>with a rejection rate for Blacks on the preinduction Army General Classification Test of about 30%, compared with 3% for Whites.
This is the key point that undermines the whole article. And the rejection rate disparity doesn't even count people who self-rejected due to expected failure.
I mean cmon, "no disparity in the IQs of the children of black and white olympiad finalists" doesn't show anything at all.
So if you have a normally distributed set and remove the bottom 30% you get a increase in the average of .5sigma half a standard deviation. So basically you'd expect those soldiers to have an IQ of 93, not 85. Which would explain most of the gap disappearing. But more than that since some were north african, and we assume some rejection of the bottom in that group, we'd expect something even higher say 95. Seems like a small N very selected study. That's not a problem, but I'm not surprised we've never seen a replication.
This study looked at IQ of children of white father and black mothers vs black fathers and white mothers and found that children of white mothers and black fathers had an IQ 9 points higher than than those of black mothers and white fathers-
Hu reanalyzed this data and found a smaller IQ difference (4-7 points), but the difference was still present. Many people have seen this data to support the hypothesis that environment impacts IQ significantly. However, it might not be environment. Firstly it could be mate selection in which white women select higher IQ black men than white men select black women or something. But it could also be an IQ effect from mitochondrial DNA, which no one really understands.
Anyway, the best studied black population for IQ is American blacks. They have around 16% white admixture, and the vast majority of that comes from white male ancestry. It is possible that white female ancestry has some kind of an IQ impact throgh MtDNA.
There is no IQ effect from mitochondrial DNA. There is an IQ effect from the X-chromosome - it's a gigantic chromosome, and boys only have one and ONLY from their mother. Girls are however 50/50 in terms of their TWO X-chromosomes.
Hm, looks like a replication of sorts was published in OpenPsych in 2022, which looked at various datasets and wasn't able to find consistent support for the alleged effect:
Hu’s analysis was crafted to test the hypothesis that the mother’s impact on Iq was environmental. Thus, his analysis of interracial families had an important wrinkle- he only looked at children living with both married parents. He excluded children of separated couples and single parents, which would have been an equal n size as the sample he analyzed. If you see the supplemental notes, he does say that in the 1974 data set, the iq gap remains large at age 7 between white mothers vs black mothers if you look at unmarried mothers. I don’t think his analysis is invalid, it’s just to test a separate hypothesis of familial environmental impact dependent on mother’s race. For purposes of understanding the mother’s race genetic impact on IQ, I don’t think hu’s analysis is that relevant.
First, we are not comparing black with white. we are comparing half-whites with whites. An of the half-whites, 30% were probably white too. So we are comparing 1/3 non-whites with whites. That's not a projected gap of 15 points but just 5-6 points.
There are also several layers of selection that went on:
A. black servicemen candidates that didn't meet a certain IQ threshold were taken out of the pool (this we know for certain)
B. The provider quality of potential partner had to meet a certain level, maybe higher with a black partner? So maybe a white private maybe an OK partner, but if he's black, a sergeant or even a lieutenant is better?
C. Interracial kids had a higher probability to be relegated to orphanage or secondary adoption, and then may not hve appeared in this study? Here it is probable that smart kids had a higher maternal retention rate.
Selection processes are known to play a role: in the recent ABCD study of Jordan Lasker and Emil Kierkegaard, full blooded Subsaharan descent kids whose parents were apparently recent African immigrants had a significantly better IQ than children/adolescents with 20% europid white admixture who represented the indigineous African-Americans.
In the UK, children of recent African immigrants GCSE scores were almost on par with that of average British whites. And so on...
That on it's own wouldn't close the gaps though, assuming the AGCT standard was the same for both groups. The 30% to 3% rejection ratio implies an initial IQ gap of 20 points(SD 15) between groups shrinking to 14 points after rejections. The hereditarian expectation would be a gap of about 7 points in the half-German children(regression towards the mean could push that up a bit but being raised in similar environments might push the gap down a bit).
