Originally published in Race, Intelligence and Education, November 1978 
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RACE, INTELLIGENCE AND EDUCATION:
A Reply to the National Union of Teachers' Booklet
Written by a group of trained biologists active in education and published in the interests of truth, science and the future of the British people by the Racial Preservation Society.
Foreword
The question of the links between Race and Intelligence is not only a vitally important one, it is also highly complex. A full understanding of the evidence, to say nothing of the arguments on both sides from that evidence, requires either a considerable background of biological training or the careful, clear and fair explanation of such highly technical evidence and argument in terms which the layman can readily understand.
Thus, in discussing these issues publicly, those of us who are fortunate enough to have the requisite expertise to understand the scientific background of this matter have a clear responsibility to our fellow-citizens. In the words of a resolution on this very issue adopted by the World Conference of Organisations of the Teaching Profession in Washington, D.C. in 1978, and subsequently endorsed by the 1978 Conference of the British National Union of Teachers, we must "be ever alert to the danger of false information which nourishes false concepts" and we must "monitor the quality of information received and disseminated . . . and ensure that it is based on unbiased factual data." We must, therefore, ensure that publications intended for a lay readership purporting to be fair, impartial and accurate reviews of the facts and issues of this matter are actually that.
One important recent such publication is Race, Intelligence and Education: A teacher's guide to the facts and issues, written by Professor Steven Rose and Dr. Ken Richardson of the Open University, published by the National Union of Teachers on 22nd September, 1978, and subsequently distributed to well over 50,000 teachers and other interested and influential persons throughout the United Kingdom.
It is the contention of these writers that the authors of that booklet have not produced the fair, impartial and accurate review, based upon "unbiased factual data", which they and the NUT Executive claim, and that therefore they have failed in their responsibility as scientists and educators in commenting on this issue.
It is in order to point out the numerous errors, irrelevancies, misrepresentations and distortions occurring in that booklet, and, to some extent, to redress the balance by counterposing some of the arguments advanced by those who do not support the multi-racialist, egalitarian and leftist viewpoint adopted by Rose and Richardson, that this reply is written.
If it is to discharge its responsibility to Truth, Science and the future generations with whose education its members have been entrusted, and to that end to ensure that those members are in possession of at least a reasonably balanced idea of the "Facts and Issues" of Race, Intelligence and Education, the National Union of Teachers' Executive is under a clear moral obligation to distribute this reply as freely and as widely as it did its original publication.
Introduction: The N.U.T 's Foreword
Race, Intelligence and Education opens with a Foreword by one Mr. Fred Jarvis, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. This is of little relevance to the scientific issues under discussion, except that it does make clear that what is intended is not a polemic in favour of one side or the other in the race/intelligence controversy, but to "provide the teaching profession with factual and analytical material concerning the biology of race and intelligence." In view of what actually follows, that is an interesting comment ― to say the least!
After acknowledging, correctly, that "this is a highly controversial area," Mr. Jarvis informs us that "it is the belief of the Executive that the views put forward by Professor Steven Rose and his colleagues are essentially correct." One wonders upon what authority the NUT Executive bases this weighty verdict. How many qualified physical anthropologists, human geneticists, psychologists specialising in the field of Race and Intelligence or even holders of an 'O' Level in Biology does this august and learned body number in its ranks? It certainly has at least its fair share of non-biologists, careerist Trade Union hacks, and adherents of sundry lunatic fringe extremist political groups of varying degrees of silliness from the Communist Party leftward, so that Professor Hans J. Eysenck, one of the world's leading academic authorities on the race/intelligence issue, might well describe it in a letter to The Times as a group of laymen unacquainted with the facts and unequipped to produce anything but "irrelevant ideological preconceptions." So an endorsement from the NUT Executive in itself should be sufficient to lead the reader to look especially long and hard at the work so "honoured".
In reviewing the NUT's booklet proper, the simplest course would seem to be to look at each of the five 'Main Points' which its authors allege it makes and which they very kindly provide in summary form at the end; to examine the arguments advanced in the text in support of each of these points and to point out where many, or in many cases as we shall see, almost all scientists in the race/intelligence field would differ from Professor Rose and Dr. Richardson's argument, alleged "scientific facts" and conclusions; to look at any other significant points in their text; and finally to make a few concluding remarks of a general nature about the booklet as a whole and the possible real motives of its publishers.
Their Main Point One: "In biological terms the concept of 'race' is meaningless for human populations."
OUR REPLY
This point has at least the merit of being original! It has often been suggested that the races of man are equal, but never that they did not exist at all, not even by the most extreme racial egalitarians. But when one actually looks at the section of the text which is evidently supposed to support this point, one finds that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the biological concept of race at all.
Rose and Richardson point out, at length, that the word 'race' is often applied by laymen to peoples, nations, religious groups or some other grouping of people according to purely cultural or social, non-biological, criteria and that, as they quite rightly put it, "these popular uses of the word 'race' have little, if anything to do with biology". They belabour this point, which no one with any knowledge of racial biology would for a moment dispute, at rather tedious length, reiterating at the conclusion of their discussion of this issue that "defining people as Black or White, Jewish or Christian, English or Irish, is a social and not a biological description" (their emphases).
Though Rose and Richardson seem to think that they are establishing a major point fatal to their opponents' case, no scientist (and, for that matter, no reasonably well-informed racialist) would disagree with them here. We all agree that when laymen use the term "race" in a biologically wrong sense it is biologically meaningless.
But the real issue these authors appear to be raising ― from their "Main Point" ― is of the biological validity of the races into which biologists and physical anthropologists, not laymen, divide the human species: the Caucasoid ('White'), Negroid (African Black), Mongoloid ('Yellow', and sometimes American Indians, whom other authorities consider a separate, 'Indianid' race), Australoid (Australian aborigine) and Capoid or Khoisanid (Kalahari bushmen and the now extinct Hottentots, exterminated by the Negroes or interbred with Whites), and the several sub-races into which these races may be divided (e.g. Nordic, Mediterranean, Palaenegrid etc.)
These biological races and sub-races have little or nothing to do with the social 'races' Rose and Richardson rightly describe as scientifically meaningless. For example, Englishmen are a people within the British nation, not a race, made up, as are the Scots, Welsh, Ulstermen and Irish, of an admixture of the Nordic and Mediterranean sub-races of the Caucasoid race (indeed, Rose and Richardson would probably consider West Indians (Negroids) and 'Asians' (a basically Caucasoid element with variable degrees of Australoid admixture derived from interbreeding with the Veddoid Indian aborigines) living in England to be Englishmen too, though most real Englishmen might well not agree with them!); the term 'Black' has been applied to representatives of every human race except the American Indians (though 'White' is a fairly accurate synonym for 'racially pure Caucasian'); and anyone of any race can call himself a Christian.
