David Friedman responds to a question from one of his readers:
Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source)
It is never too much to remember how much ethnic cleansing was made in the past based on “scientific evidence” that some races were “not as intelligent as ours” … (Comment on my blog)
Claims of this sort, about genocide, slavery, or ethnic cleansing, are offered as a reason not to talk about group differences. The implicit argument is that even if the average IQ of Africans is lower than that of Europeans or fewer women than men are talented at mathematics it is better not to say so, better to pretend it isn’t true. People making the argument rarely put it that way but it is pretty clearly what they believe.
This raises three questions. One is whether group differences exist. My view is that they almost certainly do. Darwinian evolution implies that humans are “as if designed” for reproductive success. Male and female differ in their role in reproduction so it would be surprising if the same distribution of talents were optimal for both. Africans are optimized against different environments than Europeans; that is the reason for the differences in appearance by which we distinguish them. It would again be surprising if the same distribution of abilities were optimal for both. That does not tell us what the differences are but it makes me skeptical of claims that they do not exist.
That is not, however, the subject of this post.
A second question is whether, if the claim is true, it is a valid argument for concealing true facts about group differences. It might be. If something is true and the consequences of it being known are sufficiently bad that is a reason to conceal it. Consider, for example, accurate instructions for creating a plague virus.
Whether that is the case for the existence of group differences depends on the consequences of concealing or not concealing it; my guess is that if significant group differences exist the consequences of pretending they don’t are worse than of admitting that they do1 but that is also not the subject of this post.
The third question is whether the claim is true, whether the belief that some groups were less intelligent was the cause of terrible things in the past. As far as I can tell it was not. There were terrible things done in the past and the perpetrators often expressed a low opinion of the victims but I have found no case in which supposedly scientific evidence of their inferior intelligence was the cause. In the most plausible cases, mass killing of Jews, Slavs and Romani by the Nazis, prejudice and conflict long predated the purported scientific evidence.
Consider some examples of terrible things.
Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, so far as I can tell, had nothing to do with scientific evidence, real or bogus, about the relative intelligence of races. In some cases the cleansers and their victims differed only in whether their ancestors had or had not converted to Islam in the distant past. In others, the justification offered for the cleansing was “it’s historically our land, and they have taken it over by immigrating and having more babies than we did”.
The largest race killing in the post-war period may have been the Hutu/Tutsi conflicts in southern Africa.2 The victims were mostly Tutsi, an ethnic minority that before independence been the dominant group.3 It is hard to believe that any significant amount of it was motivated by evidence of their inferior IQ.
What about the Holocaust? Some Nazis made claims about Jewish inferiority of one sort or another but the basis for their antisemitism was the idea that Jews were race enemies, in which case the more intelligent they were, the more dangerous. One can see that pretty clearly in Henry Ford’s less malevolent version of antisemitism. The Nazis claimed that Slavs were an inferior race but their motive for killing or deporting them was to seize their land, a conflict that had been running, off and on, since medieval times. The Romani, the other major target of racial killing, were viewed as inferior but principally as criminals and vagabonds, again an issue that long predated the Nazis.
- Nathan Cofnas argues that the confident denial of group differences is responsible for the popularity of woke beliefs. If you know for certain that Africans and Europeans, men and women, have the same distribution of abilities it follows that any difference in group outcomes must be due to one group having a less favorable environment; if you cannot find evidence of racism, sexism, or something similar you must not be looking hard enough.
- The Nigerian Civil War may have killed more people but although the sides were racially different the conflict was over the attempt of the Ibo minority to secede from Nigeria.
- I somewhat oversimplify.
