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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:20:42
Race, Genetics and Intelligence | Helmuth Nyborg and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
In our continued quest for the truth about genetics, intelligence and ethnicity, we bring the latest in a long round of experts who've come to talk about this.
This is Dr. Helmut Neuberg.
He is Professor Emeritus of Developmental Psychology at Aarhus University, Denmark.
is a distinguished and well-published researcher in the field of intelligence and individual differences.
Now, just for those of you who aren't Danish, the website doesn't sound exactly like the name.
It is helmuthnyborg.dk for getting more information about Professor Newberg's work.
As always, thank you so much for taking the time today.
You're welcome.
Now, let's start with a little bit of background because, of course, most of the listeners or the people who are going to watch this video are probably dipping into this area for the first time and may not be aware of, I guess you could say, the rather extensive lull in genetics and IQ research that occurred in sort of the mid-20s. the rather extensive lull in genetics and IQ research that 20th century and they're probably coming into this somewhat raw.
I wonder if you could give people just a little bit of a background as to the history of IQ, ethnic differences, and gender differences to some degree as well.
Well, you see, before 1930 everybody could talk about intelligence.
They could talk about individual differences, race differences, sex differences.
They could even talk about eugenic aspects of intelligence.
But then came the Second World War, and with it the Nazi atrocities.
And now, in 1948, the United Nations issued a statement that actually put a ban on the biological study of intelligence and IQ differences.
And then came the Soviet idea that man is created by society and if you work hard enough you can shape anybody in the picture of the ideal Soviet citizen.
Then came the Frankfurter School, and then came the whole left movement, who also believed that man is created by circumstances, capitalism is rude, and you should be able to repair any individual differences into the norm of an average human being, which of course is impossible.
Right, and of course this radical environmental determinism, you're right, the economic model that your class relationships form your personality, and that human beings are kind of liquid that can be poured into any fashionable ideological container, seems to have gripped the world so much that it's rather an extreme position now.
Of course, the earlier position was that both genetics and environment play a role in the development of intelligence, and now it seems heretical, almost, to talk about any role That's right, and it's even so bad that at modern politically correct universities you can easily get banned, you can get ousted from the good company.
I had a very bright PhD student recently And after the ceremony where he finalized his PhD, I congratulated him and said, I hope that he will be a nice person for the university here.
And he said, no, this is a goodbye.
I have seen how they have treated you and I don't like to be subjected to this.
I have a very fat Very well salaried job in the private sector and I'm leaving now and I think that is a tragedy of modern universities.
They have become so politically correct that certain areas of science is banned.
Well, actually, and funnily enough, that was sort of my experience as well.
I got to the master's level in Canada at a pretty good Ivy League school and what happened was I began to be somewhat suspicious of the claim that diversity was always a value because as a sort of free market capitalist who was very interested in, you know, classical Greek philosophy and so on, I found that this was rather unwelcome and it did not seem that that particular contribution was valued.
In other words, if you're on the left, The diversity of the left is valued, but no diversity from any other political perspectives.
And I actually abandoned academia then and went into the business world and became an entrepreneur, which I found much more satisfying.
And this dearth of diversity in academia I think is really stifling.
And of course I've really focused on Canada and America, which is where my primary audience is, but in researching Your particular story, it seems that it is very common throughout Europe as well.
It is indeed, and it was so bad that when I in 2012 published a study on such a thing as a sex difference in intelligence, Then really the university austed me.
They threatened me with two civil cases.
Then it appeared that I was too old for them to finish them because it takes several years.
So they simply ordered me to clean my desk in the day and that was that and I became so angry that I sent this case to a governmental committee and they came back with the message there were nothing dishonest in it and then the university had to hire me again but only for six months then I turned 70 and they could kick me out twice.
And I have generally gone with the argument that John Milton put forward centuries ago in Areopagitica, that if there are bad ideas, then we should put those bad ideas front and center.
We should not try to exclude them, we should not try to minimize them, because the old same statement that sunlight is the best disinfectant is Seems to have been so deeply rooted in Western history and Western culture that it seemed, at least until recent decades, almost impossible to uproot.
But something seems to have changed with regards to looking at genetics, the genetics of personality, particularly as it applies to differences between ethnicities.
I do know of course that the eugenics of course got a terrible name but I've made the case for many years that the welfare state is just another kind of eugenics in that it is the manipulation of breeding patterns by a central authority and you've of course talked about this to some degree as well with regards to Denmark and Europe.
I wonder if you could help people understand the influences that have occurred on, well actually sorry before we get to that, Let's go to ethnicity and IQ and some of the most surprising studies over the last hundred years and what people could glean from them.
Yeah, I think you have two interesting things at the same time here.
Why is it that the northern and western countries have developed democracy?
Why is it that they seem to support an infrastructure that is based on altruism and on high intelligence?
And I'm just writing a book about that, The Suicide of the European Peoples.
And the basic idea in that book is that if you live in Africa in prehistoric times, you had to defend the territory.
You had to be rather muscular, rather aggressive in order to do that.
But it doesn't take too much energy and too much intellectual capacity to get some food despite some periods of low food.
But then as you walk your way out of Africa and up in the cold areas, Then you need a different kind of person.
You need a person with a big brain and a high IQ in order to figure out where to shelter for the winter, how to get the scarce food, and how to share it.
That's altruism.
And funnily enough, if you look at these perimeters on a north-south gradient, you will see that the further north you come, the larger are the brains.
The actual difference today from African brain size, on average, of course, and North European or North Asian brain size.
And also you see that people are able to pay their taxes and to share their wealth with others in order to, in return, have hospitals, free libraries, and so on.
So my argument in that book is that you are selected for cold winters which require high intelligence and altruism, and that's the basic pillars of any civilization of some sophistication.
Wow.
Well, I think that the argument could be made that civilization itself is founded on the deferral of gratification.
And it would seem to me that when you are facing a cold winter climate, you need two things, of course.
You need social cooperation because you can't individually harvest enough food to survive for the winter.
Everyone's got to help build each other's barn if they're going to I'll be able to survive and you need to defer gratification because so much of survival in a farming environment in an agricultural environment is about not eating your seed crop no matter how hungry you get in the winter and patience and the deferral of gratification and extending empathy beyond one's immediate clan would seem to me to be positively selected by evolution in that kind of environment.