But our authors cite not a shred of evidence to cast doubt on the scientific validity of biological races in man. Indeed, they do not even mention them, preferring to go on flogging furiously at the dead horse of the 'races' invented by laymen when, as they put it, "in everyday language people use the word 'race' very loosely." This decomposing beast is belaboured with the results of numerous scientific studies which prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that when ordinary folk use the word "race" in a scientifically inaccurate way they are scientifically inaccurate! But Rose and Richardson's "Main Point" does not describe as "meaningless" the concepts of ordinary folk alone, but also by implication those of trained scientists and, having disposed of the former, one might expect them to turn their attention to the "concept of race" possessed by the latter. They fail utterly to do this, and present not a scrap of evidence to discredit in any way the scientific validity of properly defined human races. This may have something to do with the fact that there is no such evidence: no one else doubts the reality of human racial differences, whatever they may think about their extent, nature and origin.
Indeed, when Rose and Richardson themselves put forward what they would consider to be the correct biological "acid tests" of the validity or otherwise of a proposed race, the races of man pass as "valid" with flying colours!
Their first test is that a race should "be distinguished from other varieties (of its species) by some common and heritable attribute." Well, as Professor E. Raymond Hall, MA, PhD, the distinguished American zoologist says: "Something that most non-zoologists seem not to know is that the subspecies of man are distinguished one from the other by the same sort of differences ― characters, in zoological parlance ― as are subspecies of almost any other kind of mammal, say, subspecies of the mole, marmoset, or moose. For example, in the skull of a Point Barrow Eskimo, one of the races of the subspecies Homo sapiens asiaticus" (Mongoloid race ― or the American Indian race, Homo sapiens americanus, if this is considered separate) "the size and shape of the bony opening for the nose is significantly different from that in a Zulu Negro, one of the races of the subspecies Homo sapiens afer. In the Eskimo the opening is narrow (less than half as wide as high) whereas in the Negro it is wide ― more than half as wide as high. Under a microscope the hair of the head of the Zulu is seen to have a characteristic shape in cross section, and inspection by means of the naked eye only reveals that the hair of the Zulu is kinky and his skin black, whereas the Eskimo's hair is straight and his skin yellow or dark reddish. Even cursory comparison will serve to multiply this list of differences. Similarly, in the moose, the subspecies A Ices alces alces of Europe has the premaxillary bone extended back beneath the nasal bone and the colour of its hair is greyish, whereas the subspecies Alces alces gigas from Alaska differs in that the premaxillary bone does not extend back so far as the nasal bone and the hair is blackish."
So great are the differences between human races that, from the days of Linnaeus on, many scientists, like Professor Hall, have considered the races to be actual subspecies, and named them accordingly (e.g. Caucasians become homo sapiens sapiens, Negroes H. sapiens afer, and so on, and sub-races are elevated to the status of full races). As Professor Luigi Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University and Professor William Bodmer of Oxford University, both eminent human geneticists and both, incidentally, firm opponents of the idea of inherited racial differences in intelligence, put it in their classic textbook, The Genetics of Human Populations: “The differences that exist between the major racial groups are such that races could be called subspecies if we adopted for man a criterion suggested by Mayr (1963) for systematic zoology (see Coon, 1962; Clark, 1964). Mayr's criterion is that two or more groups become subspecies when 75% or more of all the individuals constituting the groups can be unequivocally classified as belonging to a particular group. As a matter of fact, when human races are defined fairly broadly, we could achieve a much lower error of classification than 25%, implying, according to Mayr, the existence of human sub-species. Most of the error would, in fact, come from hybrids of recent origin."
And some scientists would go even further. The great British biologist, Professor C. H. Waddington, CBE, MA, ScD, FRS, writes in his Introduction to Modern Genetics: "Man is a very variable animal. An Australian aborigine, a Chinaman, and a West European differ as much from each other as do many related species of monkeys."
So Rose and Richardson's differences in "common and heritable attributes" between the races of man do exist. Indeed, they are so great that they are not only sufficiently to easily justify the existence of races in man, but to justify, to many scientists, the division of mankind into subspecies or even, some believe, several entirely separate species (although this latter is still a minority viewpoint).
Rose and Richardson provide a second criterion which, if shown to be fulfilled, would presumably lead them to accept that the concept of race in man was "meaningful." They write: "a distinct human 'race', in the biological sense, would exist if the frequency with which a particular allele" (an allele is a particular form of a gene (the unit of heredity); for example the gene for eye colour has several alternative alleles, for blue, green, brown etc. and the eye colour each of us has depends on which two alleles, one from each parent, we inherited) "occurred in that group was very different from the frequency with which it occurred in another" (page 6).
And when we turn to Professors Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza's standard textbook on human population genetics, what do we find but : "The analysis of gene frequencies in different populations . . . shows that human groups considered to be different on anthropological evidence" (i.e. races) "are also distinct in terms of gene frequencies (see e.g. Boyd, 1952)" ― i.e. the frequencies with which particular alleles occur in that group. So human races pass Rose and Richardson's other test too.
So not only do Rose and Richardson present no evidence whatsoever that "in biological terms" (their emphasis) "the concept of 'race' is meaningless for human populations," but according to their own criteria this statement, their first "Main Point", is clearly not true! All they can offer to substantiate it is a lot of evidence that a lot of laymen do not know much about racial biology. A lot of laymen do not know much about neurotransmitter substances in the glial cells of the rat cerebrum, on which Professor Rose has published a number of papers, either, but we would not be so unkind as to assert that this proved that his work was "in biological terms" meaningless!
Indeed, such is the irrelevance of the argument on which Point 1 is apparently based that one might suppose that this point actually has nothing to do with the interesting little aside on pages 5 and 6 about how the word "race" can be used wrongly by non-scientists. But no, Rose and Richardson parade their evident paralysis of the logical faculties, in bold type no less, at the bottom of page 6: "It is as a result of observations like these" (those cited in the preceding two pages, which actually concern more the use of English than biology) "that modern biology is coming to discard the concept of 'race' as having any relevance to the study of human populations."
