifies pathological gambling as a disorder of impulse control, and impulsivity is a major facet of antisocial personality.

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Table 6.1 presents data on three of the most serious crimes in the United States.192 In 2018, blacks committed slightly more than half of all homicides and robberies and a third of all serious assaults. Taking into account their respective proportions of the population, blacks committed homicide and robbery at about six times the rate of whites, and serious assault at nearly three times the white rate. Northeast Asians were at the opposite end, committing serious crimes at a fraction of the white rate and an even smaller fraction of the black rate.

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Allowing for the percentage of the total population represented by each racial group, blacks were arrested at 31 times the white rate for murder, 15 times the white rate for robbery, 11 times the white rate for rape, 9 times the white rate for felonious assault, and an almost unbelievably high 98 times the white rate for all shootings (both lethal and nonlethal). Blacks were overrepresented for other less serious crimes as well, such as misdemeanor criminal mischief and misdemeanor assault, although not to the same extent. In general,

fairness, it has to be noted that the mobs did not consist entirely of blacks. There were some whites involved as well. But the whites mostly marched, raised their fists, shouted, and taunted police. The looters, vandals, and arsonists were virtually

Africa is a very warm continent overall, and in those regions near the equator extremely hot and humid. The archaeologist Lewis Binford has assembled data on 340 hunter-gatherer societies to show how hunter-gatherer subsistence is closely tied to latitude (Table 7.1).246 Up to 30° either way from the equator, gathering is the principal mode of subsistence. Hunting makes up much less of the diet, and hunting and fishing combined still account for less than gathering. Gathering is principally a female activity wherever it is found, and it certainly was and is found in Africa. Before the outward migration, Africa consisted only of hunter-gatherers, since agriculture did not appear anywhere on earth until about 11,000 years ago, and in Africa much later than this. This means that in early times women were providing the majority of the diet. And in warm or hot climates the demands of gathering are minimal. Hunting is also much less demanding in such climates than it is in more northerly climes. Building shelters from the elements is a lot easier as well because it is easy to stay warm year-round. Shelters therefore do not have to be “weatherized” (except to keep the rain out).

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CONCLUSION: RUSHTON’S RULE OF THREE It should be obvious by now that there is a specific order of race differences revealed by the three major races of mankind: blacks are at one end, Northeast Asians at the other, and whites in-between. This point has been repeated over and over again with respect to a wide range of human characteristics and behaviors. In fact, Rushton claims that this same order is found for some sixty variables, of which he lists thirty-two.273 I summarize some of his discussion and add a few variables of my own in Table 7.7. As mentioned previously, this order has been called “Rushton’s Rule of Three.”274 The pattern is extraordinary. The probability of any specific order of the three races is one-sixth (the six possible orders are A-W-B, A-B-W, W-B-A, W-A-B, B-A-W, B-W-A, where A = Asian, W = white, and B = black), but the probability of achieving the same order for a large number of variables will be exceptionally low. For example, in the table there are nineteen orders listed, and seventeen of them are the same (A-W-B). The probability of that order happening seventeen times by chance alone will be infinitesimal. This means that we are not dealing here with a sequential order that is occurring seventeen times independently or randomly, but with a process in which each sequential order is inextricably intertwined with every other (identical) sequential order. Only a very powerful theory could possibly explain such an outcome. If race is not an object...

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All decent people can certainly agree that slavery was a wretched and dehumanizing system, and yet it is one of history’s greatest ironies that in the long run it has been beneficial to today’s blacks, especially black Americans. Black Americans are far better off today in economic terms (and in political terms as well) than black Africans. Had contemporary blacks’ ancestors never been enslaved by Europeans, they would still be living at the current African level. This, of course, is not to justify slavery—which certainly cannot be justified—but simply to say that contemporary blacks have not been crippled by slavery as is so often claimed. Irony of ironies, their lives have been improved by it over the long

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skinned blacks, are invariably ensconced at the bottom of the social hierarchy in every society and whites or otherwise lighter-skinned persons are at (or nearer to) the top. Actually, there is no society anywhere in the world in which blacks achieve parity with whites or, a fortiori, in which they outperform whites. This powerful social fact militates against predominantly social and cultural theories of racial inequality. And yet, predictably, this outcome is invariably attributed to prejudice and discrimination by almost all social scientists.333 There is

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Frost seems to be returning to the discredited view that it was European conquest and colonialism that led to the disparagement of dark skin (although with a new twist). Disdain for blacks is much older than the sixteenth century and has been found in societies that never enslaved them or even had much contact with them. The reason for color prejudice against blacks and other native peoples was that such groups were reliably seen as less intelligent and capable than the groups that disdained them, mainly Europeans and Northeast Asians. Had Europeans encountered groups that proved to be just as talented and capable as themselves it is very likely that color prejudice would never have developed. There is no longer any color prejudice or racism against Northeast Asians living in the United States today, or at least not much to speak of, for the simple reason that they have shown that they are just as intelligent as, or even more intelligent than, the host population. The hierarchy of color among American blacks, and the similar pigmentocratic hierarchies in the Caribbean and Latin America, are primarily hierarchies of ability. Lighter-skinned people are regarded more highly because they are more talented. In an imaginary world, had human evolution occurred differently such that it was dark skin rather than light skin that was associated with greater ability, then color prejudice would have been directed toward light skin.357 Ten Racism and Stereotypes Then and Now RACISM IN C...