Yes, and that is something you cannot say today in a modern university.
You can't say that because it involves the idea that evolution is still running.
It involves the idea that IQ and altruism has a genetic background.
And if you say that, then you are not conforming to the idea that man is created by society.
And that really creates animosity that is Creating a very hostile environment at modern universities, which I have written about in several chapters and papers, but it still works today.
And this is remarkable coming from the left in many ways, because the left, all the way back to Marxism, has prided itself on its devotion to reason and evidence and science, and regularly mocks the more religious conservative right, particularly in America, for its rejection of evolution and so on.
But it seems to me that the rejection of evolution by Christians is far less egregious than the rejection of evolution by those on the left.
Our brain, of course, is our most expensive organ.
What is it?
3% of our body mass and 20% of our body's energy is consumed.
And the idea that we would end up in wildly disparate environments for 75,000 or so years, and that there would be no evolutionarily selective pressure on our most expensive organ, defies all rational science, as far as I can see.
It also defies the data.
But you see, perhaps you wouldn't believe it, but while I started reading psychology many years ago, it was in 1966 at the Copenhagen University, and of course as a previous sailor I was interested in the poor people, the little man and so on, so I was a socialist student activist.
And I participated actively in occupying the University of Copenhagen and so on.
But then something terrible happened to me a couple of years later.
A professor said to me, Helmut, you are going to write a thesis now in order to fulfill your requirements as a magister in psychology.
I want you to describe the relationship between psychology and genetics.
And I mean, I knew nothing about genetics, and of course this professor knew that, but he endured statistically to put such a task to a left-oriented student activist.
But that actually changed my whole view.
I learned that there are some aspects of human behavior and some aspects of human physiology that is under more or less genetic control.
And, for example, IQ is about 60 to 80 percent hereditary.
So that means that you couldn't no longer hold up the view of the man created by society.
And that, of course, had an effect also on my relationship to my comrades at the university.
We didn't share too much sympathy after that.
There seems to be two fundamental concerns, I think, that come up when ethnicity and IQ disparities are discussed.
I wonder if you could address them.
Number one, the first one seems to be that you will then judge all groups of a particular ethnicity by the average of that ethnicity, which of course is incorrect, logically.
That's sort of the first issue that people have, and we'll get to the second one, but I wonder if you could address that one first, because it's a bit confusing to people.
In any behavioral, in any population we have studied hitherto, all the traits we have looked upon are normally distributed, which means that in Africa you have an average IQ of about 70, somewhere between 68 and 72 depending on who's studying it.
But then you have the distribution, which means that half the people are less intelligent and half the people are more intelligent than the average.
Which means that the most intelligent person in the world might be a black, overweight, single mother.
And the stupidest, the most stupid person in the world might be a North Asian person.
So we should always be careful when we talk about populations or groups.
They are normally distributed and the distribution overlaps between races and between the sexes.
Right.
And the second issue seems to be that when you talk about varied characteristics the idea of general racial or ethnic superiority versus inferiority comes to up.
And I find that kind of incomprehensible.
I mean organisms that adapt to their local environment are better suited to that local environment but they're not superior to organisms that have adapted to other environments.
I mean when Europeans first went to Africa they had a life expectancy of 11 months because they were just decimated by disease.
So To me, it doesn't have anything to do with superiority or inferiority, but rather adaptations to local environments.
Is that a fair way of putting it, do you think?
I don't think so.
And the reason is that if you look at people in Africa, for example, then you see that the most intelligent of them are also those who do best in Africa.
If you go to the pygmy, you will see that the most brightest have the most cows and the most women.
The same is the case in America.
The same is the case in Denmark.
In all the environments we have studied hitherto, it pays off to be smart and that's probably one of the problems because you don't do too much yourself to get gifted.
You get it from your parents and then it pays off and then you are in a superior position relative to your group, irrespective of which group you belong to.
Now, as you mentioned, 60 to 80 percent.
I've heard some lower estimates and I don't think any higher, but 60 to 80 percent of intelligence is genetic.
And so a lot of people think, OK, well, we've got 20 to 40 percent that is now open to social malleability or some sort of central planning or Head Start programs or better education, better environment, more resources put in, foreign aid, whatever.
However, as far as I understand it, that 20 to 40 percent is not something that people know how to change to fundamentally improve intelligence in any individual.
Actually, it's a little bit more complex than even that.
Because if you look at the heredity in children about five, six years of age, it's down to 20 percent.
If that same child is 8 to 10 years old, heredity has gone up to 40%.
At age 18, it's up to 60%.
At age 18, it's up to 60 percent.
And when you reach the age of 65, it has gone up to 80 percent.
It has been hereditary all the way up through your life course, but the genes have not been expressed until you get to some age and then you can show your full potential.
So it's sort of like how people start out.
It depends on your age, but it's still heredity all the way up.
You just can't see it in the younger age.
Number two is, if you look at adoption studies, and you know the IQ of the biological parents of the child, you study the child at age 5, 10, 15, and so forth, and then the foster parents.
Then the similarity of the child's IQ to the foster parents remains close to zero all life through, which shows that it's not rearing or upbringing that's shaping IQ, but the similarity to the biological parents that the children have never met, at least not in an aware position, is increasing up to 60 to 80 percent.
And of course, if you accept that it's mainly determined by genes and there's only 20, 15, 20% left for the environment, then there's 5% measurement error of these 20%.
And of the remaining 15%, the impact of the environment is idiosyncratic risk.
What might benefit you for the last 15% improvement or deterioration might not benefit me.
So this is really an enigma that we have no known ways of changing IQ in an upward position.
Downward is easily.
A stone in the head will immediately reduce your IQ.
So that is also the problem that really worries my old comrades on the left, that there's not very much we can do about General Intelligence G.
And then again, we have to be more detailed because the T factor score, which is the measure most specialists today adhere to, is general intelligence.
But if you look at training at the verbal ability area of the memory of mathematics, visual spatial abilities and so on, they are trainable to some extent, even not too much, not as much as the school teacher would hope for.
Well and certainly the amount of resources in the West that have been poured internally to countries and of course into the third world.
