Introduction: When I Realized Koko The Gorilla Was Fake
When I was maybe eleven years old, I found a book in my elementary school library about Koko the gorilla. Supposedly, Koko could talk through sign language. At that age, I assumed this must be true. (After all, it was in a book at the library.) Within a few years, I had forgotten about Koko the gorilla. I didn’t give it any more thought. Importantly, I didn’t reconsider whether it was true that Koko was capable of conceptual thought like a human being.
When I was about 18, I was watching Rush Limbaugh on TV. (He had a TV show in the early to mid 90’s). He did a comedy bit with a person in a monkey suit doing fake sign language that was supposed to be a parody of Koko the gorilla. The bit strongly implied that Koko couldn’t talk like a person. I remember thinking: “Oh yeah, that’s true. Clearly, Koko the gorilla is fake.” I hadn’t really thought much about Koko at all in the intervening years, but as soon as I saw this Rush Limbaugh bit, my mind refocused on the phenomena of Koko the “talking” gorilla, and quickly concluded it wasn’t real. (Note: I went back and found this clip on YouTube, and the bit may be from more like 1996, which would have made me about 22. I had forgotten this was actually about a story of children being taught that Koko was real in elementary school, like I had been.)
I bring this up because this was a minor piece of false information that I had been fed when I was still a child, and not fully capable of understanding that people can lie or commit fraud for a wide variety of reasons. The lying reaches up to the highest levels of our society, institutions and government. Think about what it took to have a book about a gorilla that could supposedly talk in an elementary school library. It meant there was some adult that had been authorized by other adults, in local and state government, to pick out this book, and put it into the library, despite how misleading and false it was. The book gave children the false impression that a gorilla mind and a human mind are more similar than they actually are. It helped to advance left-wing and egalitarian narratives that human beings are no more important than animals. A lot of what is taught in schools is of a similar nature. It’s about advancing a socio-political agenda held by most universities and major institutions today. That agenda will attempt to deny reality when it does not conform with it.
It is another moral axiom of that agenda that all human beings have the same intellectual capacity, and any difference is NOT because of genetics. Instead, all differences in intelligence or other aspects of the mind between human beings is entirely a result of some external factor, like “environment”, “discrimination”, “colonialism”, or “a legacy of slavery”. To advance that moral axiom in schools, its proponents at universities, the news media, and in government have systematically denied reality for at least as long as I have been alive, and probably much longer. But, eventually, the truth will out. That seems to be what is happening now, when it comes to certain issues surrounding race, IQ, and the mental differences between races.
David Reich’s Book
In 2018 Harvard geneticist David Riech published a book aimed at a non-scientist audience.
The book discusses advances in the science of DNA analysis that allows scientists to extract DNA from the bones of ancient humans, and sequence their DNA. This has allowed scientists like Reich to develop databases of ancient human populations, and then compare the genes of those ancient people to the genes of modern humans.
“These advances mean that whole-genome study of ancient DNA no longer requires screening large numbers of skeletal remains before it is possible to find a few individuals whose DNA can be analyzed. Instead, a substantial fraction of screened samples dating to the last ten thousand years can now be converted to working genome-wide data. The new methods have made it possible to analyze hundreds of samples in a single study. With such data, it is possible to reconstruct population changes in exquisite detail, transforming our understanding of the past.” (Introduction, Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich)
Much of his book doesn’t have anything that would be considered obviously controversial. The second chapter discusses how scientists have concluded that Europeans contain approximately one to two percent Neanderthal DNA, on average.
More controversial topics come up, but are glossed over, or their implications are not considered. For instance, in Chapter 9, Riech says:
“In 2012, Sarah Tishkoff and her colleagues studied the biological impact of archaic admixture on the genomes of present-day Africans without access to ancient genomes like those of Neanderthals and Denisovans that had been used to document interbreeding between archaic and modern humans in Eurasia.’
Tishkoff and her colleagues sequenced genomes from some of the most diverse populations of Africa and analyzed their data to search for a pattern that is predicted when there has been interbreeding with archaic humans: very long stretches of DNA that have a high density of differences compared to the great majority of other genomes, consistent with an origin in a highly divergent population that was isolated until recently from modern humans. When they applied this approach to present-day non-Africans, they pulled out stretches of DNA that they found were nearly exact matches to the Neanderthal sequence. Tishkoff and her colleagues also found long stretches of deeply divergent sequences in present-day Africans whose ancestors did not mix with Neanderthals. Since Neanderthals have contributed little if any ancestry to Africans, this was likely to have been the result of mixture with mystery African archaic humans-ghost populations whose genomes have not yet been sequenced.” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Pg 208 to 209, emphasis added.)