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There is great irony here since a number of black Americans have adopted Islam as a religion, and some have even declared that Islamic civilization consisted of blacks.

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to American and other Western perceptions in the heyday of racism and that we have a clear case of “the unbearable accuracy of a stereotype.”

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The end of apartheid was celebrated in the West but in fact there was little to celebrate. Nelson Mandela became the new South Africa’s first president but he was an ineffective and largely disengaged leader. Retiring as president in 1999, he was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki, an increasingly corrupt and ruthless dictator who tolerated no opposition, even going so far as enlisting prison inmates to murder political opponents. Under Mbeki, things went swiftly downhill.499 One of the first things the post-apartheid government did was to establish affirmative action programs in which overwhelming preference was given to blacks; whites quickly became aware that entire categories of jobs, especially in the public sector, were off limits to them. Most whites and other minorities did not even bother to apply for these jobs. But most blacks had extremely poor work skills and were so unproductive that, without racial preferences, they would have been virtually unemployable. Affirmative action had a very negative impact on the quality of public services, including nearly complete failure of delivery in 2006-07. There was massive corruption among police, many of whom were illiterate. Government had become almost totally ineffective.500 The economy declined dramatically. Jobs in the formal sector shrank by more than 100,000 a year for many years. As whites began to emigrate in large numbers, they took their capital and skills with them. Domestic and foreign investment collapsed and unemplo...

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Before colonialism Africans had indigenous political institutions that were much simpler and more easily used to maintain order than those established by the colonists. The new colonial institutions were not natural to Africans and proved beyond their ability to manage effectively. As Ayittey remarks, after colonialism ended “African nationalists abjured their own native institutions and rushed to blindly copy foreign systems they did not understand.”522 Because native Africans did not create the forms of government established by Europeans, they proved incapable of understanding how they operated and thus how they could be maintained. Many members of African elites have attended universities and received degrees, but these are little more than paper credentials (and usually cheap ones at that). Those who hold them do not understand their meaning or how to use them or apply them. They are “functionally illiterate,” Ayittey says. Indeed, it took Europeans thousands of years to create such institutions, which no other society or civilization had thus far developed, and so it is no wonder that Africans did not understand them. When decolonization was beginning, the colonizers who opposed it said that Africans would not be able to maintain the political institutions they were inheriting, and they were often scoffed at. But it turned out to be true.

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effects actually seemed to be more harmful than beneficial.533 The authors found that as the percentage of black students increased in a college or university, non-black students’ satisfaction with the quality of their education declined, as did their assessment of the work ethic of

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There is no single group that benefited exclusively from slavery. If slave labor has created wealth for white Americans, it has also created wealth for black Americans. American blacks today are much better off than Africans living

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Blacks actually owe a debt to America. As a result of slavery, blacks today enjoy a standard of living much higher than that of blacks living elsewhere, especially

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Some people argue that it harms blacks to talk about a possible average racial difference in intelligence, whether it is partly genetic or not, and that it is better to promote what they view as a useful fiction. But … it endangers blacks more, and the nation too, if we fail to confront and come to grips with the situation. Promoting the fiction is not harmless, as many people seem to assume. Just because academics, politicians, and others may refuse to discuss race differences in g publicly is no guarantee that the lay public will not notice, and perhaps even dangerously misconstrue, the inevitable differences in real-world performances that follow from racial-ethnic disproportions

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about the enduring Black-White difference in phenotypic g would seem to be both futile and harmful in the long run. It is futile because the truth—and attempts to suppress it—will become increasingly obvious to the average person. Phenotypic differences in cognitive ability have relentless real-world effects that are neither ameliorated nor hidden by claims to the contrary…. Lying about race differences in achievement is harmful because it foments mutual recrimination. Because the untruth insists that differences cannot be natural, they must be artificial, manmade, manufactured. Someone must be at fault. Someone must be refusing to do the right thing. It therefore sustains unwarranted, divisive, and ever-escalating mutual accusations of moral culpability, such as Whites are racist and Blacks are lazy.554

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And while the feelings of blacks deserve respect, so do those of whites. Not only have whites, particularly white males, been made to pay reparations for what they did not do, they have been vilified and ridiculed in public discourse to an extent unthinkable for other groups. They must be permitted to defend themselves, and if calling attention to unwelcome facts about nonwhites is part of their defense, that too must be allowed.

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