Trillions and trillions of dollars have been poured into the goal, the social engineering goal of attempting to bring people closer in terms of economic output and opportunities and education and so on.
And certainly in America, I'm not sure where it is in Denmark, the income gap appears to be widening even after all of this.
So I guess we can chalk that up to another failure of a government program.
And my curiosity, you know, I think everybody wants to do good.
Every decent person wants to do good in the world.
And the first thing we have to do when we want to do good is see the doing good that's not working.
And that's what sort of led me to this area.
Why, when you've transferred trillions of dollars and untold amounts of person hours into attempting to solve a problem, and that problem is getting worse, it must be because something is fundamentally being missed at the very beginning of the conception.
Yes, and I think that's also the basic problem with the Soviet Union model.
You have to establish a police state in order to into the wishes of the Central Committee.
The same is the case in the school.
You can, when you look at IQ differences, you can see children of IQ 70 having a very small bowel, and IQ 130 children has a very big bowel.
And then if you pour knowledge and information into the 70 IQ bowel, you can fill it up to a certain point, but then it overflows.
The very unsolidaric thing is that if you put information in an IQ 130 child, then you can not only learn that child principles and abstractions, but that child can also begin to operate on them, so there's a double advantage of being gifted.
And that looks to me like a very unfair thing, but nevertheless a thing that we have to live with.
And of course it is, I think, emotionally quite painful for people to accept that at least with everything that's available now, there is no magic wand that is available to change group or individual IQ.
Certainly after birth, I guess you could choose to mate with somebody who's very smart, if you're very smart, and that's going to give your children an edge.
But I think this idea that the egalitarian dream, which fueled so much of 20th century ideology, is beyond the reach of what is achievable, I think, is very painful for people and would require a significant, and to many people rather radical, restructuring of how we even think about these kinds of issues.
I think it's one of the most unfair things in the world, but I also think it has some reality to it.
So we have to take it from there.
And I think this, you talked before about these huge energy put into improving IQ.
The American project Headstar is a multi-million dollar enterprise running over decades and the effect is washed away five years after the children has left the program.
The abysadarian program shows the same.
In Denmark we have for many years had an idea that everybody is free and everybody can be improved up to at least the average standard, but it has not succeeded.
And now in recent time, we have had a big inflow of low IQ people from southern countries.
And I think it's shameful and hurtful to see that many of these children really have a hard time being put together in a class with fairly high IQ children.
And I think that's something we have forgotten to look after, and those responsible are not even aware that there is a problem, because they still believe in the malleability of the human nature.
But it really hurts me to see this, and I think anybody with a heart would feel very sad.
I certainly agree with that, and it is, when I traveled through South Africa, I went to places like the Southwest Township and so on, and you see these, you know, tin shacks and no running water and no flushing toilets and garbage everywhere, graffiti, and it's heartbreaking, and of course
The idea, you know, then you look at the sort of skyline of Manhattan and you say, well, you know, if we give people resources from Manhattan who live in the southwest township, then it will all equal out, that all they lack is resources.
And then we may say, okay, well, we look at the test scores of people from sub-Saharan Africa, you know, this IQ 70, and we say, okay, well, but because they live in these kinds of places, of course, they're going to have lower test scores under stimulated environment and so on.
The idea that Their environment is a result of the IQ differences, rather than the IQ differences being a result of the environment.
It was like swallowing a cantaloupe or something for me to get my mind around that, and I think that's the big challenge for people.
It's a big challenge, and if you reverse the situation, Look at the programs.
The United States are going into Iraq or going into Afghanistan, going into some of the Arab countries, and then if we go there and put enough soldiers, enough guns, and enough support, then we will introduce democracy there.
But there's one thing that is missing in this understanding.
You cannot introduce democracy into a country with an average IQ below 90.
The Finnish scientist Tutu Van Haanen has shown that in several books, but this lesson is not communicable to those responsible.
They still believe that if you go in and you build up a cement factory or anything else and then leave it to the people, for example in Africa, then it will all work and they can begin to support themselves.
But five years later there are no spare parts and the The administration is missing in some parts and everything goes to pieces again.
We have seen it years and years again and we never seem to learn from it.
That really evades me.
Oh, this idea that we would take these biological and evolutionary facts and apply them to public policy.
I mean, I've just sort of been running through my mind over the last couple of days, and I won't bore you with an exhaustive list, but all of the disasters that could have been averted and with far better outcomes if people had accepted this kind of stuff.
I mean, the war on poverty has been occurring since the 1960s throughout most of the West.
If the money had been left in the hands of more productive and more intelligent people, the economy as a whole would have become wealthier, which have raised the wages of poor people and would give them a far higher standard of living now if that approach had been taken than they ever could receive on a On welfare, and not to mention, of course, as you point out, the Middle East seems to have IQs between 85 and 90, which puts them below the cutoff for functional democracies, at least according to the research that's available.
And so would it have been, you know, if people had known that, would they have said, well, let's go bring democracy to the Middle East?
They would have said, well, no.
I mean, what we want to do is see if we can help guide people to Practices that would raise IQ, treating their children better, longer breastfeeding or some of the other things that have been shown to be somewhat helpful rather than an invasion.
I just think of the amount of catastrophes that could be averted or could have been averted with the right acceptance of basic facts.
I think you're right there.
Another lesson that we might have from these failed countries we have tried to save by putting them into our image is that if you don't have an authoritarian structure Then everything falls to pieces.
So the Arab Spring turns into Arab Turmoil instead of.
So it seems like the lesson is, and I hate really to fully realize that, is that if you don't have a strong man or some war chief that can keep some order in these failed areas, then it becomes even worse.
But of course that is an immensely unpopular message to bring to the people.
So it will probably fail and we will continue to introduce democracy where it cannot be introduced.
And there also, let's move a little bit towards some of the ethical considerations with regards to intelligence, because intelligence is considered to be sort of a morally neutral capacity.
You know, it's like being tall or short.
It doesn't make you a better or worse person.
And of course at the high end of intelligence are like the kitten-stroking Bond villains who, you know, the super genius evil people and so on.