So, not only are Europeans and Africans genetically distinct because Europeans generally contain some Neanderthal DNA, but also, Africans generally contain an unknown “ghost population” of proto-human DNA that Europeans do not have.
“We provide complementary lines of evidence for archaic introgression into four West African populations. Our analyses of site frequency spectra indicate that these populations derive 2 to 19% of their genetic ancestry from an archaic population that diverged before the split of Neanderthals and modern humans.” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aax5097)
So, on average, present-day Africans contain anywhere from two to nineteen percent of their DNA from an archaic proto-human population that is even more ancient than the split between humans and Neanderthals. In the past, Africans bred with a population of proto-humans that was, presumably, even more primitive and backward than Neanderthals. It’s entirely possible that those genes affect not just African physiology, but African brains, and, by extension, African mental capabilities. (This is speculation on my part, but it is something that needs to be studied.)
Just as an interesting aside, West Africans formed the bulk of the slaves brought to North America:
“…a considerable number of enslaved people had their origins in the West African nation of Ghana, as well as neighboring parts of the Windward Coast, now Ivory Coast.” (https://www.history.com/articles/what-part-of-africa-did-most-slaves-come-from)
In other words, the two to nineteen percent archaic human population found in West Africans is presumably found in most of the people of African ancestry found in North America today. This potentially explains a lot about this racial group in the United States, and why they are so behind on many measurements of socio-economic success. It also points to a possible reason they were enslaved by their fellow Africans in the first place.
Of course, Reichs doesn’t say or imply any of this in his book. He doesn’t speculate like I am. (Although I think my speculation should form the basis for some scientific hypothesis that could be tested, but probably won’t, because scientists are afraid of the results of any such experiment.)
Reichs spends a lot of his time convincing the reader he’s not racist:
“The real offense of racism, in the end, is to judge individuals by a supposed stereotype of their group -to ignore the fact that when applied to specific individuals, stereotypes are almost always misleading…Everyone is his or her own person with unique strengths and weaknesses, and should be treated as such. Suppose you are the coach of a track-and-field team, and a young person walks on and asks to try out for the hundred-meter race, in which people of West African ancestry are statistically highly overrepresented, suggesting the possibility that genetics may play a role. For a good coach, race is irrelevant. Testing the young person’s sprinting speed is simple -take him or her out to the track to run against the stopwatch. Most situations are like this.” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Pg 267.)
Of course, this isn’t actually true for anything except, possibly sports, where sub-Saharan Africans appear to excel. I question even that, however. I suspect a lot of white people don’t dedicate their high school and college years to professional football or basketball, because they know that they have an infinitesimally small chance of getting into the NFL/NBA. Black overrepresentation in the NBA or NFL may just be a feature of white people being better at statistics and probability, so more of them focus their efforts on things that are a better bet of paying off.
Why can’t we just apply the metaphorical equivalent of a “stop watch” in fields like law, medicine, science, engineering, or any other job? Because it has been made illegal to do so. It is largely illegal, thanks to Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Civil Rights Acts, to prohibit workers from taking employer IQ tests. It’s called “disparate impact discrimination”, which is just a fancy way of saying black people don’t do as well on IQ tests. The “stop watch”, in things far more important than the high school track team, has been made illegal.
David Reich and every other mainstream academic out there loves to use sports analogies when it comes to the issue of race and IQ, because sports are the one area black people seem to do okay in. Reading between the lines, I think they are trying to convey to their audience: “I’m not racist! Please don’t think I’m racist! See? I acknowledge black people are better at something, so I’m not racist.”
I find it sad and pathetic. They need to stop caring if they’re racist. One of two things is true at this point. Either the concept of “racism” has been so twisted and expanded that it means nothing, and should be ignored as a useful concept, or, sometimes, “racism” means nothing more than acknowledging reality, in which case it’s a virtue.