This statement is not only totally untrue, it is no less logically absurd than the equally valid statement that "As a result of the observation that there are no snakes native to Ireland, modern biology is coming to the conclusion that the moon is made of green cheese"! Even if the conclusion were true it would in no way follow from the argument leading up to it: this is known as a non sequitur and it is to be hoped that Professor Rose avoids their use in his papers on rats' brains as they are rather frowned upon in scientific circles.
But not content with proving their point with this dazzling display of lucid and relevant argument, our authors establish it beyond all possible doubt by citing that unimpeachable authority on all matters biological, "a leading British sociologist" (a "sociologist of race", no less!), who solemnly pontificates that "biology has nothing to contribute to the study of human 'race'." It is a trifle odd, in that case, that Rose and Richardson should have quoted irrelevant biological studies, rather than irrelevant sociological studies, to "prove" that human races do not exist. But nonetheless a Sociologist has spoken, and those mere biologists, such as Professor C. D. Darlington, FRS, MA, PhD, DSc, of Oxford University, Dr. John R. Baker, FRS, Reader in Cytology at the same University, Dr. Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, Professor Sir Peter Medawar, Dr. R. Gayre, MA, DPhil, DPolSc, DSc, Professor C. H. Waddington, CBE, MA, ScD, FRS, and a few thousand others, including most opponents of the idea of inherited racial differences in intelligence such as Professor Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Professor William Bodmer and the eminent population geneticist Professor Theodosius Dobzhansky, who had all hitherto laboured under the delusion that biology did have something to contribute to the study of human race, will no doubt be suitably grateful to the learned Sociologist for showing them the error of their ways. They will doubtless be especially impressed by the fact that the Sociologist in question is none other than Professor John Rex, the well-known Race Relations Industrialist, of that hallowed seat of learning, Warwick University (which institution we suspect might be more at home, academically and ideologically, as a Home for the Feeble-Minded in Vladivostok).
Before leaving this Main Point, we cannot resist mentioning another example of the logical tangles of the rambling Rose and his colleague, which further illustrates their apparent inability to understand the concept of relevance (perhaps they think that "modern biology is coming to discard" it!). This concerns their claim that "racial purity" is not a "meaningful concept" (page 6). To support this claim they cite scientific studies which show that the Jews are not a pure race. Since half a page later Rose and Richardson themselves tell us that the Jews are not a race at all in the biological sense, and since modern Jews include Ashkenazim of Central Asian origin and Sephardim of Levantine origin, to say nothing of black Falasha Jews from Ethiopia and brown Jews from India, and therefore cannot conceivably be racially pure even if they had originally been a separate race, it is hard to see the relevance of this. And even had Rose and Richardson chosen a genuine race and shown it to be racially impure, this would in no way have cast doubt upon the "meaningfulness" of racial purity as a concept, any more than the existence of muddy water casts doubt upon the "meaningfulness" of pure water as a concept or, for that matter, as something which actually exists. Such manifest inability to carry out simple logical thought processes on the part of highly qualified scientists is a disturbing reflection upon our educational system.
Having dealt with Point 1 we move to Point 2 . . .
Their Main Point Two: "More than 94 per cent of all genetic differences between individuals that have been studied occur between individuals of the same 'race', not between 'races'."
OUR REPLY
This Point certainly seems quite an impressive rebuttal of the case for innate racial differences at first sight. A closer look at what it actually says, what it means and the evidence quoted to back it rapidly reveals, however, that it is not a fair summary of the rather less impressive claims the authors are making and that, in any case, it would not matter if it were a fair summary and, moreover, were a proven scientific fact, since as usual it is irrelevant.
For what Rose and Richardson actually say in the text (page 6) is: "When allele frequencies are measured in human populations which are socially (their emphasis, not ours) defined as races (for instance, 'English', 'Jews', 'Blacks'), it turns out that for nearly all the genes studied the differences between individuals of different 'races' are no greater than for individuals of the same 'race'. Well over 94 per cent of all the differences are found within a given 'race' rather than between 'races'."
They are quite right to emphasise that what they are talking about is not differences between genuine biological races but fictitious 'socially defined' (i.e. made up by ignorant laymen) 'races' (there is, for instance, no such thing as an 'English race', or a 'black race'). Of course, since Rose and Richardson have spent the surrounding 2 ½ pages proving conclusively that such 'socially defined' 'races' are scientifically meaningless, it follows that they of all people should be well aware that studies, such as this one, based upon such pseudo-'races' are also therefore equally scientifically meaningless. So this quote and the Main Point derived from it, are quite without any scientific meaning!
It is, therefore, rather hard to understand why the authors should have included this material, which they evidently realise is nonsense, at all. The study they quote only shows that genetic analysis of members of ill-defined and biologically meaningless groups misnamed 'races' by some laymen, demonstrates just how ill-defined and biologically meaningless they are! The only conclusion to be drawn from this, as far as we can see, is that the public clearly needs a massive campaign of education on the subjects of Racial Biology, Physical Anthropology and Racial Differences, but somehow we suspect that this is not quite the point that Rose and Richardson would wish to make!
Similar studies have in fact been done on real biological races, such as Caucasoids, Negroids and Mongoloids, and as we have seen, the results are then totally different. As Professors Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza put it: “The analysis of gene" (i.e. allele, in this case) "frequencies in different populations ... shows that human groups considered to be different on anthropological evidence" (i.e. biological races) "are also distinct in terms of gene frequencies."
So as this point is based on 'socially defined' races it is irrelevant. Had it been allegedly based upon biologically defined races it would be wrong.
In any case, even if Main Point Two were indubitably true in its entirety instead of a nonsensical summary of an irrelevant finding, it would actually leave the case for inherited racial differences in intelligence quite unscathed. For if it were to be shown (which although Main Point Two appears to claim is so, it has not been, and Rose and Richardson do not really claim in any way that it has ― hence the Point is not a fair summary of what they are actually saying) that 94% of all genetic differences occurred between members of one race, then all that would prove is that all the multifarious differences between the races are due to the other 6% of the human genetic complement. According to Professor Rose, each one of us has about 100,000 genes, that is 6,000 genes (the total number of human genes is actually about 5 million, but as Rose is not a geneticist we may excuse his error). And since the wrong allele of one gene can turn an otherwise potentially normal person into an idiot, an achondroplastic ('circus') dwarf, a giant, a Huntingdon's chorea case genetically programmed, after a hitherto normal life, to go mad in his or her mid-thirties and die around fifty, or any one of numerous other, sometimes very weird indeed, deviations from the norm, or even kill him before birth; and we know that only about four genes cause all the differences in skin colour between Negroes and Caucasians, even 6,000 genes (let alone the 300,000 we get from correct figures) would certainly be more than enough to account for all the inherited differences between human races that have been observed or suggested. They would probably still be enough even if one human race consisted of little green men with seven fingers, one eye and an antenna sticking up out of their foreheads with an average IQ of 180!
