VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow writes: And now for something completely different…I was deeply impressed to receive this contribution from Zambian immigrant Chanda Chisala, who has emerged as one of the most ingenious opponents of the race-IQ hypothesis. Our Ruling Class’s position, as shown by the Stephen Miller and “Judge” Ashley Tabaddor farces, is that VDARE.com should simply be shunned, not engaged in rational debate. Naturally, we think this is because Ruling Class positions cannot stand up to rational debate. So we have a soft spot for mainstream figures who have nevertheless engaged us in rational debate, for example University of London Professor Eric Kaufmann, more recently the author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,and the blogger Razib Khan, hired and fired as a New York Times columnist on the same day because he had written us a letter back in 2000 disagreeing—disagreeing!—with something we’d posted. I very much hope nothing nasty happens to Chanda Chisala as a result of his commitment to the West’s scientific method.

VDARE.com recently published an interesting article, “Race Denier Chanda Chisala Does Not Deserve His 15 Seconds of Twitter Fame” by Lance Welton, responding to my Unz Review articles on the superior scholastic performance of black African high school kids in the UK, who now consistently outperform British whites, thereby putting into serious question the race-genetics-IQ promoted by the Human Biodiversity (HBD) intellectual movement (henceforth, HBDers).

Welton’s article contained a number of errors and misunderstandings that I would like to correct, and hopefully help the reader to get a better grasp of the very real challenge posed to the race hypothesis by the UK’s test score data. I will end by demonstrating that the only “logical” HBD response to this unexpected data—the claim that these high-scoring Africans must be just children of highly selected Africans—is itself untenable, which should make the race hypothesis implausible, and thus falsified.

Is Race Really Real?

Welton’s errors begin on a personal level with the very first words in the title: ‘Race denier Chanda Chisala…’ The idea that anyone who opposes the conclusions of HBDers is somehow some radical “woke” progressive liberal who denies the very existence of race or the possibility of any gene-based individual (or population-level) differences is rather presumptuous. I’m not and I don’t.

I guess Welton did not bother to read anything I’ve written on the subject in the past since he could not spare more than “15 seconds” of his time. I am as far from a “race denier” as you can get, and I believe I made this clear in at least one of those articles at UNZ that he lambasts:

“I am not arguing against the heredity of intelligence in families or tribes or (theoretically) even races. Neither am I arguing that all ethnicities and races on earth necessarily have the same average intelligence, presently or potentially, or that races do not even exist – all straw men that so many commenters have been ascribing to me so that they could enjoy the illusion of making an argument. The average (genetic) potentials of intelligence could indeed be as varied as the heights of different populations. What I have contested is the empirical evidence for the specific genotypic estimates and rankings of the racial cognitive heights, if you will.” [emphasis added.]

Closing the Black-White IQ Gap Debate, Part 3, December 9, 2015

In short, I have never thought that race is nothing more than a mere “social construct”; my humble academic background is in biology, not sociology. Populations that have lived separately for a very long time are probably bound to have some differences that are a little more than skin deep.

But that does not automatically mean that the way these populations rank now, under strongly variable environmental pressures, is necessarily the way they would be ranked under optimal conditions, when no one faces any significant detrimental assaults.

Similarly, genotypic heights are bound to be different among different individuals, families, tribes and races, but this does not mean that what we see now among these groups reflects their ultimate genetic height rankings. (For example, Nigerians are reportedly shorter than Koreans under current height rankings—should we assume this is how it will be even when all environments are optimized for full genetic height development?

Welton also suggests that I’m also “environmental determinist” and, even more puzzlingly, a “science denier.” And just in case his reader hasn’t yet despised this race-and-science-denying environmental determinist enough he throws in a bit of slander for good measure:

But to reach this conclusion, Chisala has manipulated and misrepresented his data.

To accuse someone of manipulating data is of course an attack on his integrity. The simplest evidence that I have “manipulated” nothing is the fact that this UK cognitive data was troubling to many race hereditarians themselves long before I was involved in the debate. [A Troublesome Intelligence? by Chanda Chisala, Unz.com, September 26, 2018]

And that was when they thought the British children were scoring only an equivalent of 8 IQ points above the black African kids, despite the black children being drawn from a population that is supposed to be about 30 IQ points lower. When I entered the debate by showing that their “troubling” data was in fact misleading (those children who were from English-speaking African countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe were already outscoring the British whites), it was not long before some of the more mathematically adept HBD bloggers started publicly declaring that they were “now agnostic as to the real cause of the intelligence gap”! [Changing My Mind About Race and IQ, Jason Bayz, September 18, 2017]

Can Blacks Do Math?