However, there's still two steps of selection after that: who knocks up whom, and who marries/is allowed to marry whom. And if different standards are applied to different groups, it's possible for gaps to disappear or even reverse.
The way it works in experimental science is you start off with anecdotal evidence and then try to remove the confounders. I would classify Eyferth as good anecdotal evidence. But it is just one piece of such evidence (while there are many others lined against it). And there very reasonable queries from very reasonable biostatisticians like Jordan Lasker who are in the running for the second coming of Ronald Fisher. My personal view is that ABCD and Philadelphia studies on admixture are much larger and better controlled.
"It is too bad that the Eyferth study is the product of a unique historical moment, meaning that it can’t be replicated,"
Of course it can be replicated. The U.S. has based troops in Germany for 80 years and countless half-black half-German children have been born, such as the late Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli and numerous members of the U.S. men's national soccer team who have participated for the U.S. in the World Cup (such as Malik Tillman, Jermaine Jones, John Brooks, and Timothy Chandler). U.S. men's national team soccer coaches traditionally like black nature and German nurture.
The Eyferth study could have been replicated at any point in the 65 years since 1961. Sadly, I've never heard of a replication.
Exactly - why repeat a study that settles the field definitively once and for all, lol? Particularly as its author, Prof Klaus Eyferth later showed such sympathies for the left fringe (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition)? So it kinds of fits his profile. The Chat-GPT translation also doesn't have any acknowledgements - yet I can't imagine that Klaus Eyferth did all the identification, selection and testing on his own, with 400+ kids...
Richard, you can't have a post that says "Shut up about race and IQ" and then continually post race and IQ posts. You're one of the least morally/logically consistent people i've ever seen
The "Shut up" post is about people who fixate on IQ gaps and make HBD central to both their thinking about political issues and their engagement with others on political issues. Discussing--in a balanced way--a study that bears upon race/IQ is not the same as that.
The point was that a Right that is loud and proud about their views on racial IQ gaps is a Right that is less likely to prevail politically. The point was not that discussing race/IQ is completely verboten--that's the left-wing view.
Very fascinating story and study, despite the fact I find the larger topic to be pretty boring.
The issue, as I see it, isn't that we shouldn't expect to see genetic differences in intelligence between groups with different genetic backgrounds/makeup. Of course that will be the case. The issue is the confidence people have in assuming one's genetic makeup simply be looking at them.
While it's kind of obnoxious to point out, it is a fact that 'race' (in the simplistic sense that humans use it, which is based almost entirely on how one looks) is not an external DNA test., but indeed a construct. In America, for example, we had the one-drop rule and even had a term for an individual who had one black great-grandparent. Descendants of mix-race people from over 200 years ago are all over our country now.
The fact that one's appearance only works as a proxy for their true genetic make-up, to me, makes the entire conversation seem farcical at times. It's easy to say that even though there is nothing about the knowledge that 'genetics differences in IQ between different races' that is even the least bit scary to me.
I think it should be possible to replicate if you look for similar circumstances, e.g. British soldiers stationed in Kenya fathering children with local women:
The Freust and Hu analysis of ABCD data looked at IQ based on percentage of black admixture vs european admixture of 11,000 children in the US (about 2100 blacks). I think this study found a difference of around -4 IQ points between black identified people who happened to have 50% european ancestry vs. biracial people who had a white and a black parent who had around 50% european ancestry. Thus, there is perhaps evidence that biracial IQ is for some reason slightly higher due to recent mate selection.
I find post-WWII Europe fascinating to read, but did this 1960s study take into account of rape by the Western Allies? This was a largely looked over feature of occupation given the Cold War politics of the time period, but recent academic works, like Miriam Gebhardt, have come out that describe the extent of occupation resulting in many out-of-wedlock children in Western Germany. There were also many North African soldiers for example had taken part in heinous atrocities in Italy during the war.