Before going on to Point 3, I must present for the amusement of the reader what is perhaps the funniest example of Professor Rose and Dr. Richardson's idea of logical deduction. For the next sentence after the report of the study of allele frequencies in 'socially defined races' quoted above, reads as follows: "This means that, genetically, a white English individual is likely to be just as similar to or different from his white neighbour as he is to a Caribbean or Asian neighbour."
Leaving aside the fact that "this" ― consisting of a study of biologically-meaningless "socially defined" pseudo-races ― is, as the authors themselves should be well aware, utterly meaningless and therefore by definition quite incapable of meaning anything whatsoever, if it did mean what the authors say it meant, there would be some interesting practical results.
For if a white Englishman is likely to be as genetically similar to his Caribbean or Asian neighbour as to his fellow white Englishmen, then since these features are unarguably of genetic origin, he would be just as likely to look like his Caribbean or Asian neighbour (skin colour, thick lips, frizzy hair and all!) as like his fellow white Englishmen, and vice versa for his coloured neighbour. As a result, on average, half of all white Englishmen would look like Asians and Negroes, and half of all Asians and Negroes would look like white Englishmen! Perhaps that is the case where Professor Rose and Dr. Richardson live, or perhaps they just don't see many white Englishmen in their jobs, but it certainly isn't so where most normal Englishmen live.
Of course, Rose and Richardson might reply that whilst they did undeniably say that, what they really meant was that a white Englishman was as likely to be genetically similar to Asians or Negroes as to other white Englishmen except for the genes which cause the observed differences between white Englishmen and Asians/Negroes, but since obviously a white Englishman is as likely to be genetically similar to his dog as to his fellow white Englishmen except for the genes which cause the observed differences between a man and a dog this is scarcely a very telling point! Essentially all they are saying is that we are all the same except for the points where we are different. A fundamental discovery indeed!
Having shown that 'Main Point Two' is even sillier and less relevant than 'Main Point One', we fare onward to do battle with 'Main Point Three'.
Their Main Point Three: "Intelligence tests may give results agreeing with children's school performance but they say nothing about any fixed 'biological potential' of the individual."
OUR REPLY
The first part of this "Point", admitting that "intelligence tests may give results agreeing with children's school performance," represents a major concession on the part of the authors in the space of just seven pages, since on page 8 they were claiming that "the correlation between IQ tests and school performance is poor."
This may be due to a sudden access of memory on the part of one of the authors, Professor S. P. R. Rose, since his last-quoted remark, if it had gone uncorrected, would have compared interestingly with his own statement in a paper he had published in 1973. This paper, entitled "Science, Racism and Ideology", was published in that august scientific journal Socialist Register, and subsequently reprinted as a booklet by that illustrious learned society of academics, the "Campaign on Racism, IQ and the Class Society", and on page 249 thereof Rose states: "In general, IQ scores correlate very highly with scholastic achievements and their predictive value in this area is one use to which they have been put."
Unless there is a subtle distinction between "scholastic achievements" (of children, as Rose makes clear in the context) and "school performance" which we have not grasped, there would appear to be a slight case of self-contradiction on this point.
So we have it on the authority of Professor Rose himself, the co-author of "Main Point Three", that IQ tests (not just 'intelligence tests') do (not 'may') give results correlating very highly (not just 'agreeing') with children's school performance. So much for the first half of "Main Point Three".
Incidentally, IQ scores correlate very highly with more than just school performance. For example, they correlate with the speed of brain waves measured by an electro-encephalograph produced in response to a sudden stimulus such as a flash of light ― perhaps the most 'culture free test possible, as it could be applied as well among dogs or beetles as to any men from any culture or race.
Normal curve of distribution of intelligence, showing the expected percentages of the population in each IQ range. Except at the extremes, these percentages are quite close to what occur in actual populations.
IQs of a representative sample of 2,904 children between the ages of 2 and 18, showing the percentage of subjects whose scores fall into each five-point interval. The IQs are based on Stanford-Binet tests.
'Brain waves' resulting from a sudden stimulus (light). The waves are the 'evoked potentials' recorded on an electro-encephalograph, and the score used is the wave length of the first four waves to occur (E1 to E4). Note that the wave lengths are shortest for the brightest, longest for the dullest subject. In other words, transmission of information is quick for bright, slow for dull subjects.
Evoked potentials from ten bright and ten dull subjects. Note the quick waves in the former, and the slow waves in the latter.
The second part of this point, the question of whether intelligence tests say anything about any fixed "biological potential" of the testee, depends upon whether intelligence is mainly inherited or acquired, and so is best discussed together with "Main Point Four".
A mass of epistemological casuistries (better known as irrelevant pseudo-intellectual nit-picking!) about the "meaning of intelligence" of the "does 'intelligence' really exist?" type (after reading this booklet we must admit that we, too, begin to wonder in some cases!), which occupy 24 pages of text between the origins of Points 3 and 4, are evidently (and understandably!) not even considered worth immortalising in a "Main Point", so we can go on to "Main Point Four" without more ado.
Their Main Point Four: "It is not meaningful or possible to divide a child's performance into 'genetic'or 'environmental' components."
OUR REPLY
This Point was obviously intended, in a somewhat roundabout way, to cover the real kernel of the race/intelligence issue. For the crux of this matter lies in the answer to this vital question: "are the differences in average intelligence between the races of man”, whose existence few if any now dispute (Rose and Richardson in this work don't), due primarily to the effects of the social, economic and cultural differences between the races (the 'environmentalist' position hitherto adopted by most liberals and multi-racialists and a few scientists) or do they reflect differences in the average inherited genetic endowment of the races (the 'hereditarian' position adopted by most scientists working in this field, and also by those concerned with the preservation of their race and nation) or is this question scientifically meaningless and not susceptible to an answer (the 'evading the issue' position adopted by Professor Rose and Dr. Richardson in their booklet)?"
The term "environmentalist" as used in this work refers to those who believe that intelligence, and other aspects of human nature, are primarily the result of the effects of each individual's environment rather than his or her genetics. It is placed in inverted commas to distinguish it from, and should on no account be confused with, the other, and entirely praiseworthy, sort of environmentalist who is concerned with the quality of the human environment and with minimising the damage we do to our environment by pollution, urban sprawl etc.