But from what you've talked about and what I've read, It seems that high IQ does seem to have a moral dimension in that people of higher IQ tend to be better behaved, more cooperative, less prone to mental illness, less prone to other forms of social dysfunction, as you've pointed out, theft and other issues as well.
Is that something that Makes sense to you that as you scale up in IQ, socially beneficial behaviors also seem to increase as well?
I think I would be very careful not to infect the idea of intelligence with moral, because intelligence is defined as the ability to handle complexity irrespective of the area in which it's measured.
So it is actually an objective and free dimension as far as I see it.
But now it appears that high intelligence is inversely correlated to social pathology.
Any kind of social pathology takes place of the IQ scale.
There are some notable exceptions with financial people who are criminals and so on, But if you look at the number of people that run into many social pathology things, like being out of work, having children outside, marriage and so on, then you will see that it increases almost linearly with intelligence, then you will see that it increases almost linearly with intelligence, but
So the lower intelligence, the more trouble do people run into, irrespective of which kind of trouble.
They simply seem to find it more difficult to live a decent life and to get a decent job because they do not qualify for it.
And I think that's a dimension that is related to IQ but not unitary with IQ.
We should keep those things apart except from their correlationally coincidence.
Oh yeah, no, we don't want to go from economic or social or environmental determinism to genetic determinism.
I always want to keep the bookends of possibilities at both sides, because I don't want people to feel like they're leaves on a stream running by their genetics.
I'm still a very huge fan of free will, otherwise there's not much that a philosopher has to talk about, otherwise you'd be a physicist and call yourself a student of human nature.
Now, one of the things that has been confusing to me, and we've got a lot of messages about this when I talk to intelligence experts, and I wonder if you can help clarify it.
Of course we had Dr. James Flynn on the show a couple of months ago, and you're of course fully aware of the Flynn effect.
So you've talked since 1850 that you've noted that there could have been, if I got this right, a 15 point or a full standard deviation decline in European intelligence.
And then of course we have Dr. Flynn on the other hand talking about a couple of point increase per generation of IQ.
These can't both, you know, these intersections can't both be correct.
I wonder if you could help unravel that mess for us.
I have deep respect for James Flynn.
I have met him personally and he's a very clever man.
I think that The g-factor I talked about as a measure of intelligence is not affected by the Flynn effect.
It has not gone up, it has gone down actually in the genotypic sense since 1850 or something around that time.
But the First-order factors like verbal ability or memory or visuospatial scores or mathematics, they have gone up, but it's not an improvement on the D-factor.
And that would have been what we would have liked.
We would have liked to get smarter.
Now if you train your verbal abilities, it might be that you cannot also train your mathematics skills as well.
So there will be a sort of a bias in the verbal direction.
Or if you train your mathematics skills, it might be at some expense of the verbal abilities.
So there you have a Flynn effect and you can have a sort of an Asymmetry between your abilities, but that does not affect the g-factor, and the g-factor is the measure of how you deal with complexity in general.
Right, so the g-factor is the underlying infrastructure of the brain that allows you to process faster, to process more, to handle more complexity, whereas there are of course specific skills for abilities that may be out of step with the g-factor, is that a fair way to put it?
No, it will always be in tune with the G-score.
The G-score has been likened by Spearman in 1905, when he first wrote about the G-factor, as a sort of a motor.
And that motor could drive all the small dynamos down the line.
So G is the big Energy motor.
And if G is high, then all your first-order factors like verbal and mathematic skills also run high.
And if your G is low, then the first-order factors are low.
So he would say that it's always an advantage to have a high G, because that drives the whole, should we say, the nexus, the IQ nexus, in which G is the major node and it drives all the secondary factors.
Okay, I think I understand.
So, with regards to mental illness, there is, of course, this myth or the cliché of the neurotic, crazy, really smart person.
The sort of Jonathan Nash kind of example from the movie A Beautiful Mind.
But according to your research, IQ is a good shield against things like psychosis, neuroticism, although it does seem to have the effect of making people more introverted.
Is it fair to say that IQ is a fairly good protection against mental illness?
Some have said that ego strength, which is not an IQ but a personality factor, is very important.
So if you combine high ego strength and high IQ, you are fairly safe in controlling your high IQ in a healthy and productive direction.
If the ego strength is low, then you might see those so-called crazy scientists.
But again, we should talk about averages of thousands of people and not about anecdotes about the German crazy scientists like Dr. Strangelove and so on.
So entertaining they are, they are anecdotes and we should always be aware of that.
Right, right.
Now, let's move from one contentious issue to another with reason and evidence as our guiding light, and let's talk about IQ and fertility, which of course is one of the great demographic challenges facing Europe in particular, though other countries as well.
There does seem to be an inverse relationship between IQ and fertility.
The higher the IQ, the lower the fertility, and vice versa.
And if it is the case that people from the Middle East who come from a lower IQ, maybe a standard deviation or so, lower IQ than native Danes or native Europeans as a whole, If they're going to come into European societies and they're going to have higher fertility than Danes, it seems to me that there is an inevitable mathematical displacement that is going to occur absent further intervention.
I almost have a feeling that you have read my still unwritten book about the suicide of the European people.
But in 2012 I published a paper showing that IQ in Denmark will go from 97.33 in 1980 down to 92% in 2075.
Of course prognosis of that range are always risky business, but it means that IQ will go down by several points.
It will reach in Denmark around 2100, the limit of 90, and that will be the point where democracy begins to falter in Denmark.
And I must say that, considering that this is a very controversial area, I was actually attacked by a lot of my old left-wing comrades and I have sued the state right now and there will be a final verdict on the 3rd of March whether I'm a dishonest person or not by publishing those data.
People are very edgy about these things, but the problem is also that if you have an influx of people with IQ 90 or 85 and they are put up in Danish schools, around 2050 they will dominate the Danish school system.
By an influx of Middle Eastern and people from Afghanistan and people from other countries with below 90.
And of course that will change the Danish school system to a degree that most people cannot even begin to fathom today.
And I'm very worried about that.
I'm just writing a paper on that development right now.
Right.
This is a very challenging, but the more challenging and the more dire the consequences, it would seem to me, the more essential is an open and sunlit public discussion of the facts and the trends.
One of the things I remember reading many years ago was about the Germans who went to Russia in the 19th century to help the Tsars out with administration.
