THE CAMBRIDGE DEBATE

-- THE PROPOSITION

Ten Arguments for the Existence of Racial Differences in Intelligence and Why to Welcome Race Realism

Gonville Hall Debating Society, Tuesday, January 28, 1997

CHRIS BRAND PROPOSES

This House believes that there are deep-seated racial differences in intelligence.
[ ] passages to be omitted if timing out

Mr President, I owe Cambridge a debt. During 1996, I achieved a certain national notoriety for making what I call realistic observations about race, sex, genes, IQ and paedophilia. (Contrary to what one commonly hears from the BBC and todays geneticists, I believe people differ genetically. By contrast, just yesterday a lady intellectual on BBCs Start the Week denied that the thousandfold difference in homicide rate between Reykjavik and Chicago might arise even partly from genetic differences which anyhow, she added for good measure, simply did not exist.) As a result of upsetting the new Thought Police, the politically correct, my book, The g Factor, was withdrawn by my censorious publisher, John Wiley & Sons (New York and Chichester); and I am suspended from teaching and administration at the University of Edinburgh. Yet student societies at the University of Cambridge have twice invited me to address them and even though I am myself an Oxford man! I am grateful to you, Mr President[, and to this Societys Senior President, Professor Stephen Hawking, for all you have done to make possible this debate between Mr Darcus Howe and myself].

Ironically, when last asked to talk in Cambridge on race and IQ, I declined. I said it would be irresponsible to talk to a non-specialist audience on race without having first covered the topic of IQ itself in reasonable depth. [Hence I addressed the Cambridge Scientific Society on the importance of intelligence instead.] This year is different. I now have no alternative but to present and support the views for which I have been vilified. However,[ thanks to a computer-literate former Edinburgh University Psychology student actually the son of a Cambridge Head Porter] I will be presenting this address on the Internet and will there be able to indicate some of the sober academic detail that I must needs omit tonight. I will also gladly put up Darcus Howe's address should he wish me to do so. I will leave the Website address with you, Mr President[; alternatively, the site will readily be found by using standard Net Search procedures].

Whether there are deep-seated group differences in any important human qualities is today an excruciatingly delicate topic in the West. Two years ago, Sir Roger Bannister, the first four-minute-miler, himself a medical man of distinction, provoked media frenzy in Britain by mentioning the obvious truth that Black people are superior to Whites in athletics. [Blacks excel at most sports, even if not at swimming or rowing or rugby or ping-pong.] Last year, my own repetition of the seventy-year old observation that Whites are 15 points ahead of Blacks on IQ tests was what most commonly interested British newshounds. Following the withdrawal of my own book, US Wiley soon cancelled a book by Arthur Jensen while this pre-eminent IQ scholar was writing the books last two chapters on race.

Yet what happens when my views do actually vault the censors and reach the pubic domain? In September, my article for young Blacks -- explaining that I wanted relevant education and suitable marital arrangements for them -- went out to 10,000 readers of the smart Black magazine downlow (music for the hip hop nation). [For good measure I also put it up on the Internet and advertised the existence of the site to about a further 1,000 people.] Well, I did not receive a single letter or e-mail or phone call of protest. Whoever wants to censor me and Art Jensen, it is not Black people, even Blacks who read Black power magazines [that play up to full-blooded Black racists like Louis Farrakhan and Ice Cube].

I will now address the factual question that confronts this House tonight; but I will return to identify the true source of the demand that deep-seated race differences be denied.

[The factual question about racial differences is one that would have surprised many of our cultural forebears. The Hebrews of the Bible were certainly nationalistic and what would doubtless today be called racist. Yet the Jews did not base themselves on any race realism about the lasting qualities of other peoples from whom they kept themselves apart when not trying to fight them. The Greeks, too, did not have any racial theory. They held a dim view of women, of the British tribes (one of Aristotles few mistakes...), and of their slaves of whatever ethnic origins. However, perhaps inspired by what they knew of Africa (principally via Egypt) and perhaps tamed by their own preferred form of love, paedophilia they were not race realists. It was the Muslims whose wide ranging conquests furnished their scholars with much anecdotal evidence for the racial theory that Negroes were different from Arabs -- having a longer penis, great merriment and less intelligence. However, Muslim scholars failed to develop systematic ways of measuring intelligence; and their reputation for scientific accuracy is tarnished by their scholars also reporting low intelligence among the Slavic peoples who have largely normal scores on modern IQ tests.]

