On Race, Racism, IQ, and Heritability

If you still believe in innate racial IQ gaps, you're ignoring a lot of science.

I am a reformed racist. For four years between 2002 and 2006, I wrote for the racist journal and website American Renaissance, and for three years I worked for Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation, which publishes that journal. After I left that job in 2006, I ran two websites where I went on promulgating my racist ideas until 2010. (I have subsequently done my best to eliminate all trace of these websites.) In 2012, I repudiated my racist writings in an interview with the The Intelligence Report, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center.¹ I stand by most of what I said in that interview, but I now believe that my repudiation was incomplete, and I would like to update my position here in the hope of changing the minds of those who still think as I used to.

The primary reason that I became a racist was that the state of behavior genetics research in the 1990s seemed to justify racism. Behavior geneticists believed that human psychological traits were strongly heritable, meaning that they were heavily determined by our genes. Given such strong heritability, it seemed certain that IQ gaps and other psychological differences among the races had a genetic basis and were not likely to change.

In 2012, I still believed in the strong heritability paradigm, so I didn’t criticize it in the Intelligence Report interview. However, more recent research has convinced me that the behavior genetics consensus of the 1990s overestimated the influence of genetic factors on psychological traits.

The strong heritability paradigm emerged because of studies on twins and others conducted by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and his colleagues starting in the 1970s. For example, some of the twin studies compared fraternal twins reared together with identical twins reared apart. Since identical twins share 100% of their genetic material and fraternal twins 50%, such studies plausibly allowed the researchers to separate the effects of genes and household environment on our psychological traits. The research found that by the time we reach adulthood, 80% of the variation in our IQ scores is explained by heredity. While household environment is influential on the IQ scores of children, by the time we reach adulthood, it has faded into irrelevance. Lower but still substantial heritability is found on other personality traits, like schizophrenia and alcoholism.

Significant IQ gaps had consistently been found among the races. The gap between black and white IQ scores was estimated to be around 15 points, and the gap between whites globally and black Africans was even larger. On the basis of the twin studies, many social scientists during the 1990s, like Arthur Jensen, Charles Murray, Richard J. Herrnstein, and J.P. Rushton, concluded that racial IQ gaps were mainly explained by innate factors. Murray and Herrnstein demonstrated in the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that IQ scores were an effective measure of intelligence and predictor of life outcomes: the higher your IQ score, the more likely you were to graduate from high school and be employed, and the less likely you were to live in poverty and end up in prison.

As a racist writer, I took this basic idea of innate racial differences and pushed it in all sorts of speculative directions. I argued that white people possessed a unique, genetically determined nature that enabled them to build uniquely desirable and successful societies, like those of the United States and Europe. I concluded that as majority-white societies became increasingly dominated by non-whites, due to immigration and different rates of reproduction, these societies would lose their uniqueness and desirability. It’s a story that many people still believe.

However, as I was promulgating my narrative of racial doom, a new vision of behavior genetics was arising, led by philosopher James R. Flynn. Flynn and others argued convincingly that the behavior genetics establishment was vastly overestimating the heritability of IQ. I refer you to Flynn’s book, What is Intelligence?, for a thorough-going demolition of the strong heritability theory of IQ differences.

Briefly, Flynn focuses on what he calls “multipliers,” which are environmental influences that were not captured by twin studies. “Individual multipliers” are environmental effects that people create for themselves because of genetic differences. For example, those who have a slightly greater aptitude for music than others are more likely to play instruments, thus developing their musical ability. In this way, small genetic differences can, through the environments that individuals themselves create, get multiplied into very large behavioral differences. Similarly, “social multipliers” are differences of environment that exist among societies in different places and times. Societies differ in ways that affect the IQ scores of all their members. Societies that prioritize education, for example, are likely to have collectively higher IQ scores than societies that do not.

These multipliers explained a fact about IQ scores that had puzzled behavior geneticists: they were rising all the time, across many different societies, by about three points per decade on average, a phenomenon that became known as the “Flynn Effect.” It is absurd to believe that this rise is due to biology, as our biology is very slow to change. It is virtually impossible to reconcile changes of the size that Flynn found with the notion that IQ is strongly heritable. Flynn writes:

Dutch 18-year-old men gained 20 [IQ] points (1.33 SDs) between 1952 and 1982. By this logic [that is, the logic of strong heritability], a minimum of a 2.67 standard deviation gain in environmental quality would be necessary to account for their IQ gains. If we take into account that the passage of time cannot have had much effect on some significant fraction of environmental causes, the necessary gain for relevant environmental factors might be as much or more than 4 standard deviations. So, assuming a normal distribution for environments, the average Dutch man of 1982 must have had an environment whose quality was well into the highest percentile of the 1952 Dutch distribution.

It is highly unlikely that environment changed that much in 30 years. The only plausible explanation of the Flynn Effect is that IQ tests primarily measure developed rather than innate abilities.

The Flynn Effect also cast doubt on the notion that IQ was measuring any ability that could be reasonably called “intelligence.” As he wrote in What Is Intelligence?:

if we project IQ gains back to 1900, the average IQ scored against current norms was somewhere between 50 and 70. If IQ gains are in any sense real, we are driven to the absurd conclusion that a majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded.²

Other work on behavior genetics has shown that the interactions between genes and environment are more complex and multifarious than was previously believed and that environmental changes can have very large effects on IQ. For example, one study found that changing childhood environment through adoption could raise a child’s IQ by 19.5 points, a massive shift that is very hard to reconcile with the theory that IQ is 80% heritable. Also, the supposedly permanent black-white IQ gap is clearly narrowing.

The case for large environmental effects on human traits has been strengthened by a different method of measuring heritability, Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS), which has been made possible by the mapping of the human genome. These studies measure the effect of particular genetic variants on human traits. Estimates of heritability derived from these studies are much lower than those derived from the twin studies.

However, even as the scientific justifications for racism have become increasingly discredited, racist beliefs have become more mainstream and widely accepted. It is undeniable that Donald Trump’s blatant racism is part of his appeal to many voters.

One reason for the persistence of racist attitudes is that the right-wing spin machine keeps insisting that nothing important in behavior genetics has changed since the 1990s. I’ve already mentioned the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued that the black-white IQ gap was due to innate factors. In 2020, Charles Murray published a book called Human Diversity that simply repeated the case that he had made more than 25 years before! He makes no mention of the Flynn Effect, individual and social multipliers, or GWAS estimates of heritability. It is as though time has stopped.

If you are a racist, you owe it to the well-being of society to re-examine your beliefs. But you should also do so for your own well-being. Since I overcame my racism, I have become a much happier person. I no longer see people of color as interlopers and enemies, but as potential friends. I am able to appreciate and be thankful for the brilliant achievements of people of color. Above all, I no longer feel as alone in the world and can recognize the humanity I share with people of all races.

1. I have a complaint about the way that The Intelligence Report framed the interview. The sub-headline of the article reads, “Ian Jobling, an intellectual who once worked for the American Renaissance journal, says he now rejects white nationalism and what he sees as its genocidal program.” I never mention any genocidal program in the interview, and I never encountered a white nationalist who spoke in favor of any such program. I even say in the interview, “[Jared] Taylor doesn’t believe in genocide.” It may be that there are white nationalists who believe in genocide, but this was not a subject that I addressed in the interview.

2. Flynn, James R.. What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 9-10.