David Riech’s Hidden Message:
Historically, I think a lot of scientists and intellectuals didn’t recognize, or didn’t want to admit, the obvious implications of their theories:
“For someone who has had more impact on religious thinking than anyone else born in the last 200 years, Darwin wrote very little about religion….The reasons for his reticence are complex. Darwin did not want to upset his wife, who was devout. He did not want to upset public opinion in any way that might retard the reception of his theory. He generally approved of the religious influence on society.” (https://www.faraday.cam.ac.uk/news/Darwins-religious-beliefs/)
David Reich is like Darwin and religion. He’s a “true believer” when it comes to the morality of egalitarianism and altruism. But, his science is constantly undercutting his “faith”, just like Darwin’s science undercut his religion. Darwin may not have wanted to fully admit what the theory of evolution did to the creation story in the Bible, but later thinkers would recognize the logical implications. Similarly, David Reich may not want to admit the logical implications of his work, but others eventually will. The truth will out. The “hidden message” of David Reich’s work is this:
Yes, race is real. Yes there are actual biological differences between races. Based on the genetic data that is being collected, we’ve got to acknowledge it at this point:
“Chapter 11, ‘The Genomics of Race and Identity,’ argues that the orthodoxy that has emerged over the last century —the idea that human populations are all too closely related to each other for there to be substantial average biological differences among them—is no longer sustainable…” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Introduction)
But, David Riech says: Let’s use a euphemism called “ancestry” and pretend like it’s not synonymous with what everyone already meant by “race”:
“…the language of ‘ancestry’ that geneticists like me have adopted is a reversion to traditional ideas of biological race. She has pointed out that in the United States, the ‘ancestry’ terms that we use map relatively closely to traditional racial categories, and her view is that the population genetics community has invented a set of euphemisms to discuss topics that had become taboo….But ancestry is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with ‘race’. Instead the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them. It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits, and the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful. If we continue to use it we will not be able to escape the current debate, which his mired in an argument between two indefensible positions. On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.” (Who We Are And How We Got Here, David Reich, Pg. 253)
Here, Riech gives us a socio-political reason for not using the term “race”, rather than a scientific one. He simply assumes that anyone who speaks of race is “grounded in bigotry”, whatever “bigotry” means. It’s not “bigotry” to recognize differences in average IQ between races, or average differences in murder rates. It’s recognition of reality. Or, if it is “bigotry”, then sometimes being a “bigot” is a virtue.
I didn’t discover David Reich and his ideas through his book. I discovered him by watching an approximately two-hour long interview on YouTube. (I highly recommend listening to the video interview.) At several points, I had to rewind it and relisten to what Reich said. I found it shocking to hear an academic from Harvard University, an institution I have almost nothing but contempt for, saying what he was saying. My assumption was that Harvard does nothing by carry water for the egalitarian left. I was surprised to see one of the egalitarian left’s most sacred creeds being called into question. I don’t know if Reich has learned more since he wrote his book in 2018, or if he has simply decided that he is more committed to the truth than he is to any ideology. Some of Reich’s apparent discoveries since he wrote the book include:
1. Significant Evolution through natural Selection has occurred in Eurasia since the Bronze Age, 5,000 years ago.
a. This contradicts Steven J Gould, who said: “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3721656/#b1-rmmj_1-1-e0006
b. The idea that human evolution has been quiescent for the last 50,000 years was a reflection of Gould’s left-wing, egalitarian ideology, rather than science. https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/the-mismeasurements-of-stephen-jay-gould/
2. Significant evolution through natural selection in Eurasia since the Bronze age has included:
a. Genes Correlated with IQ score. -An increase in those genes:
“In some cases, groups of SNPs were under selection together to influence polygenic traits. Some changes raised the frequency of beneficial traits, including some that are interpreted today as…Measures of behavioral and social status or cognitive functions, such as scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling…” (https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-reveals-natural-selection-has-accelerated-recent-human-evolution)
b. Genes correlated with Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia- A reduction in those genes:
“Other changes reduced the frequency of harmful traits, such as those that are interpreted today as: Reduced risk of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia…” https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-reveals-natural-selection-has-accelerated-recent-human-evolution
What the above findings tend to suggest:
(1) It’s not your imagination that black people, on average, seem less intelligent.
(2) It’s not your imagination that more black people seem to have more mental health issues:
“Compared to non-Hispanic White individuals, non-Hispanic Black individuals had a significantly higher prevalence of SSDs [schizophrenia spectrum disorders] (4.1% vs. 1.2%; adjusted odds ratio=3.49, 95% CI=1.37, 8.91) and psychotic symptoms (9.3% vs. 4.9%; adjusted odds ratio=2.04, 95% CI=1.15, 3.63), and non-Hispanic multiracial individuals had a significantly higher prevalence of SSDs (5.6%; adjusted odds ratio=4.59, 95% CI=1.53, 13.76).” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40887946/
(3) It’s not “all racism” or all “a legacy of slavery” that explains the fact that black people have lower IQ and more mental health problems.