In order to answer this question the first point to establish is whether the measured intelligence of the individuals making up each race is primarily due to their heredity or their environment. Here Rose and Richardson are right (for once!) to say that we cannot (yet) state that, for any given person, his intelligence is 'x' per cent determined by his heredity and 'y' per cent by his environment i.e. our understanding is not yet sufficient for quantitative measurements to be made.
But in qualitative terms most geneticists and many psychologists would say that the position is clear. At conception, our genes determine our maximum potential intelligence and in what way our environmental influences will affect the attainment of this (for the same environment has different effects on different people, obviously for purely genetic reasons). What we cannot yet do is measure this inherited potential intelligence level (except insofar as obviously it cannot be lower than the measured intelligence level: a highly intelligent person clearly has a high genetic intelligence potential; and a much less intelligent person who shared a similar childhood environment almost certainly has a lower one) but such measurements are not 'meaningless', they just aren't yet possible, just as in 1900 heavier-than-air flying machines were not 'meaningless', just not yet possible.
Of course, environment has an effect. In the words of Dr. J. R. Baker of Oxford University : "It is scarcely necessary to insist that the environment plays a part in the development of cognitive ability. Theoretically it would be possible to rear a child without ever allowing him to see anything, or to move about and thereby gain ideas of space, or handle separate objects and thus conceive of numbers, or hear any external sound, or even be aware of the existence of any other human being. It is unthinkable that such a child could evince any but the most rudimentary cognitive ability. His genes might be such that if he had experienced the ordinary upbringing of the great majority of children in the world, he would have displayed an IQ of 140 or more; in the circumstances his mental potentiality (our emphasis) would remain hidden. What we have before us in any organism, including man, is the result of interaction between inheritance and environment." But the effects of the comparatively small range of environments encountered in modern society are unlikely to be very great.
Intelligence potential is believed to be determined by a number of genes ("polygenic inheritance") and in fact intelligence behaves in exactly the same way with respect to its variation, inheritance, environmental effects and different averages in different races as most other continuously variable human characteristics, e.g. height, arm length etc., but since these are less controversial geneticists have been working quietly away for many years investigating the interactions between genes and environment and the extent to which environment can have an effect on inherited characteristics without being accused of doing 'meaningless' research. Indeed it has long been generally accepted without demur that these other characters are basically determined by heredity, with environmental variations, unless really extreme, playing a minor modifying role. The reasons why intelligence should be somehow 'different' do not lie in scientific factors at all, but in the roles of totally unscientific political and ideological vested interests on the part of a few isolated workers in the field, and a much larger number of 'commentators' whose ignorance is only exceeded by their prejudice and bigotry.
But when discussing the question of 'Race, Intelligence and Education' we are not really interested in the relative contributions of heredity and environment to individual intelligence (i.e. what causes intelligence?) but in the relative contributions of heredity and environment to differences in individual intelligence (i.e. "what causes differences in intelligence?"). So, of course, Rose and Richardson's "Main Point Four", which is concerned only with the former question, is totally irrelevant to the subject of their booklet!
On the question of whether the observed differences in human intelligence are primarily hereditary or environmental in origin we find, as even Rose and Richardson admit, that genetics has a very precise technique for obtaining a clear answer, the technique of "heritability studies."
What is done in these studies is to compare the character in question, intelligence in this case, in individuals who share genetic complements to a greater or lesser extent, e.g. identical twins (100% similar), non-identical twins or brothers and sisters (on average 50% similar genes), parents to their children (50%), grandparents and grandchildren (25%), first cousins (12.5%) and so on. Obviously, the ideal case to study is that of identical twins reared apart (same genes, different environment, so any difference in intelligence must be entirely due to the environment), but as these are few and far between most of the work done has been on remoter relatives. Once the character has been measured and the degree of genetic similarity worked out for enough individuals, a fairly straightforward statistically verifiable calculation yields the 'heritability' ― the per cent contribution of genetic variance to total observed variance.
Correlations not corrected for attenuation (unreliability)
1. Assuming assortative mating and partial dominance
2. Assuming random mating and only additive genes, i.e. the simplest possible polygenic model
This table compares the correlation of IQ among people related to each other in various ways with the correlation one would expect to find if differences in IQ were completely determined by heredity. The table summarises well over 100 studies and is taken from Jensen's monograph. The most appropriate comparison is between the column stating the 'Obtained Median r' and that giving the 'Theoretical Value 1' assuming assortative mating and partial dominance; it will be seen that agreement is pretty good, although of course far from perfect. The degree of imperfection of fit between the theoretical model and the actual figures can be used to calculate the amount of environmental influence that must be postulated, and this calculation gives us the value of 20% or thereabouts.
A large number of heritability studies, from the 1920s to the present day, have been done on human intelligence, And all have agreed on a figure of around 80% for its heritability. In other words the observed differences in intelligence between individuals in the populations studied are 80% due to differences in their genes, and only 20% to differences in their environments. This implies that the range of environmental variation in our society can only modify inherited intelligence potential by about 20%, so that the intelligence of individuals is approximately four-fifths due to their genes.
Of course, as Dr. Baker points out in the above quote, a more variable environment could produce a greater environmental contribution to intelligence differences ― someone who had been locked away in a dark box all his life, or hit on the head with an iron bar, would have a measured intelligence whose difference from that of others would be almost totally due to the effects of his environment! Also, intelligence can be affected under certain circumstances by genes not normally concerned with it at all.
For example, there is a gene which codes for a substance produced by the body to convert phenylalanine, a component of some foods, into a harmless and useful product. If one inherits alleles of this gene which are defective, then the converter substance, an 'enzyme', is not produced and if such a person eats phenylalanine containing food, poisonous phenylalanine derivatives build up in the blood and cause permanent brain damage, a condition known as phenylketonuria (PKU). This brain damage certainly reduces IQ (just as a bash on the head with a sledgehammer does!), and if a PKU sufferer is diagnosed in time (as a baby) and does not eat phenylalanine he will not suffer brain damage and his IQ will then depend on his normal genes for intelligence. But it is hardly very useful to say, as Rose and Richardson do, that the environment, in the form of a correct diet, can change the gene for PKU from a “low-IQ” gene to a "non-low IQ" gene because it is not an "IQ gene" at all, and so its behaviour has nothing to do with how IQ is normally determined and it is a (deliberately?) misleading example for them to quote on this issue.