And with regards to integration, I mean, these are two Caucasian races, but not exactly compatible, as has been shown many times with cross invasions in history, not exactly compatible cultures.
The Germans went to Russia and stayed there for about a hundred years, never learned Russian, brought their children up as good Germans, and then when the Communists took over in 1917, they all packed up and went back to Germany and resumed their former lives.
And that is, you know, fairly close geographically, not wildly dissimilar histories, still similar languages, at least compared to Arabic and English.
And there was an example where a group went to a country, And did not assimilate in any way, shape, or form, then moved back when the country became hostile.
And the degree to which groups do not assimilate is something that needs to be talked about.
I mean, if they had all assimilated, as happened in a lot of ways in the 19th century in America, that would be fine.
But the reality is that there does seem to be a kind of moat that goes up around particular cultures, particularly, I think, where theology or religion is involved and the integration does not occur and the degree to which a society can function with groups that have opposing ideologies that don't integrate is a fairly significant question I think.
You're right.
And just think about what President Kennedy said long ago.
The U.S.
is a nation of immigrants.
And he surely is right in that.
But he forgot to tell also that it was European immigrants that dominated it.
And the IQ of 100 or so was brought with them to the United States.
And now the United States has an influx of Mexicans with slightly less IQ.
That will, arithmetically speaking, lower the American IQ, and that will harm their productivity.
And just think about the Boers who, centuries ago, went to South Africa.
They kept their high IQ over many generations.
Europeans going to Australia and New Zealand, they keep their IQ intact.
And then they conflict with the natives in those areas.
And in South Africa now we have seen that the influx of white European immigrants have been reduced greatly.
And now we see some areas that run into severe problems with the social infrastructure.
And I think the same is happening to Europe at large right now.
We just don't have seen the message on the wall yet.
There is, I think, something that's confusing and requires maybe a higher order of intelligence to see it with regards to immigration from very different cultures.
I mean, I was thinking about this the other day, that one of the big influences on my life when I was growing up was a friend of mine's father, who was a wonderful Persian man.
He refused to refer to it as Iran for reasons that I think are fairly clear.
A wonderful, very intelligent, very warm, very charismatic Persian man.
Who had come over to the West, I think, in the 1970s.
And when you're in the West and you see a wave of immigrants come from other cultures, the first round tend to be the smartest, tend to be the most ambitious, with the greatest capacity to sort of plan to leave a country, to go through the paperwork, to go through all the bureaucratic hurdles to get into a new country.
So I think, just to take the example from Iran, When the Iranians come first, people are like, well, these people are fantastic.
And they are, because they're very high IQ people who obviously can't stand living in the Ayatollah Khomeini's theocracy.
But I think then to mistake that sort of cream of the crop for the general population is confusing for people, because the first people they meet from those cultures tend to be very high quality individuals.
Yes, and there's another problem.
Even should there be some selective migration from the brighter part of that population, then the children will regress to the mean again, which means that if they have an IQ of 100 and an average from their country of 70, they will regress back to 85.
That is, the children will not be as smart as them.
But there are some studies in Denmark suggesting that the second generation might actually achieve three or four IQ points.
But they are not doing better in school.
They are not doing better at work.
And it seems like there are some fluctuations in the IQ, but the biological load will hammer through again, which means that we now see even third-generation immigrants, some part of which means that we now see even third-generation immigrants, some part of them not doing as could be hoped for and So it's a complex problem.
Selective migration in the first wave and some regression to the mean in the second generation.
And then comes all the animosity of the natives if there are so many unqualified people who are going on social security.
And then some people might argue, well, we have pooled those money together and we don't like them to take them from us again.
And I think that will be a source of racism.
And the other source of racism is on the part of the immigrants, because some of them might find they have not been given a fair chance in this high-tech society that Europe is.
And that means that they might feel animosity against people, the native people, because they think they have been treated unfair.
And I think there's very little awareness of this Potentially poisonous problems.
And now we see a march on the right side of some people that definitely does not mean immigrants well.
So I think the responsible politicians should really think deeper about these problems.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot that I value with other cultures, particularly with regards to food and music and so on.
But I tell you, I was helping my daughter do some research on a project she was working on South Korea.
And I was reading about, you know, this economic miracle that they grew like 10% a year over a 30-year period, and Seoul with a population of 25 million is the safest city in the world, and it was hard to miss the basic fact that there was like 99% ethnic homogeneity in Korea.
And I just, like, I couldn't stop thinking about this, and I want to get your thoughts on it, because It's not that I want a world of ethnic homogeneity, because I love the variety, but my question is, would I trade the stuff that I could get anyway, like music and food, would I trade that for living in a society where I had no fear of being called a racist?
And that is a very difficult question for me and I think people are struggling with it to varying degrees of consciousness across Europe and North America because if the genetic argument is valid then there are going to be clusters of people who are not going to succeed that are specifically ethnic in nature and then there's going to be a lot of people saying well you're the equal of everyone in this society and the only reason you're not doing well is those evil white racists
And it's going to rile up a whole bunch of people to be very hostile towards the society.
That the only reason you're not doing well is the white, mean, racist people got their hobnailed shoes on your neck.
And it's going to cause a lot of conflict.
Whereas, of course, the fact that there aren't a lot of Chinese people in the National Basketball Association is not ascribed to racism, but because of the general fact that Asians, or East Asians at least, tend to be shorter.
than whites and blacks.
So my concern is or my concern fundamentally is that because there are going to be disparate outcomes for potentially or likely genetic reasons, but everyone is going to ascribe that to the racism of whites and Europeans, is this not sowing a huge amount of future landmines in society?
I think many of these biological differences, as you talk about them in sport, are real, but people do not infer from this that there might be IQ differences.
On the contrary, it has been argued that if blacks are stronger and more endurant in certain areas, it has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with IQ.
But they are separate questions.
You might have an African 100 meter sprinter who is highly intelligent, and you might have one who is very dumb.
So we should always keep in mind that the biological factors might be behind it all, but it manifests itself in different forms in sport.
While I was young I was traveling and I was competing in kayak and I actually won the bronze medal at the Olympiad in 1960.
And then it occurred to me I have never seen a black kayak paddler.