(4) I want it be perfectly clear why this matters:
Current racial groups, like Caucasians and Africans developed within the last say, 10,000 years. Current Europeans come from genetic populations that haven’t had much interbreeding with Africans for at least 10,000 years. If there has been “directional selection” for IQ amongst Europeans in the last 10,000 years, then it occurred after European’s ancestors separated from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans. It implies that Europeans have evolved greater intelligence than sub-Saharan Africans since those two racial groups separated. It implies that European populations have more instances of genes that are correlated with higher IQ people. In plain terms, it means Europeans are, on average, smarter than sub-Saharan Africans due to their genetics. Biologically speaking, whether you want to call this “superior” or not depends on what environment you find those genes in. It appears those genes are not “superior” in a stone age or neolithic environment, like sub-Saharan Africa up until a couple of hundred years ago. Higher IQ is superior in a modern, industrial world.
Why The Assumption That “Intelligence is always useful in any environment” May Not Be True
In the past, I had doubted that there could be significant average genetic-based intelligence differences between races. My assumption was that intelligence is always useful, whether one lives in a stone age society, or an industrial society. This would mean that Darwinian evolution would always favor increased intelligence for human beings.
I am no longer certain that is true. First, Charles Murray’s Book “The Bell Curve” suggested to me there are differences in IQ between races. Now, David Reich’s work suggests that there was “directional selection” for the genes that correlate with higher IQ in the Bronze age of Eurasia, within the last 5,000 years. Regions of the world like Africa did not go through the Bronze Age, which strongly suggests that sub-Saharan Africans did not face the same selective pressure on the genes for IQ. (It’s just barely possible some other world-wide effect caused directional selection for IQ, for all the geographically isolated peoples of the world 5,000 years ago, but not likely.)
How do I reconcile these facts with my assumption that natural selection would always select for intelligence, because of my assumption that intelligence is always a benefit, regardless of technology level? I cannot explain it at this point, but, here is a hypothesis/speculation that I hope some scientist can test someday.
Intelligence is always a benefit for an adult human being. I am not so sure that intelligence is always a benefit for children, toddlers, or infants. It may be that a child with greater physiological capacity for intelligence (a bigger brain, or more neural connections in his brain, or whatever) expends more energy as a child than a child with lower intelligence capacity. In a stone age environment, where calories are very scarce, it might be that the children born with greater genetic capacity for intelligence have a lower probability of reaching adulthood than children with less genetic capacity.
Intelligence matters much less to a child’s survival. He is dependent on his parents and elders to a great degree. If the more intelligent child requires more calories than the less intelligent, perhaps he is more likely to die in childhood.
The phrase “intelligence is always a benefit” should perhaps be modified to: “Intelligence is always a benefit for an adult human being.” For children, the situation might be different.
Once the Bronze Age occurred, there was greater surplus food, and more children started surviving to adulthood, including more children with greater genetic capacity for intelligence. As adults, they were then more successful than less intelligent people, and were able to survive and reproduce in greater numbers.
Also, the mechanism of childhood mortality for more intelligent children might have been something else besides food. Maybe there is a negative correlation between genes for intelligence and genes for, say, immunity to disease. Maybe more intelligent children were less likely to survive in a stone age environment for some socio-cultural reason unique to stone age cultures. (Maybe smarter children were regarded as threatening to the tribe and were more likely to be killed or abandoned.)
Ancient African genes do not appear to have been tested for correlation to IQ yet. That is the next logical step. We need to confirm that the same directional selection for intelligence did not occur in Africans. (This would help confirm if it was a result of a Bronze Age environment in Eurasia, or something else. Sub-Saharan Africa would seem like a natural control.)
I had decided that IQ was at least partly genetic, and that the averages differed between the races, by about ten to fifteen years ago. But, I was never really sure. I never wanted to say too much about it because I’m not a scientist. I take great care in what positions I take, and to think through the evidence as carefully as I can.
In her article rejecting racism as a form of collectivism, Ayn Rand said:
“Even if it were proved — which it is not — that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race — and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.” (“Racism”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/racism/)
It is certainly true that individual sub-Saharan Africans can buck the trend of their race, genetically. Population genetics is the study of populations, not individuals. I also don’t think genetics is 100% of the picture when it comes to intelligence. Your family and social environment growing up also seem to make a difference. The choices you make, especially in late childhood to early adulthood, make a difference.
At this point, however, I don’t think the first part of Ayn Rand’s quote can be considered open for debate any longer. As the environmentalists like to say with global warming, the science is settled. When a population geneticist from a leftist-captured institution like Harvard is admitting what David Reich is admitting, the science on the subject must be really strong. Today, I think the question of race and IQ, and the average genetic differences between the races, is largely proved.