Serious race-theorizing [only] developed with the European Enlightenment and the arrival of White missionaries and explorers in Africa itself. Soon, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Richard Burton (who translated the Karma Sutra), Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Francis Galton, H. G. Wells (ex-PM Michael Foot's hero) and Winston Churchill were among the many who accepted that Black-White differences in mentality were substantial. The arrival of IQ testing from France after 1910 allowed the first serious demonstration of the correctness of this view. At the same time, the testers found other interesting results for racial and ethnic groups: Jewish people reliably have IQs which, averaging 117, are markedly superior to those of other Caucasian peoples; and East Asian peoples have average IQs of around IQ 105-110. [These differences are largely as Galton estimated them in 1869 and in line with the frequency with which Nobel Prizes are awarded to people from the different groups: for example, Jewish people (3% of the US population) account for 27% of US Nobel Laureates.] [As Darwin put it (1871, The Descent of Man): The races differ....in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct....] [ Is this game only for White men or does everybody play? Professor Steve Jones (who holds the Galton Chair of Genetics while apparently doubting the heritability of IQ) recounts how he once quite easily persuaded an audience of South African Xhosa that they were the intellectual equals of Whites. To his dismay, he was then questioned: Surely he would not deny that Black people were brighter than Bushmen?] What twentieth-century psychometry has achieved is reliable measurement allowing objective testing of racial theorizing.

Are measurable racial differences deep-seated (most probably genetic) (contrary to the infamous 1951 declaration by the United Nations Organization)? There are {ten} main lines of relevant evidence.

1. Economic

Poverty and low social class do not provide much explanatory help. The Jews arrived in America in poverty from pogrom-torn Russian and Poland and nevertheless scored well immediately on the early mental tests and soon prospered. What happens if we match Black and White children today for the income of their parents? Doing this reduces the childrens usual 15-point IQ gap by only 3 points.

2. Medical & educational

What of other environmental features as indexed by the mothers level of education, lack of pregnancy complications (e.g. because of drug addiction) and the early health of her child? Again, matching Black and White three-year-old children on these variables narrows the IQ gap by only one or two IQ points.

3. Paternal deprivation

Father-absence has often been ventured by social science as an explanation for the problems of Black children with delinquency and school failure. But the Black-White difference has grown no greater through the twentieth century despite Black family structure -- once more stable than that of Whites -- collapsing from 1970 into what is now the Black norm of single-parenting.

4. Alienation

What about the handicap of growing up as part of a different culture, speaking a non-standard form of English and experiencing hostility from the dominant culture because of ones difference? Fortunately for scholars, this problem does not afflict Black people alone. In Britain, Pakistani children are bilingual, have a different religion and sexual code from their hosts, and experience more intense racial hostility (often based on jealousy of their family's success). Despite these handicaps, the IQ of Pakistani children has never been a problem, being an entirely normal 100 in children of families who have been in Britain for five years or longer; and, perhaps because of hard work, Pakistani schoolchildren perform a little better than do other British children in mid-adolescence. Still worse for the alienation thesis, children who grow up deaf have entirely normal IQs on non-verbal tests: mainly born to hearing parents, these children grow up in a misunderstanding environment in which even their nearest and dearest are often cross with them and label them as stupid; yet their IQs are at normal Caucasian levels. Perhaps worst of all for the alienation thesis, the Japanese of California, after experiencing a century of racial prejudice (which banned them from churches, swimming pools and trade unions) found themselves cordially detested after the Battle of Pearl Harbour and put into relocation camps in the Eastern Californian desert. Subsequently they were released on condition that they did not return to their ruined homes and businesses but went eastwards instead. The result of all this racial discrimination is well known: the American Japanese are over-represented in all of the professions, have a crime rate almost as low as that of the Jews, and have been awarded multi-million dollar sums for the violation of their civil rights in the 1940s.