I just had a look - the biggest question we have in discussing this paper are the selection methods used for the study. As I read the English translation of the study, it was exactly here that the paper was "thin on the ground". Is THAT due to the ChatGPT English translation or is the original German version just as bad? Could someone post the original German Methods Section in Full?
These children would be baby boomers. Has anyone followed up to find out what their later educational attainment and acheived socioeconomic status was?
Lately, I’ve been reading a few articles about relationships between German women and Black soldiers in post-WW2 Germany so your post is a touching coincidence.
It’s actually quite remarkable that women in their early to mid-20’s who grew up in a racist regime which groomed them in their schooldays to believe they were « superior aryans » mingled quite easily with Black people who in turn thought they were better treated in the heart of what was once the murderous racist regime in history than in the United States ! With more than 3’000 mixed-race kids it means that for a decade, there was at least one birth per day of a half-Black child in Germany !
I’d like to dig deeper into their fates and how many girls became war brides despite the legal and social restrictions against their marriage. Most famous example I can cite off the top of my head is Ronald K. Noble. Born in 1957, New Jersey, to a Black father and German mother, who grew up to become not just a high-ranking DOJ official but also the General-Secretary of Interpol !
As for IQ, I don’t pay much attention to it. It’s the most abstract overused metric available and frankly it’s overrated. Chanda Chisala, a right-wing Zambian immigrant in the US, wrote a series of articles on Unz.com that completely rip apart the whole nonsense about the « heritability » of IQ.
I don’t propose to replace IQ, I propose to ignore it altogether. Other social metrics play a much better role to evaluate progress from an ethnic group (e.g. Teenage births, homicide rate, imprisonment rate, unemployment rate, etc.)
These might make sense for groups, but not much of individuals. Hence heritability cannot be determined.
>Born in 1957, New Jersey, to a Black father and German mother, who grew up to become not just a high-ranking DOJ official but also the General-Secretary of Interpol !
If that person somehow avoided racism, why can't we just extend that no-racism to all countries?
GSS records steady decrease of share of Americans saying their opposition to interracial marriage and the idea of genetic differences. Shouldn't people born in 1957 experience more racism than people in ~2000?
That seems more like a completely different question but there’s no question that in the US racist prejudices were definitely more prevalent in 1957 compared to 2000 just as they were much more entrenched in 1914. Mentalities were clearly changing in the 50’s due to desegregation, besides NJ is among the few States that never banned interracial mariages.
>> James Flynn argued that this is not the case, and if anything African Americans who fathered children in Germany were below average for their group. He points to a 1947 military study that looked at the relationship between cognitive test scores of black troops in Germany and whether they were involved in serious offenses, including contracting venereal diseases. Men who scored between 70 and 78 on the AGCT, the army’s general cognitive-aptitude test, were most likely to get in trouble, while those below 70 or over 100 were better behaved.
I feel like this is a bit of an unfair comparison to make. There are *so* many more "serious offenses" than just getting STDs, and we're including all of that in the IQ comparison (things like theft and other general criminal like behavior). We know that general criminal behavior of this sort is going to be negatively correlated with IQ, so I don't think it's fair to use this as the IQ estimate for the population of soldiers that fathered children out of wedlock.
>with a rejection rate for Blacks on the preinduction Army General Classification Test of about 30%, compared with 3% for Whites.
This is the key point that undermines the whole article. And the rejection rate disparity doesn't even count people who self-rejected due to expected failure.
I mean cmon, "no disparity in the IQs of the children of black and white olympiad finalists" doesn't show anything at all.
So if you have a normally distributed set and remove the bottom 30% you get a increase in the average of .5sigma half a standard deviation. So basically you'd expect those soldiers to have an IQ of 93, not 85. Which would explain most of the gap disappearing. But more than that since some were north african, and we assume some rejection of the bottom in that group, we'd expect something even higher say 95. Seems like a small N very selected study. That's not a problem, but I'm not surprised we've never seen a replication.