When Welton finally leaves the ad hominem mode and decides to make some actual arguments against my observations, it quickly becomes clear why he needed to first poison the well so viciously: he actually does not have any good argument.

He begins by rehashing the arguments that I’ve most easily refuted already. He of course calls my refutations mere “attempts” at refutation, but fails to show why those “attempts” fail:

Clearly, GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education, a U.K, standardized achievement test] Math is a better proxy for IQ than GCSE Art or GCSE Physical Education. Yet Chisala’s data relates to students’ best 8 GCSE scores and the students’ mean pass rate, meaning it does not distinguish between “hard” and “soft” GCSEs.

My easy refutation of this claim was just to present the group scores in GCSE Math (and GCSE English) separately. The Africans in question outscored the British whites even in those “hard” GCSEs. So why would anyone continue to insist that eight subjects are invalid because they contain some easier subjects?

I was curious to see the big counterargument that he promises to diffuse my “attempt” at refuting this point. But it only betrayed Welton’s unfamiliarity with both the history of the IQ debate in general, and the UK GCSEs in particular.

Welton’s big counterargument to the higher math scores of Africans, right after saying they only score well because the eight subjects are too easy, is this: it doesn’t matter if those blacks are outscoring British whites in math because math is not an IQ test anyway!

Unbelievable? Let’s see it in his own words:

Chisala attempts to get around this problem by showing that Africans in the UK—as distinct from those of Caribbean heritage—score higher than whites even on GCSE Mathematics. The obvious counter-argument is that GCSE Mathematics is still not the same as an IQ test. It includes coursework, for example. This is not done against the clock, so it will favor those who are high in certain personality traits, such as Conscientiousness (‘rule-following’ and ‘impulse control’). These traits are themselves associated quite strongly with educational success …and, according to some studies, migration.

This has been the modus operandi of many HBDers in this debate. When a goal is scored against them (or even an own-goal by themselves), they simply shift the goal posts and declare it a non-goal.

First it was “Blacks can’t outperform whites in school anywhere in the world – just find one country where they do and it’s game over.”

When it was shown that black Africans do perform better than whites in the UK, it changed to “well, those are just pass rates, they can’t outperform whites when you look at actual scores.”

When actual scores were found and presented, it changed to, “Well, that’s in eight subjects; blacks can only beat whites in eight subjects because most of those are easy subjects, unlike hard subjects like math.”

When actual scores in math were found and presented, it has apparently now changed to “Oh, GCSE math has a lot of coursework, and blacks only beat UK whites in math because coursework requires conscientiousness rather than intelligence; if there was no coursework, whites would obviously beat blacks.”

In short, those high-scoring Africans are actually not that smart, they are just more serious about work, like all immigrants, and they would never beat whites if coursework was removed and it became a time-controlled hard test like the SATs in America.

On such a timed test, the greater brains will prevail, and that’s the British whites. Makes sense, right?

Well, it seems they might have to shift those tired goal posts once again!

It turns out that Welton does not quite know the GCSE system very well, which is why he imagines that he has the final “obvious” counterargument in this endless chain of shifting goal posts. GCSE mathematics does not actually have any coursework. It has not had coursework since 2009. Yes, it is indeed done “against the clock,” as he desires, just like the SATs.

In fact, when the coursework was abandoned for the very reasons expressed by Welton, the perennial UK trend of girls beating boys in GCSE math ended immediately. [Boys overtake girls in maths GCSE as coursework dropped, by Polly Curtis, Guardian, August 27, 2009 ] Boys started outperforming girls, just as they do on the math section of the American SATs, which probably confirms an increase in the g-loading (cognitive complexity) of the GCSE math sans coursework.

However, Africans from English-speaking countries still out-performed whites—which should indicate, by the hereditarians’ own theory, that this black African advantage is really on general intelligence (g) itself.

If anything, it appears that it is the British whites whose performance improves when you remove the harder subjects (math and English), while the African performance goes down drastically without their advantage on the math and English sections.

Although more data is probably needed to prove this more conclusively, it does seem like the diametric opposite of what Welton and other HBD enthusiasts predict:

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