However, in reality individuals and racial groups of lower intelligence live in the same society as the rest of us, and it has not (as far as we are aware) been suggested that such individuals and groups are all locked in boxes as children, or bashed on the head, or are untreated phenylketonurics, or are in any other way subjected to extremes of environment, so there is no reason to suppose that heredity plays a lesser part in determining their intelligence than anyone else's.
This "80% heritability" figure is fatal to the environmentalist position, at least as far as accounting for differences in intelligence between individuals of the same race and society are concerned, and they have no effective answer to it. Most concede the point, and retreat to arguing that this figure only applies to differences within races, rather than between them, a position we shall examine shortly. A few diehards, whose fanaticism seems to owe little to purely scientific concerns, including Rose and Richardson, refuse to face the 80% heritability figure at all and denounce it as "a Big Fraud", hysterically proclaiming that the results it is based upon are "all faked" and introducing such creatures strange to science as "capitalist society", "fascists", "plutocratic plotters" and so on (the CIA and the "Gang of Four" have not as yet been implicated!).
Rose and Richardson, who presumably hope to be taken reasonably seriously, leave out such comic capers at this stage, and rely on sheer effrontery and bluff (in bold print no less!): "the most commonly cited studies" (to establish the dreaded 80%!) "those of Cyril Burt, are now regarded as scientifically discredited, and similar critiques have been made of other studies in this area." These unsupported assertions cannot be allowed to pass without a closer examination.
Cyril Burt or, to restore to him the honours he richly deserved, Professor Sir Cyril Burt, was Britain's most distinguished educational psychologist, and in fifty years of painstaking research, ended only by his death in 1971, contributed perhaps more than any other scientist to the modern understanding of the measurement and inheritance of intelligence. He was a principal contributor to the design of IQ tests, and one of the most widely used such tests, the Binet-Burt test, bears his name. He also edited the learned and prestigious British Journal of Statistical Psychology for many years.
Professor CYRIL BURT: eminent scientist unfairly smeared by Reds and liberals.
So impressive were the vast collection of results he arrayed in support of the 80% heritability figure (which incidentally was published in 1966, not in the 1920s and 30s as Rose and Richardson seem to think) that opponents to the hereditarian position despaired of disproving it. So, taking advantage of the fact that Sir Cyril was no longer in a position to seek redress at Law, a few extremists set out to discredit him instead.
Led by an obscure American associate of Professor Rose's, one Leon Kamin, who had hitherto been noted only in the columns of the Journal of Radical Psychology and other such dubious outlets of neo-Marxist pseudo-scientific maunderings, they set about spreading scurrilous rumours that Sir Cyril had "faked his results" and that he had even "invented non-existent scientific co-workers." These gravely defamatory slurs first emerged from the nether regions where they were concocted when they were published in the Sunday Times in October 1976 in an article by the paper's Medical Correspondent, Dr. Oliver Gillie (whose book Who do you think you are? Man or Superman: The Genetic Controversy is "recommended reading" according to the list at the end of this NUT booklet).
A great outcry arose, and upon closer investigation the "Great Burt Fraud Shock! Horror! Scandal!" proved to consist of a couple of minor (and insignificant) slips in some long statistical tables such as could have arisen by slips in copying, and a series of complex statistical checks by Arthur Jensen, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that Burt's results tallied with those of three quite independent studies in a way which would have been extremely improbable if the results had been faked. The even more ludicrous charge that this eminent and distinguished Man of Science had indulged in James Bond antics with hordes of fictitious scientists and co-workers who never existed etc. also collapsed ignominiously when numerous people who had met Dr. Margaret Howard, alleged leading figure in Professor Burt's alleged secret army of non-existent researchers, came forward.
Professor ARTHUR JENSEN: he checked Burt's figures and found a few minor errors not a vast conspiracy to fake results.
Certain people were indeed "scientifically discredited" by this sordid and silly affair, but Professor Sir Cyril Burt was not amongst them. Had Sir Cyril lived a little longer it is safe to say that this disgraceful affair would have left its authors somewhat impoverished and Sir Cyril lawfully vindicated: but they probably wouldn't have dared smear him at all if he had been able to reply ― their supporters would more likely have beaten him up instead, as they did Professor Eysenck, Professor Jensen and Professor E. O. Wilson, or threatened to kill him, as they did to Professor Richard Herrenstein of Harvard. These tactics of vicious abuse, physical violence, intimidation, and posthumous character assassination have no place in Science, and such a descent to the tactics of the gutter and the gangster in defence of a gravely endangered theory raises a serious question of possible ulterior motives on the part of those wishing to maintain the environmentalist position in the face of the evidence.
In any case, even if one leaves out of account Sir Cyril Burt's entirely valid and scientifically creditable findings, so many independent studies have confirmed his 80% heritability figure that it can hardly be seriously doubted any longer (unless, as Rose and Richardson imply, they are all frauds!). Even Professor Christopher Jencks of Harvard, a bitter critic of Burt who regards his data as 'suspect', nonetheless considers that Burt's basic theory of the role of heredity in the determination of intelligence is correct, and believes, on the basis of his own long-term, large-scale studies of American children (all faked, of course, presumably) that: "intelligence is at least 60% determined by genetic factors."
Having made their disgraceful and defamatory attack upon the reputation of one of Britain's greatest scientists, Rose and Richardson bluff on (still in bold print!): "The result is that Leon Kamin" ― yes, the very same heroic libeller of deceased scientists ― "when recently re-evaluating studies of identical twins and analogous studies, was led to the conclusion that there was no evidence from which to deduce that there was any heritable component to IQ differences at all."
Kaolin's 're-evaluation' presumably consisted simply of denouncing all evidence contrary to his own (none-too-widely-shared!) views as 'faked' but in any case, this junior lecturer at the obscure New York City University is not the only one to have done such a 're-evaluation.' Professor Henry Munsinger of the University of California has done his own 're-evaluation' of all the work published on this subject ('The Adopted Child's I.Q.; a Critical Review', Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association, September, 1975), and he comes to a somewhat different conclusion: "the available data strongly suggests that, under existing circumstances, heredity is much more important than environment in producing individual differences in IQ." We realise of course that Professor Munsinger is a faker of results, a capitalist-roader, a fascist, and an enemy of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought, who never actually existed at all but is a posthumous invention of Sir Cyril Burt's, but being rather Enemies of the Proletarian Revolution ourselves we are inclined to disregard such weighty factors and take into account instead mere bourgeois irrelevances like the relative academic standing and professional conduct of Kamin and Professor Munsinger in deciding which 're-evaluation' we would tend to accept.