This study looked at IQ of children of white father and black mothers vs black fathers and white mothers and found that children of white mothers and black fathers had an IQ 9 points higher than than those of black mothers and white fathers-
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01066706
Hu reanalyzed this data and found a smaller IQ difference (4-7 points), but the difference was still present. Many people have seen this data to support the hypothesis that environment impacts IQ significantly. However, it might not be environment. Firstly it could be mate selection in which white women select higher IQ black men than white men select black women or something. But it could also be an IQ effect from mitochondrial DNA, which no one really understands.
Anyway, the best studied black population for IQ is American blacks. They have around 16% white admixture, and the vast majority of that comes from white male ancestry. It is possible that white female ancestry has some kind of an IQ impact throgh MtDNA.
There is no IQ effect from mitochondrial DNA. There is an IQ effect from the X-chromosome - it's a gigantic chromosome, and boys only have one and ONLY from their mother. Girls are however 50/50 in terms of their TWO X-chromosomes.
X chromosome is larger than average, but not gigantic, it has about 5.1% of human DNA. (The largest chromosome is called 1st).
Girls' advantage is too large to be explained only by X-chromosome.
So you could check to see if the difference is the same for boys vs girls. If it's smaller for girls, that suggests the X is playing a role?
Hm, looks like a replication of sorts was published in OpenPsych in 2022, which looked at various datasets and wasn't able to find consistent support for the alleged effect:
https://openpsych.net/files/papers/Hu_2022a.pdf
Hu’s analysis was crafted to test the hypothesis that the mother’s impact on Iq was environmental. Thus, his analysis of interracial families had an important wrinkle- he only looked at children living with both married parents. He excluded children of separated couples and single parents, which would have been an equal n size as the sample he analyzed. If you see the supplemental notes, he does say that in the 1974 data set, the iq gap remains large at age 7 between white mothers vs black mothers if you look at unmarried mothers. I don’t think his analysis is invalid, it’s just to test a separate hypothesis of familial environmental impact dependent on mother’s race. For purposes of understanding the mother’s race genetic impact on IQ, I don’t think hu’s analysis is that relevant.
Because of regression to the mean, you'd expect them have phenotypic +.5SD and genotypic +.25SD
First, we are not comparing black with white. we are comparing half-whites with whites. An of the half-whites, 30% were probably white too. So we are comparing 1/3 non-whites with whites. That's not a projected gap of 15 points but just 5-6 points.
There are also several layers of selection that went on:
A. black servicemen candidates that didn't meet a certain IQ threshold were taken out of the pool (this we know for certain)
B. The provider quality of potential partner had to meet a certain level, maybe higher with a black partner? So maybe a white private maybe an OK partner, but if he's black, a sergeant or even a lieutenant is better?
C. Interracial kids had a higher probability to be relegated to orphanage or secondary adoption, and then may not hve appeared in this study? Here it is probable that smart kids had a higher maternal retention rate.
Selection processes are known to play a role: in the recent ABCD study of Jordan Lasker and Emil Kierkegaard, full blooded Subsaharan descent kids whose parents were apparently recent African immigrants had a significantly better IQ than children/adolescents with 20% europid white admixture who represented the indigineous African-Americans.
In the UK, children of recent African immigrants GCSE scores were almost on par with that of average British whites. And so on...
UK's GCSE scores aren't IQ
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/do-gcse-results-refute-hereditarianism/comments
I was discussing it in case they were strongly correlating with IQ. They did 30+ years ago, by the way. It has somewhat changed in the meantime.
That on it's own wouldn't close the gaps though, assuming the AGCT standard was the same for both groups. The 30% to 3% rejection ratio implies an initial IQ gap of 20 points(SD 15) between groups shrinking to 14 points after rejections. The hereditarian expectation would be a gap of about 7 points in the half-German children(regression towards the mean could push that up a bit but being raised in similar environments might push the gap down a bit).
