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Submitted by David Gold on Friday, 6 November 20096 Comments

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Rageh Omar presented a fascinating documentary the other week about intelligence. His question was ‘are some races inherently more intelligent than others?’ Of course I don’t know the answer, but I can make certain judgements, and it was interesting to watch the programme, and try to understand the methodology behind Omar’s research.

So, the big question? Are certain races more intelligent than others? Of course I don’t know, but I would have guessed they were. After all, what almost every scientist both on the programme and in the wider world agree on, is that intelligence has a crucial root in hereditary qualities. If genes can impact on an individual’s intelligence, and given that all people are uniquely different, it would follow logically that there must be races that are more intelligent than others.

Further to this are anomalies in human history which suggest differences between races. For one thing, how has the comparatively tiny continent of Europe come to dominate the globe? How were the Portuguese and Dutch, tiny nations, able to come to rule over vast swathes of the planet? How have Israel and Japan, both tiny countries with almost no natural resources, come to become so much more powerful militarily, technologically and economically than their neighbours, huge countries rich in natural resources? And how can we explain black athletes’ continued and consistent superiority over their white rivals when it comes to endurance sports, in particular running events?

To me there are two more pertinent sub issues that arise from the debate.

Firstly, that the question should not have been ‘is race a factor in an individual’s intelligence?’, but it should have been, ‘which races are the more intelligent?’ And secondly, just suppose for instance, as the programme does, that North East Asians are more intelligent than North Europeans. Is this really a problem? It was a problem about 100 years ago, when eugenicists such as Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel advanced Social Darwinism, and in doing so, created a blueprint for the advancement of the Aryan race above all others.

This was a problem because it supposed that those less intelligent races should be prevented from breeding. It isn’t a problem that some races are more intelligent than others; it is only a problem when it is argued that one race should effectively have ‘more rights’ because of their intelligence. As long as we don’t follow this path, there shouldn’t be fear of suggesting one race is more intelligent than another. After all, it is evident that not all are equal, but the key thing is to treat all as having equal worth. Darwin’s logic suggests that the least intelligent will die off anyway, so let men and women choose their life partners and natural selection will take its course, no?

The other issue with Omar’s programme, is that it seemed to focus on the differences between white and black people. This appears to be a flawed way to approach the question, given that white people are descended from black people. Therefore, whichever intelligent genes that white people possess must have come from black people, surely? Whilst there was a logic to the idea that those living in Africa may be of a lesser intelligence, it seems flawed to then suggest that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, for there are many black people making successful lives for themselves all over the world.

Finally, there is a pertinent question that comes from measuring people and races by race. This supposes that intelligence is the measure of human progress. But is this really true? Some of the most intelligent men in history have committed some of the greatest atrocities. Adolf Hitler took an IQ test which placed his intelligence at 141, whilst Stalin scored 132, and Mussolini’s was estimated as between 129 and 138. A South Korean official estimates Kim Jong I’ls IQ as between 150 and 160.

So, if one was to tell Rageh Omar, par exemple, that black people were less intelligent than white people on average, would that really be an offensive comment? That is the question. I would suspect the answer would be ‘no’.

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6 Comments »

John Spence said:

For one thing, how has the comparatively tiny continent of Europe come to dominate the globe? How were the Portuguese and Dutch, tiny nations, able to come to rule over vast swathes of the planet? How have Israel and Japan, both tiny countries with almost no natural resources, come to become so much more powerful militarily, technologically and economically than their neighbours, huge countries rich in natural resources? And how can we explain black athletes’ continued and consistent superiority over their white rivals when it comes to endurance sports, in particular running events?

Many answers to these points, complete or partial, come in Jared Diamond’s excellent ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’. While the book is very readable, the presented arguments are too complicated to precis here.

- 7 November 2009 at 2:26 am

David Gold said:

Interesting stuff…I shall have to nab a copy! Cheers.

- 7 November 2009 at 11:44 am

Tom Hewitson said:

Having watched the documentary myself it did feel a little like he was actively setting out to disprove the difference rather than taking an impartial look at the facts.

One of the problems I have with this whole debate is that somehow its valid to lump an entire race together when it obviously involves massive generalizations. So what if the average IQ of one race is a bit lower, that doesn’t discount the millions who are more intelligent than an average member of another race.

The other problem I have is that there’s no real attempt to measure distribution. It is completely possible that whites have a higher number of geniuses and that is dragging the average up. These geniuses are a small enough number that its completely possible that they are overlooked in nations where schooling and testing isn’t so universal.

- 7 November 2009 at 2:30 pm

Morwenna said:

I didn’t see the documentary but this article raises some interesting points. Yes I agree, Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ is a fascinating lateral look at history and at race, but in the end is somewhat self-verifying in my opinion. That is to say (look away now if you don’t want to know the answers) Diamond is a bio-geographer, and thus concludes the differences between races can mainly be prescribed to bio-geography. As a historian myself, I’d have liked to see more of an attention on accidents of history – times when stuff just happens, nations react to stuff in different ways, and often one wins and one loses through no deep-seated fault of its own.

But on to the points raised above: I think it’s too general about the term ‘intelligence’. Of course there are always issues with testing and evaluation (are IQ tests genuinely reflective or are they just a useful tool for journalists?) but surely we could be a bit more varied in how we measure intelligence. It’s not just ‘how clever are you’; instead the difference between material success or failure in this world surely comes down to thousands of factors such as resourcefulness, access to education, access to the job market, hardworkingness (if that’s a word…), support and healthcare… quite frankly, nurture as well as nature. For example, in my area of London there are many Polish plumbers. Polish plumbers are, in general, simply more hard working and industrious than their English counterparts and thus more successful in their job. Consequently, they have achieved more than the English plumbers irrespective of intelligence or any IQ test.

Surely in any debate such as this we need to look beyond a simple reading of ‘intelligence’ and appreciate the thousands of other factors involved?

- 8 November 2009 at 12:37 pm

didi said:

I am a french educated guy and I know for fact that France has the best mathematical brains in the world(France won more Fields medallists than any other country in the world).If blacks arent intelligent,how come many blacks come top of the best engineering school in France.Mr Tijane Thiam,the first black CEO of a fortune 500 company in UK,won all the best academic prizes one can think of in France.He won the first prize in the “concours general de mathematiques”(Following in the footsteps of the great Henry Poincare),he topped his class at L`ecole des Mines that recruit only the best brain in France.I think if people are so anti-blacks is because they fear blacks.

- 23 November 2009 at 10:34 pm

David Gold said:

Didi, I think you miss the vital point.

Which is that it is fundamentally self defeating to compare intelligence simply by a basic categorization of race (i.e. black and white). The fact is that as pointed out in my article, the first human beings were black people in Africa, therefore there is bound to be discrepancies that you yourself allude to.

Another key point raised is the question of ‘is intelligence that important?’ I’m in doubt as to whether raw, natural intelligence is that vital a trait for the progress of humanity; Hitler and Stalin being highly intelligent people, demonstrates that high intelligence and the pursuit of a more intelligent race can be a contributory factor towards some of the worst atrocities and periods in human history.

It’s all a bit vague, basically…and to use the pun, there’s nothing black and white about this debate – which is why I will finish by questioning your assertion that ‘France has the best mathematical brains in the world’. My answer to this statement, as detailed in my article, is as follows.

1. This is indeed a possibility.
2. If it is the case, how can you prove it?
3. If you can prove it, does it even matter?

- 24 November 2009 at 11:09 am