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The different racial groups have faced different levels of environmental challenge and have survived by evolving different levels of a protective mechanism (probably through natural selection) against environmental insult. The East Asians, who faced the most severe climatic and other environmental challenges, have evolved the highest level of environmental protection, and sub-Saharan Africans have the lowest. In modern times, this has meant that East Asians can survive strong environmental intellectual deprivations (low Socioeconomic Status, etc) more than the other groups, which ensures a higher average IQ by having very few people phenotypically falling into intellectual depression at the bottom end.

When I looked at the school performance data in the UK, this pattern was clear. There was practically no difference between Chinese students from low income households and those from higher income households. Looking at the UK GCSE table, something else jumps out at you immediately: the girls perform above the boys in every group, but even more spectacularly among the Chinese since even the girls from the poorer environments are outscoring the boys from “rich” backgrounds.

Is there a theory that can explain all this? Would that theory help us explain racial and gender intellectual performance differences in general?

The question of how races and genders became differently canalized is not crucial for our hypothesis; more relevant is the process of how black Americans received these deleterious mutations that apparently differentiates them from Africans.

In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell (2006) theorizes that the modern ghetto culture of black Americans came from their association with white rednecks during the time of slavery and he believes it is the preservation of this detrimental culture – preserved with the intellectual help of “white liberals” – that keeps the black IQ low due to its anti-educational, anti-intellectual disposition. Sowell convincingly demonstrates some very uncanny similarities between ghetto black culture today and some aspects of white redneck culture that was more dominant in the South in the past than it is today, as more and more whites have decided to abandon it.

Although I agree that the case for a cultural transfer from some groups of Southern whites is very strong, I think it is more likely that this “culture” was actually passed to blacks genetically rather than through mere influence and imitation. If that is the case, then it was in fact the presence of relatively strong mutations in that sub-population of whites that was affecting the stranger aspects of their behavior and intelligence, and they passed on the same genetic condition to blacks through mating with the black women.

Read full, original post: Towards a Theory of Everyone