However, there's still two steps of selection after that: who knocks up whom, and who marries/is allowed to marry whom. And if different standards are applied to different groups, it's possible for gaps to disappear or even reverse.
The way it works in experimental science is you start off with anecdotal evidence and then try to remove the confounders. I would classify Eyferth as good anecdotal evidence. But it is just one piece of such evidence (while there are many others lined against it). And there very reasonable queries from very reasonable biostatisticians like Jordan Lasker who are in the running for the second coming of Ronald Fisher. My personal view is that ABCD and Philadelphia studies on admixture are much larger and better controlled.
If I take a large group of men and women, and remove all the people under 5'7", the men will still on average be taller than the women.
"It is too bad that the Eyferth study is the product of a unique historical moment, meaning that it can’t be replicated,"
Of course it can be replicated. The U.S. has based troops in Germany for 80 years and countless half-black half-German children have been born, such as the late Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli and numerous members of the U.S. men's national soccer team who have participated for the U.S. in the World Cup (such as Malik Tillman, Jermaine Jones, John Brooks, and Timothy Chandler). U.S. men's national team soccer coaches traditionally like black nature and German nurture.
The Eyferth study could have been replicated at any point in the 65 years since 1961. Sadly, I've never heard of a replication.
Exactly - why repeat a study that settles the field definitively once and for all, lol? Particularly as its author, Prof Klaus Eyferth later showed such sympathies for the left fringe (Ausserparlamentarische Opposition)? So it kinds of fits his profile. The Chat-GPT translation also doesn't have any acknowledgements - yet I can't imagine that Klaus Eyferth did all the identification, selection and testing on his own, with 400+ kids...
Richard, you can't have a post that says "Shut up about race and IQ" and then continually post race and IQ posts. You're one of the least morally/logically consistent people i've ever seen
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq
The "Shut up" post is about people who fixate on IQ gaps and make HBD central to both their thinking about political issues and their engagement with others on political issues. Discussing--in a balanced way--a study that bears upon race/IQ is not the same as that.
The point was that a Right that is loud and proud about their views on racial IQ gaps is a Right that is less likely to prevail politically. The point was not that discussing race/IQ is completely verboten--that's the left-wing view.
He's been talking non-stop about it.. this article, the korean adoption, nathan cofnas. He's a tremendous hypocrite.
Advice columns are usually advice the writer wants to give themselves.
Very fascinating story and study, despite the fact I find the larger topic to be pretty boring.
The issue, as I see it, isn't that we shouldn't expect to see genetic differences in intelligence between groups with different genetic backgrounds/makeup. Of course that will be the case. The issue is the confidence people have in assuming one's genetic makeup simply be looking at them.
While it's kind of obnoxious to point out, it is a fact that 'race' (in the simplistic sense that humans use it, which is based almost entirely on how one looks) is not an external DNA test., but indeed a construct. In America, for example, we had the one-drop rule and even had a term for an individual who had one black great-grandparent. Descendants of mix-race people from over 200 years ago are all over our country now.
The fact that one's appearance only works as a proxy for their true genetic make-up, to me, makes the entire conversation seem farcical at times. It's easy to say that even though there is nothing about the knowledge that 'genetics differences in IQ between different races' that is even the least bit scary to me.
I think it should be possible to replicate if you look for similar circumstances, e.g. British soldiers stationed in Kenya fathering children with local women:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/searching-for-soldier-dad
Apparently these kids actually get discriminated against, so it's sort of perfect as a test of genes vs environment.
The Freust and Hu analysis of ABCD data looked at IQ based on percentage of black admixture vs european admixture of 11,000 children in the US (about 2100 blacks). I think this study found a difference of around -4 IQ points between black identified people who happened to have 50% european ancestry vs. biracial people who had a white and a black parent who had around 50% european ancestry. Thus, there is perhaps evidence that biracial IQ is for some reason slightly higher due to recent mate selection.
