unz | The first logical way the American-invented cognitive game of
Scrabble settles the score against radical hereditarians in the racial
(Black-White) IQ gap debate is through a two step process: how do white
female players compare to white male players in top-level elite
Scrabble? Since many mainstream cognitive psychologists tell us that
white women (like white men) have much higher tested intelligence than
blacks, whether you measure this as “general intelligence” or you just
limit it to visuospatial intelligence or mathematical ability, we should
expect white women to perform better than black men in any activity
that depends on these abilities (since a slight deficiency in such
abilities is also the reason white women perform lower than white men,
according to the same hereditarians). What we have in Scrabble is an
emphatic refutation of this hereditarian expectation of Black cognitive
under-performance, especially when the full picture of African
achievement in such mental games is examined, as I attempt to do in this
article. I also refute any suggestions that such games are insufficient
for this analysis.
Hereditarian Science
When I oppose “hereditarians,” I am really concerned with only one
specific aspect that many self-described hereditarians seem to share:
their intriguingly confident belief that they have already found some
kind of proof for a genetic cognitive gap between racial groups that has
a certain magnitude and direction, which consequently explains
scholastic and IQ test score differences among different ethnic groups. I
will call this the “racial hypothesis” in this article, even though it
is officially called the “genetic hypothesis,” because I do not want to
leave the impression that I reject any genetically transmitted
differences in mental (or any other) ability between any two
populations. (I have previously theorized
that the American black-white IQ gap could simply be a reflection of a
high incidence of functionally mild neurological disorders among native
black Americans, which tend to affect
many more males than females: such a gender IQ gap reversal is less
acute in black Caribbeans than black Americans, and absent in Africans,
which could suggest that the disorder may have been inherited from
mating with similarly affected poor whites during the time of slavery;
it has nothing to do with race or evolution per se.)
Although I am therefore also skeptical about a radical global
“environmental hypothesis” as the universal explanation for every single
time there are any significant performance differences between
populations or genders, I think that it should be obvious that the
drastically inferior environment of Africa, especially the learning or
educational environment (the training factor), is a sufficient
explanation for any inferior intellectual performance or IQ of Africans
living in Africa (which is why African school children born in Western
countries perform as well as white European children, if not better).
This article tests that proposition by examining the performance of
Sub-Saharan Africans on contests that are much less hindered by the
artificial lack of educational (training) resources while simultaneously
requiring the application of high natural cognitive resources.