I have never seen, I have seen a few Asians.
Because their upper body is just about the same size of the Europeans.
It's only their legs that are shorter.
So they could do well in kayak.
So I've seen a few Asians, but none that really could threaten the final winners.
So there are some immense differences in the sports biology.
I mean, you and I would never put our faces up in a 100 meter final at the Olympiad, because we would make a laughing stuff.
Stuck.
But then again if we were given some intellectual problems we might be able to compete again.
So there's a growing awareness that there are some differences but the full consequences are not realized.
The data that seems to be coming out of Our capacity to peer inside the brain using CAT scans and other forms of medical technology.
Where is the science relative to the measuring?
Because, of course, everyone's measuring and has for the last hundred years or so.
As you mentioned, 40,000 plus people have been tested across the world to create some either direct or approximate measures of national IQ.
Where is the physical science in its exploration of the potential biological substrata of IQ and intelligence as a whole?
Last year I attended a conference in the States and there I was told by one of the leading researchers of brain scanning that he first showed some nice pictures and said, now we are giving this person some tasks, some intellectual tasks.
And look, these areas are active.
And he showed a lot of pictures and I was deeply impressed.
And then he turned speed and said, well, now I will show you this brain.
It is doing exactly the same task as the one you saw before, but the picture is very different.
And now it was the same person who was studied one week later.
This shows that the brain is such a versatile thing that even the same substrates in one person differ from one task to another and even between similar tasks.
You've also pointed out that, and I found this a little tough to follow because of my lack of expertise in the medicine, but the glucose consumption seems to decrease the smarter that you are, which it would seem to me like, you know, if your muscles are stronger then they're going to burn more calories, more energy, but this doesn't seem to be the case with the brain.
If you take the resting potential of glucose uptake in a demented person and in a high IQ person, you will see that the demented person's brain is working like lightning all the time.
But the resting high IQ person has a brain that really is relaxing.
But now if you load those two people with some cognitive task, the demented person's brain continue to work at high speed and apparently have difficulties trying to figure out what is going on, while the high IQ person's glucose uptake is greatly increased.
So there's much more flexibility in high IQ brains than in low IQ brains.
The American Anthropological Society, this is some time back, I don't know if they've revised this, but have put out, as a lot of the social sciences have put out, the argument that race is just a social construct.
There are sort of superficial differences in appearance and skin color, but the brain is photocopied across the globe, despite differences in environment and evolution.
I wonder if you could help people to understand the degree of of information that seems to be withheld from everyone about some of the differences in race, everything from twinning to brain size to secondary sexual characteristics.
It seems like there's quite a lot, you know, again, we're all human, but it seems like there are quite a lot of differences that are kind of withheld that make statements like race is a social construct sort of incomprehensible, at least to me.
Yes.
I think I will take you back to while we a short while ago talked about the exodus from Africa, and then people walked through still colder areas, and then their selective conditions changed, so they only and then their selective conditions changed, so they only were selected for a higher brain, a larger brain and a more intelligent brain.
This has actually made me, in a publication I published last year, suggest that we are We are not talking so much about race differences but about geoclimatic types.
So there are some icy people up north with big brains and altruism and there are some smaller brains in Africa with more sunny people.
So the race is actually a rough categorization of this long selection process when we had exodus from Africa Some 50 to 200,000 years ago, and that means that we are climatic types rather than race types.
So, I would like to free the race discussion People cannot even endure hearing the word race, then they begin to frown.
And I think if you talk about geoclimatic differences that are related to brain size and to longitude, to the degree to which people have walked up towards the high north, then we might have a more relaxed discussion.
And then it becomes more data related, which I always prefer.
Yeah, and the analogy that I've used is that when we look at brown bears versus polar bears, white-haired bears versus brown-haired bears, we recognize that as a function of the environment, and we would talk really about the effects of the environment.
You know, why people have paler skin, as far as I understand it, is something to do with less vitamin D absorption, particularly in winter, vitamin D being necessary to avoid rickets and other problems.
So yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it, that we're really looking at the effects of climate on a species rather than some a priori racial division.
Yes, and I think it will be a more easy way for people to understand.
Yeah, I think that's very helpful.
I will totally steal that from you with due credit.
You're welcome to do that.
So what are some of the biological differences that people generally aren't aware of that have, I guess, arisen as a result of these environmental differences?
I think the size of the brain correlates moderately with intelligence, about 0.45 when you do a good scanning.
And we also have differences in hormones.
It seems that blacks have slightly higher levels of the male hormone testosterone.
than Europeans has.
And even the Northeast Asians have the lowest level.
Testicular size is also something that differs between people, but you're never allowed to talk about that.
And the size is not really, we don't know the importance of that.
But testosterone has a lot of effects on libido, sexual appetite.
It has a lot of effects on our well-being.
And if it goes low, then a man, of course, becomes impotent.
And that's a problem in itself.
If he has too much then he might go out of control, he might be too aggressive and even if he has some ego strength he might not be able to control himself.
So in females we have variations also in testosterone but also in estrogen and estrogen is It's what creates what males consider beautiful curves and so on.
So there are a lot of biological differences.
And now comes this whole business of DNA typing, which is immensely interesting.
And we learn by the day of new traces that people took in prehistoric times and so on.
And we can begin to foresee individual differences in all respects.
of the, for example, intelligence.
There's this 1220 domain that seems to correlate with intelligence, not only among species, but also within humans.
And those who have a lot of copy repeats of this DAF 1220 domain on the chromosome, they are more intelligent than those who have fewer of it.
It's all so fascinating and it's actually time I wonder if we could dip into gender as well, because I really don't want to leave any group unoffended in this conversation, but to dip into gender.
Now, what I had understood with regards to gender, and I get a lot of this from Charles Murray's book on human achievement, is that the bell curve is more narrow for women.
In other words, they're more clustered around the mean.
And this explains why there are more male super geniuses and more male super idiots, like why there are more men at the very highest level of intellectual achievement and homeless men who can't seem to put barely one foot in front of the other.
But I've also heard that there may in fact be differences, even in the mean, between men and women, but I haven't seen that explicated too clearly.
Is that anything you can speak to to help clarify?