5. Psychometric

In the 1970s, it became fashionable to suppose that IQ tests must be somehow unfair to Black children. Yet no criterion emerged by which this claim could be demonstrated except of course the very B-W difference which the unfairness theory was itself meant to explain. IQ tests have the same psychometric properties (reliabilities, correlations between their component parts) for Blacks as for Whites of similar intelligence; and, far from homing in unfairly on special Black weaknesses, the tests actually over-predict how well Blacks will do when assigned to educational courses or jobs. [Some psychological tests are better measures of intelligence than others they correlate higher with other mental tests; and some psychological tests yield relatively better scores for Black children; but they are not the same tests Black children do better at just those tests (rote memory, simple reaction times, bead threading) that are not principally measures of general intelligence.]

6. Psycho-social engineering

Head Start programmes were long held by the media to be likely to discredit hereditarianism about the race difference. But even beyond-the-norm spending of $10,000 dollars annually per child was not enough to achieve lasting IQ gains and normally only those gains that could be expected from teaching the test (i.e. from nursery school children becoming familiar with the types of materials and problems used by mental testers). [After 30 years of effort in the States, mainstream scholars conclude that Head Start programmes have a slightly improving effect on delinquency rates (presumably because of the kindly atmosphere provided for pre-schoolers) but not the long-term effects on intelligence and achievement that were once eagerly anticipated.]

7. Caucasoid genetic admixture

Many US Blacks have a degree of Caucasian genetic admixture which can be estimated in groups by the frequency of occurrence of the Duffy gene a gene found in all Caucasians and in virtually no pure Blacks. In the one study to date, Californian Blacks (of whom 23% have the Duffy gene) had an average IQ of 90 on US Army tests; by contrast, Georgian Blacks (of whom only 11% had the gene) scored around 80. Likewise, testing in Africa itself where Caucasian admixture is even less yields IQ levels of around 70. [Lately, testing in Soweto yielded a mean Black IQ of 69; and testing in Israel of Black Jews from Ethiopia found an IQ of 70. The most recent result was provided by a Black psychologist in Zimbabwe: he found 200 representative Zimbabwean children scored around IQ 67 whereas White inner-city children in London averaged 95. By contrast, Vietnamese and North Korean refugee children adopted into Belgian families had IQs of 110 in 1994 ten points higher than modern Belgian norms.

[ 8. Within-group heritability

Within each of the three main racial groups -- within Whites, Blacks and East Asians identical twins are substantially more similar to each other than are fraternal twins (who share on average only 50% of human genetic variations). It would be surprising and require some special explanation if differences that were principally genetic when occurring within races turned out to be largely environmental when happening to occur between races. (Needless to say, at present no such explanation has been advanced, let alone vindicated.)

9. In-breeding depression B-W difference

An indication that a trait is inherited on dominant genes is provided when trait levels are reduced by cousin marriage a phenomenon called inbreeding depression. Some mental tests show more inbreeding depression than others, and it is mainly these tests which show the biggest Black-White differences in performance levels: poor Black performance occurs on just those tests where dominant genes are influential. ]

10. Adoption studies

Systematic proof of the importance of environmental factors in causing racial differences has been sought in particular from two major studies. In one, the children borne to Black US Army soldiers by German girls from 1946 to 1953 were tested as they grew up with their White mothers in occupied Germany. At around age 10, these mixed-race children had IQs of 97 no different from the White children of such occupation unions. However, the Army statuses of the Black fathers were largely unknown; and it is likely that German girls would have preferred those soldiers having higher levels of status and income making them quite unrepresentative of Black soldiers in general , a higher percentage of whom would already have been excluded from Army service because of low IQ.