It is an interesting commentary on the impartiality or otherwise of the factual and analytical material Rose and Richardson provide that they quote the extremist burblings of the nonentity Kamin in bold type and totally ignore Professor Munsinger's equally relevant review of the same topic.
Other techniques confirm that intelligence, in our society at least, is primarily inherited. For example, graphs plotted by Professor Jensen of Berkeley of the expected distribution of IQ's in the population if (a) all differences in IQ were entirely due to environmental factors and (b) if all such differences were entirely due to hereditary factors, when compared with the graph obtained from the actual population show that the observed curve is much closer to the totally hereditary curve (b) (it differs slightly from it because the heritability of IQ is 80% rather than 100%).
(a) The heavy line shows what the distribution of IQ's would be theoretically if all genotypes were identical (i.e. everyone had identical heredity for intelligence) and all differences in IQ were due entirely to environmental differences. The shaded curve represents the normal distribution of IQ's in the present population.
(b) The heavy line shows what the distribution of IQ's would be theoretically if all variance due to environmental factors had been eliminated and all differences in IQ were due entirely to hereditarian influences. The shaded curve represents the normal distribution of IQ's in the present population.
So from all the foregoing it can be seen that, contrary to the second section of "Main Point Three", intelligence tests do tell us a lot about the fixed biological potential of the individual (though certainly they don't, yet, tell us everything), so the rest of Point Three bites the dust.
However, the estimates of the heritability of intelligence referred to above are valid only within races: they cannot be applied to differences in intelligence between races. Rose and Richardson (probably because they are none-too-sure that then-readers will swallow their "all heritability estimates are faked" line) are careful to point this out ― and since this is perhaps the only factually correct and entirely relevant comment in their whole booklet let us give them due credit for it! They say, quite rightly and even relevantly: "It would theoretically be possible for the heritability of a trait like intelligence to be 100% within the *White' population and 100% within the 'Black' population, and yet this would say nothing about differences between Blacks and Whites, which could still be entirely environmental." Alas, after this promising start they degenerate into their normal level of illogicality by claiming that this "proves" that the question of whether racial differences in intelligence are primarily genetic or environmental in origin is "not susceptible to an answer."
Of course it proves nothing of the sort. Firstly, because this problem with heritability studies may be overcome in time: indeed Professor Jensen has already announced a statistical method of obtaining a value for the heritability of inter-racial intelligence differences which is currently being evaluated by the scientific community.
And secondly because this question can be answered in other ways than by using heritability studies. The obvious way of answering it is by using the standard scientific method of seeing which of two or more rival theories or hypotheses best predicts the situation actually observed and also predicts best what would happen if something was done to" that situation. In our case, we simply see which of the two rival theories of the origin of racial differences in intelligence, the "environmental theory" and the "genetic theory", best predicts what we actually observe as a result of various sorts of tests and which best predicts the likely results of doing things to the social situation. This is the standard scientific method of answering a question, and if Professor Rose has never heard of it, it bodes ill for his work on rats' brains!
If the differences in average intelligence observed between different races are due to environmental differences, then since these differences are observed in the USA and Britain where the races in question live in the same physical and climatic environment, eat (more or less) the same food and breathe the same air, the differences in question must be socio-economic in nature: the less intelligent races presumably must enjoy poorer education, fewer opportunities, worse jobs, poorer housing and less money than the more intelligent races. If this is so, then one would predict, on the basis of this, the environmentalist hypothesis, that members of different races having the same "socio-economic status" ― i.e. equal wealth, the same level of educational attainment, similar jobs, equally good housing, similar 'social standing' etc. ― would, if differences in these socio-economic parameters caused differences in intelligence, have on average the same I.Q.
The hereditarian view, on the other hand, would predict that, since one race was better endowed genetically as far as intelligence was concerned, then members of different races with the same socio-economic status ought still to differ significantly in average IQ (unless, of course, socio-economic status were directly determined by IQ, which in our society, as Rose and Richardson helpfully point out (page 8) it is ― perhaps unfortunately ― not).
Similarly, 'environmentalists' would predict that the unarguable considerable decrease in the difference between the socio-economic statuses of American Negroes and American Caucasians over the last sixty years would produce a corresponding decrease in the difference between the average IQ's of these two racial groups, whereas the genetic theory would predict that there should be no such decrease in the average IQ difference.
Well, what do the results show? In 1958, Professor Audrey M. Shuey published The Testing of Negro Intelligence, a monumental study of the results of nearly 50 years' of all sorts of intelligence tests applied to American Negroes including many Negro/Caucasian comparative studies. From the overall results of all these studies, Professor Shuey concluded that "large and significant differences in intelligence test performances between Negroes and Whites are reported even when the socio-economic environment has been equated for both groups." And, with regard to our second test of the two theories, Shuey concludes: "White and Negro differences (in intelligence) persist over the entire 44-year time span (1913-1957) despite increases in the social and economic opportunities available to Negroes relative to those of Whites." An independent study specifically aimed at investigating this question conducted by Professor F. C. J. McGurk in the late 1950's confirmed Shuey's conclusions. Many subsequent studies have fully supported these findings: in fact, higher socio-economic status Negroes have been consistently found to have a lower average IQ than lower socio-economic status Whites!
So thus far all the predictions of the environmentalist hypothesis are flatly contradicted by the facts and all those of the hereditarian one are triumphantly and totally confirmed: the results are exactly what would be expected if racial differences in average intelligence were inherited.
The environmentalist position was dealt a crushing blow by these findings, but its adherents answered them by claiming that the indices used to assess socio-economic levels were too crude and materialistic, and failed to take account of factors such as the "inherent racism of White capitalist society" and the Negroes' history of slavery and discrimination.
Very well, if these factors cause the lower average intelligence of the American Negro, they should have an even greater depressing effect on the average IQ of the American Indian. For American Indians are on average much poorer than American Negroes; they have been the victims of racial discrimination far more intense than that the Negroes constantly complain of; their ancestors, unlike US Negroes, were not taken from their homeland but had their homeland taken from them; they have suffered not slavery but virtual racial extermination at the hands of the Whites; and long after the Negroes had been freed and given US citizenship (and, from 1865 until around 1900, Negro children in many parts of the US Deep South had free public education not available to many White children in the area), the Indians were being first butchered and then herded to starve and die of TB in barren 'reservations' without education, US citizenship or medical care under the tyranny of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a situation which lasted long into the present century.