I find post-WWII Europe fascinating to read, but did this 1960s study take into account of rape by the Western Allies? This was a largely looked over feature of occupation given the Cold War politics of the time period, but recent academic works, like Miriam Gebhardt, have come out that describe the extent of occupation resulting in many out-of-wedlock children in Western Germany. There were also many North African soldiers for example had taken part in heinous atrocities in Italy during the war.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/thoughts-on-thoughts-on-hbd:
>The Eyferth study, which produced results that were likely to be strongly impacted by selection and for which low power precluded interpretation.
Richard, you are a confusing guy. Didn't you tell us to shut up about race and IQ.
I just had a look - the biggest question we have in discussing this paper are the selection methods used for the study. As I read the English translation of the study, it was exactly here that the paper was "thin on the ground". Is THAT due to the ChatGPT English translation or is the original German version just as bad? Could someone post the original German Methods Section in Full?
Opponents of heredarianism might favor it, but if this study is not a fluke, it raises a question, why it was so in 1961 but they cannot do it now
These children would be baby boomers. Has anyone followed up to find out what their later educational attainment and acheived socioeconomic status was?
Lately, I’ve been reading a few articles about relationships between German women and Black soldiers in post-WW2 Germany so your post is a touching coincidence.
It’s actually quite remarkable that women in their early to mid-20’s who grew up in a racist regime which groomed them in their schooldays to believe they were « superior aryans » mingled quite easily with Black people who in turn thought they were better treated in the heart of what was once the murderous racist regime in history than in the United States ! With more than 3’000 mixed-race kids it means that for a decade, there was at least one birth per day of a half-Black child in Germany !
I’d like to dig deeper into their fates and how many girls became war brides despite the legal and social restrictions against their marriage. Most famous example I can cite off the top of my head is Ronald K. Noble. Born in 1957, New Jersey, to a Black father and German mother, who grew up to become not just a high-ranking DOJ official but also the General-Secretary of Interpol !
As for IQ, I don’t pay much attention to it. It’s the most abstract overused metric available and frankly it’s overrated. Chanda Chisala, a right-wing Zambian immigrant in the US, wrote a series of articles on Unz.com that completely rip apart the whole nonsense about the « heritability » of IQ.
What do you propose to replace IQ with? School grades?
I don’t propose to replace IQ, I propose to ignore it altogether. Other social metrics play a much better role to evaluate progress from an ethnic group (e.g. Teenage births, homicide rate, imprisonment rate, unemployment rate, etc.)
These might make sense for groups, but not much of individuals. Hence heritability cannot be determined.
>Born in 1957, New Jersey, to a Black father and German mother, who grew up to become not just a high-ranking DOJ official but also the General-Secretary of Interpol !
If that person somehow avoided racism, why can't we just extend that no-racism to all countries?
GSS records steady decrease of share of Americans saying their opposition to interracial marriage and the idea of genetic differences. Shouldn't people born in 1957 experience more racism than people in ~2000?
That seems more like a completely different question but there’s no question that in the US racist prejudices were definitely more prevalent in 1957 compared to 2000 just as they were much more entrenched in 1914. Mentalities were clearly changing in the 50’s due to desegregation, besides NJ is among the few States that never banned interracial mariages.
>> James Flynn argued that this is not the case, and if anything African Americans who fathered children in Germany were below average for their group. He points to a 1947 military study that looked at the relationship between cognitive test scores of black troops in Germany and whether they were involved in serious offenses, including contracting venereal diseases. Men who scored between 70 and 78 on the AGCT, the army’s general cognitive-aptitude test, were most likely to get in trouble, while those below 70 or over 100 were better behaved.
I feel like this is a bit of an unfair comparison to make. There are *so* many more "serious offenses" than just getting STDs, and we're including all of that in the IQ comparison (things like theft and other general criminal like behavior). We know that general criminal behavior of this sort is going to be negatively correlated with IQ, so I don't think it's fair to use this as the IQ estimate for the population of soldiers that fathered children out of wedlock.