In 2005 I published a sex difference somewhere between 3 and 8 IQ points.
And then I was sacked by the university.
and rehired and so on so they said it was a completely worthless study because everybody knew that females and males have the same average IQ so I have taken revenge last year.
Then I studied 15, I had IQ data representing 15 million Americans between 8 and 17 years of age.
And then I said, well, perhaps there will be a sex difference in there.
And it was.
And it was of exactly the same size as my small sample.
So I'm going to present this paper to my university in a brief time.
But the point is that there is not only an average difference, about three to seven IQ points, and it differs a little bit from one race to another.
I had whites, blacks and Hispanics in this group.
But the dispersion or the curve was more flat for the males than for the females, which means that there are more really low IQ men than women, but there are also more really high IQ men than women.
And if you go up to IQ 145, there will be about eight males for each female.
And if now you assume that Nobel Prizes are taken by people who have at least IQ 145, Then you might explain the rarity of females earning Nobel prizes and field middles in mathematics and so on.
But I'm not expecting many people hailing me for the good for this paper, so I'll wait and see.
But this is the frustrating thing for me.
You've been at this game a lot longer than I have, so I may not be speaking out of turn here.
But this is what's so frustrating, is that when you have the facts, doesn't it lower social conflict?
Like, in other words, if everyone says, well, men and women are absolutely the same in every conceivable intellectual regard, And I've had an expert on the show arguing just that, so this is, you know, I try to get all sides of the perspective.
But if there are disparities between groups, and whether we put them down to upbringing or we put them down to genetics, at this point is fundamentally not that relevant.
Like if a guy is short, Because of genetics or he's short because he didn't get enough food when he's a kid, he's still probably not going to go on the basketball team at the moment.
So what we're dealing with right now I think is less relevant to focus on the genetics versus the environment and just simply say what is.
If these differences, if these group aggregate differences are obscured, isn't this just promoting resentment and frustration and conflict and hostility because there aren't reasonable explanations for disparities between groups, but everything must be ascribed to, I don't know, evil white guys or patriarchy and so on.
It just promotes a huge amount of conflict, resentment and instability to deny these basic facts.
I think every school teacher can see that, but now when you talk to them about it, and in Denmark we have a governmental initiative called inclusion, which means that even people with severe handicaps have to be brought into the normal classroom, now gradually it transpires that
It hurts those who will be put into a so-called normal environment and put to tasks that they cannot master in face of all the other children in the class.
And also the teacher has to take care of them, which means that there will be less time for the more gifted or even Even the average person.
We see from time to time that this idea that man is created by society and if there are differences we can repair them.
It's almost impossible to stop those people even if they can suffer the consequences of doing this in the class.
They can see it before them but still you cannot convince them that they're doing something wrong to the children.
And this, the old fable of the tortoise and the hare, for those who don't have kids, or maybe it's been a while since they were kids, but it's the basic fable that, you know, the hare runs all over the place, but the tortoise, slow in study, ends up winning the race.
One of the things that seems true, I shouldn't say seems true, that's not very scientific, one of the things that seems fairly confirmed in biology is the fact that that which takes longer to develop can usually end up more complex.
And I think this is another one of these red herrings that occurs in society that confuses people, is that my understanding is that girls and certain minorities will advance faster, particularly in certain physical skills, but for girls in intellectual skills, but then they peak and the growth slows, whereas boys mature slower, but then end up in some ways further ahead.
And it's that crossover that's confusing for people because they say, well the girls were doing really well, Until they weren't, and the result must be something that's happening in that crossover that we can adjust, but it may just be the way, you know, that the slower to develop ends up more complex phenomenon in biology.
That was exactly what I saw in this study of American youth.
Up to age 15, the girls have an advantage in between one and one and a half year in biological development, which also means brain development.
And they're doing better than boys in school at that time.
In boys there are more dispersion, there are more stutters, there are more boys with reading difficulties and so on.
But then when the asymptote for girls IQ begins to thin out at age 15 and 16, then the boys actually develop further and it is also found that not only at age 16 when the first significant sex difference appear in male favor, then actually it grows a little bit throughout life.
And I reported that in this paper that I also said to you I will not be law dated for it.
But that was what the data said.
So there's a point to it that those who mature early actually ends up at a lower level than those who mature late.
Unless, of course, we're talking about clinical aberrations when the story is completely different.
Right, right.
This is for normal people, so-called normal people.
Right.
Now, when it comes to peering through the tunnel of time to the future of Europe, which has been a challenge for, I guess, quite some time.
I think, as you pointed out, in the late seventies the births were about ninety-seven, ninety-eight percent for native Danes and that's projected to go down to thirty, thirty-three percent or so on in a couple of decades.
What are the implications of this combination that the social engineering that is occurring of course in a free market society people of lower i_q_ tend to accumulate fewer resources which is going to put a crimp on their birth rates but when you have a society where wealth is taken from higher i_q_ people and thrown willy nilly at lower i_q_ people That really does fuel the fire, I would argue, with regards to the spread of these lower IQ genetic situations.
What is going to... I know you've done a lot of work, and I wish we could just flash up the graphs that you have presented at a variety of places, but what do people need to understand about the inexorable mathematics of these situations?
I think when the average IQ of a nation goes down, then the rate of social pathology goes up, because there is an inverse relationship.
Then this whole social infrastructure begins to falter.
Then the level of competitiveness of that country goes down, which means that national wealth will decline.
And I think That will end in disaster.
And if it continues uncontrolled, as it seems to do right now for Europe, for Denmark and Europe in general, I think that will be the end of Western civilization.
Because Europe will degrade to a third world area, where we cannot claim to have an intact social and political system, corruption will rise, and we will be failed nations like we see anywhere else where IQ is low.
So I have a very bleak eye on the future, but it might be excused by my age when men grow old, some crumple and misperceive the world, But I hope for my children and grandchildren that it is not only the wild ideas of a grumpy old man.
Well, there are certain predictions that one always hopes to be proven wrong on.
Being wise is so often just being very sorry that you happen to be right.
But one of the things that seems inevitable is that there are high-IQ productive nations, and of course everybody wants to come and partake of that buffet.
without necessarily going through the rigor of creating those societies domestically.