The second adoption study is more recent and involves Black, mixed-race and White children in Minnesota who were all fostered into White homes. Fifteen years ago, when the children were around age 7, it appeared that the Black adoptees were not far behind the White adoptees in IQ. This raised environmentalist hopes; but in the 1990s it transpired that, by late adolescence, the White adoptees averaged 106, the mixed-race adoptees 99 and the Black adoptees 89. As is usual, the high-quality environment provided by adoptive parents had helped all the children to slightly higher IQs than are normal for their racial groupings; but the racial differences between them had only been temporarily, not permanently diminished. [In modern psychogenetic work, it is quite common to find that environmental influences on intelligence which are strong in early childhood wear off in adolescence and adulthood. Some of the highest heritabilities for IQ have lately been reported in senior citizens. It may be that the German adoption study would have found the usual B-W racial difference if it had continued into late-adolescence.]

In 1933, a momentous debate took place at the Oxford Union. A straightforward motion was rejected by that House. It was That this House would fight for King and Country. The motion was rejected, Mr Hitler heard of this with delight, and within six years the opponents of that motion were eating their words while fighting the man with whom pacifists had thought peace could be made.

Just as the mid-1930s marked the high peak of British pacifism, so the mid-1990s mark a new peak -- hopefully the highest -- of Political Correctness (PC), the movement that is the true source of demands that deep-seated race differences be denied. Even though the British Labour Party today acknowledges the need for fast track learning (which permits educating children according to their own abilities rather than in defiance of them), the forces of PC say No! Entrenched in the media, the publishing houses and many universities, the liberal-left has completed its long march through the institutions. Communism has been seen off, but PC will bring in reality-denying egalitarianism anyway. In cahoots with so-called postmodernism and constructivism which deny the existence of realities such as race, sex and IQ differences, the PC proposition is that, even if there were such realities, it would be impolite and PC people will make it impolitic to speak about them. Racism is to be challenged by the encouragement of ignorance by ignoracism, indeed. Weirdly, the years of rising anti-racism, ignoracism and affirmative action have been a disaster for ordinary Black people. In the USA, one young Black man in three is in jail at any given time, fifty per cent of the prison population is Black; and the percentage of out-of-wedlock births has soared. No one even maintains there is any less racism!

Tonight the eyes of a new authoritarianism are trained on this House. PC has had a great year: it has suppressed two books and left academics afraid to discuss race. Tonight, PC looks to this House to oppose this motion so it can continue its despotic, self-serving work that is of no lasting use to either Blacks or Whites. There are deep-seated racial differences in intelligence; and there is no need to fear them and every reason to use them to the advantage of all. I thus call on this House to reject ignoracist hysteria, speak the truth and support the Motion.

FINIS

FINALE

All men are equal in three important senses before the God of the Bible and the Koran, before Darwin (for we are all, equally, evolutionary survivors) and before the law in Western societies. I have no wish to persuade you otherwise.

However, such overall equality does not mean that people are similar, or even that they are similar in all the ways that really matter. Some men, are physically puny; while others are athletic. Some girls are not blessed with good looks. Some people got rhythm while others just haven't. The same is true of group differences: Black men plainly excel at boxing and basketball; White men and women dominate rowing and swimming; and neither Blacks nor Whites seem as yet to take on Sumo wrestlers or to have much chance at table tennis.

Naturally, we try to be sensitive in what we say about differences. One doesn't talk about the splendid size of another mans sexual tackle when one is with ones own indifferently equipped boyfriend. Some people even conspire to help the disadvantaged believe that penis size doesn't matter, or that fat girls have more fun.

Nevertheless, we surely avoid outright lies if we can; and never more so than when asked for serious advice as to a friend's prospects. We do not advise fly-weights to argue about girlfriends with Mike Tyson. We do not advise girls to go in for mountaineering or motor car racing. More particularly, none would formulate expensive public policies on downright untruths.

Yet this is the position in which the West finds itself after thirty years of increasing anti-racism, ignoracism and PC. The education system has been dumbed down so that brighter children are held back and more people can appear to be succeeding. Racial quotas in the USA discriminate heavily against Asian and Jewish children. And racism itself remains undiminished even according to the architects of anti-racism. It is time to return to respecting individuals, practising colour-blindness and telling the truth. This is why this House should support the Motion tonight.