I mean, all fleeing from Africa or the Middle East is in a sense a confession that the societies that they're fleeing from cannot end up like European societies.
They've given up, they can't, you know, after the Arab Spring failed and in fact turned retrograde in many ways.
They're fleeing to Europe and that basic fact says that they don't believe that their domestic countries can be reformed and that's most likely going to be to create the Middle East in Europe.
But all of that is dependent upon the continued transfer of resources from more productive people to the migrants, and that can't possibly sustain itself.
That is eating the seed crop, I mean, particularly as the migrant population reproduces.
And so it would seem to me somewhat inevitable that at some point the money is going to run out, right?
As the old Thatcherite saying says, you know, socialism always ends when you run out of other people's money to spend.
When that money runs out, What is the result going to be then?
Well, in a free society, I mean, a third of people who migrated to America in the 19th century ended up self-deporting because they didn't like it, but that was kind of a pendulum push-pull over many years.
When the money runs out in a group that has not assimilated, has not developed the local language, local culture, local ethics, and the work history, the resumes, and so on, I can't With the knowledge of the biology, the knowledge of the aggressiveness of certain IQ bands on the bell curve, it seems to me impossible to expect anything other than significant eruptions of civil violence.
I put that forward hesitantly because it is not something that anyone wishes, but I can't see any other alternative given the current trends.
I think you're right in that analysis and I think the immigrant is not to blame for it.
If I was an African living in one of the failed countries I would do everything to get myself and my family up to Europe or some other place where there are more wealth and more solutions to working situations and so on.
I think who to blame is the politicians Who have a short mind.
They know how to count to vote for the next election.
And apparently many European politicians are more worried about their own well-being than about the country's well-being.
And I think that's fantastic to see because they're clever people.
But they seem to have too little knowledge of the biology and the evolutionary forces.
So, I think it will end in European Suicide.
That's the title of my next book.
And I hope, really, that I have completely misunderstood the whole thing.
And it seems also that with a certain amount of wealth and escaping, you know, the endless gruesome privations that characterize most of human history, it seems that there's this kind of tumor-esque pathological altruism or sentimentality, we can do everything, we have infinite resources, we can help everyone, and the natural strictures of reality seem to have, particularly of course when governments, you know, get to print their own money and borrow and
And run up deficits and sell bonds and so on.
It gives the illusion of infinite resources.
At which point, saying we should withhold resources from certain groups smacks people as really, really horrible.
You know, you have infinite resources, so why wouldn't you help everyone?
Well, there's no way that that could possibly be sustained.
And it seems there is this kind of delusory Sentimental sympathy that seems completely out of step or recognition with the fact that all resources are finite and all human desires are infinite.
The more you get into debt, the worse the backlash is.
The more incompatible cultures you bring in and bribe, in a sense, to stay, the worse the backlash is.
It seems that this kind of sentimentality, it sort of strikes me as late Roman, seems to get punished by cold economic and socio-political reality very hard, and then for a couple of generations people sort of shake their heads and remember, and then the sentimentality starts to creep back in when the excess resources accumulate again.
Yeah, I think one of the problems is that we talked about altruism before.
Apparently our altruism has gone too far.
We think we can save the whole world and that is more A good motivator, but we need to add some realism into it.
And evolutionary forces cannot be teased with.
You cannot annul them.
If you kick evolution out with a haystack, it comes in the back door and even stronger than that.
So I think we should raise the awareness of what it means to be a good person because to be good does not always result in good things.
Look at the, what do you call that, liberations of the Arab states from their brutal leaders and look what we got.
So I think good people have something to respond to in the future.
All right, I'm going to put out one final little rant and then I'll give you the closing statement.
And this I really do want to go out to those who have, I think it's not unfair to say, persecuted you and persecuted other people in this area.
When I was growing up, if you were involved in an intellectual debate and you had a tantrum, that was a confession that you lost.
If you punched someone, if you ran away, if you burst into tears, that was a confession that you had lost.
The way that you overcome bad ideas is with better arguments, better data, more accurate hypotheses.
You know, the usual classical liberal Socratic approach to teasing out the complex truth in a challenging world.
And to those people who, you know, they're watching this, they're getting angry and they get mad and persecuted and so on, look.
There is almost no thesis in the world that I would be happier to be proved wrong on this, but we have to recognize the facts as they are and be open to pursuing the facts of science that can be teased out.
I would recommend that for people who find this stuff offensive, pour your resources into getting the researchers to examine the data, continue to explore the genome, continue to do the research, continue to do the brain scans, And if the thesis can be disproven, fantastic!
I mean, that would be completely wonderful.
But the people who say that they want to attack people exploring this area, rather than continue to pursue the science, are actually confessing that they secretly believe that the hypothesis discussed here is true.
Because the only way that you would want to keep people away from exploring a topic is if you feel that the topic is not going to go for your position.
The only way that people want to drive other people away from the facts is if they secretly believe that the facts will confirm the hypothesis that they oppose.
So, attacks on intellectuals for pursuing truth in the past used to be called a confession of failure and would be too embarrassing to act out, particularly in a public realm.
That seems to have kind of changed a little bit now where People's offense seems to be some sort of trump card, like you don't need to study philosophy or science or reason or evidence, you just need to get offended and somehow you've won, and that really is the prerequisite to the death of civilization that follows.
The capacity to welcome, appreciate, and pursue a hypothesis that go against your moral or emotional grains is foundational to civilization.
Without that, there's very little left to defend.
I'm not saying you agree with all of that, I just wanted to put that out there, and then I'll give you the last word if you like.
I sympathize with the idea, but look, I have found that.
Once I believed that better data would convince your opponent, but it appears that if you bring even better arguments, they pursue you even harder, because they know you're wrong.
So this is not a question of a rational analysis, it's a moral way, and they sit on moral very high horses, and they know you're wrong, they know you're a bad person, and you have to be subdued.
But I really hope that you have a point that the better data
Well, we will continue to try and get better data and arguments out to the world, and I just wanted to remind people, Dr. Helmut Neuberg has an extensive, you can find his books, he's got great interviews, if you're willing to either learn Danish or read subtitles, there's some great interviews that you did on television, it's H-E-L-M-U-T-H-N-Y
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