So every possible environmental factor which could be claimed to have reduced the average intelligence of US Negroes relative to Whites applies with a vengeance to American Indians, and therefore the environmentalist hypothesis clearly would predict that the average IQ of American Indians would be below, and certainly no higher than, that of US Negroes. In contrast, because of their genetic links with the highly intelligent Mongoloid race, and to the fairly advanced Maya, Aztec and Quechua (Inca) peoples, the hereditarian theory would predict that American Indians would have a significantly higher average intelligence than American Negroes descended mainly from primitive African tribesmen.
Again, what do the results show? Professor Arthur Jensen gives his findings: "despite greater environmental disadvantage, as assessed by 12 different indices, the (American) Indian children, on the average, exceeded the negro in IQ and achievement. But I did not pick the environmental indices. The sociologists picked them. They are those environmental factors most often cited by socialscientists as the cause of the negroes' poor performance on IQ tests and in school work." Professor Jensen goes on to ask "Does not the fact that another group rates even lower than the negro on these environmental indices (Indians are as far below negroes as negroes are below whites), yet displays better intellectual performance, bring into question the major importance attributed to these environmental factors by sociologists? Or should we grant immunity from empirical tests to sociological theories when they are devised to explain racial differences?" Numerous other studies confirm Professor Jensen's findings. So, yet again, the environmentalist hypothesis fails, and the hereditarian one succeeds, in predicting and accounting for the observed real-life situation.
Scores of white, Mexican-American and negro children on the Progressive Matrices test, a culture fair type of IQ test. Note that although Mexican-American childreri are lower in socio-economic status than negro children, they score much higher than negro children on this test. (Scores are given in terms of T-scores, i.e. having a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10.)
One would also, from an environmentalist position, predict that other 'socially disadvantaged' ethnic minority groups would exhibit IQs in proportion to their degree of 'social disadvantage.' But in fact Mexicans (a Caucasian / Amerindian admixture) living in the USA, who are socially no better off than Negroes, and who have additional language difficulties (English is the only language spoken in 98.2% of American Negro homes, but only in 19.7% of Mexican homes in the US ― 14.7% of the latter speak only English or some other non-English tongue) score little worse than pure Caucasians on 'culture-fair' IQ tests, and on tests of scholastic achievement and 'culture-linked' intelligence tests they score below pure Caucasoids but still markedly above Negroes.10
And Japanese and Chinese descended people in America, who were imported to the US in the 1860's in the first instance, as virtual slave labour in the construction of the Central Pacific railway; who have been the subject of numerous bitterly-fought campaigns to prevent their further immigration (successfully) and to send them back (less successfully so far); who in the case of the Japanese were subjected to severe racial persecution and, in many cases, thrown into concentration camps during the Second World War; and who differ very markedly in terms of language and culture from the society in which they live, actually score higher in IQ tests than Caucasians!
So the American Indians are not an isolated case: there appears to be no relationship whatever between the socio-economic status of an ethnic minority group and its average intelligence. This is the exact opposite of what the environmental theory of the origin of racial differences in intelligence would predict, and indeed it is very difficult if not impossible to account for these well-established findings in terms of that theory. But it is just what one would expect if the average intelligence of such groups was an innate property of the pool of genetic inheritance of these groups, as much a part of their inherent nature as the colour of their skin and the structure of their skeleton, and as little open to 'socio-economic' influences.
In desperation, adherents of the "environmentalist" theory are reduced to blaming the unarguably poor performance of Negroes in IQ tests on vague and unsupported assertions: they do poorly in IQ tests because they "lack motivation", i.e. they are not interested in doing well in them, and because they "lack self-esteem", i.e. they expect to do badly anyway. But alas for these claims, Professor Hans J. Eysenck of the Institute of Psychology at London's Maudsley Hospital (an institution our friend Professor Rose would do well not to condemn utterly as "scientifically discredited", a producer of "faked results" or a habitation of non-existent scientists as it was there that he worked for his own Ph.D. between 1959 and 1962!) has shown that lack of motivation and self-esteem has no effect whatsoever upon the performance of candidates in IQ tests! And if this were not so, if lack of motivation and self-esteem did impair the performance of candidates in IQ tests, then since American Indians show far greater lack of self-esteem and motivation than American or UK Negroes they ought therefore to perform worse, but, as we have seen, they do not. And in any case, there is no evidence that Negroes do lack self-esteem or motivation: as Professor Shuey puts it "there is no consistent evidence of lower self-esteem in Negroes: if there is a difference, it would appear to be more likely that Negroes have a greater sense of personal worth, rather than the reverse," and the situation is the same with regard to alleged "lower motivation" in Negroes. Certainly, anyone encountering one of the groups of young Negroes that wander the streets of areas such as Brixton, Handsworth or Toxteth is hardly likely to be struck by their "lack of self-esteem"! So much for this claim (which is briefly re-iterated in the NUT booklet, page 9): the factors proposed by environmentalists to explain away results embarrassing to their theory do not in fact exist, and could not explain away the awkward results if they did!
Professor HANS EYSENCK
Finally, when attempts are made to apply the environmental hypothesis in practice, they fail disastrously. One famous example is the series of programmes of remedial education, 'Operation Head Start' and others, initiated all over the US at vast federal expense in the early 1960s. The idea was to compensate Negroes for their "poor pre-school environment" by giving them special extra educational advantages (more teachers, resources, individual attention etc.) in their pre-school and early school lives. If the environmental hypothesis were correct, this should have produced some decrease in the pre-existing racial differences in average IQ, whereas hereditarians would predict that no such effect would occur and the whole thing would prove a massive waste of the taxpayers' money. In 1966, after a few years of these projects, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare published the Coleman Report on Equality of Opportunity. This massive Government report, collecting data from 654,000 pupils in 4,000 schools all over the USA, showed conclusively that racial differences in IQ were as great as ever, and, moreover, was amongst the studies which proved that American Indians, despite a worse environment, are on average considerably more intelligent than American Negroes. So the hereditarian theory succeeds yet again.
So to sum up: every time the alternative hypotheses advanced to explain the observed racial differences in average intelligence have been practically tested, the hereditarian hypothesis has proved correct and the environmental one has proved false. In any other branch of Science, the environmental hypothesis would long ago have been rejected, for these reasons, and so one must begin seriously to question the motives of those who persist in upholding it in the face of the evidence.
In fact, Rose and Richardson do not seriously attempt to uphold the environmental hypothesis. All they do is assert (in the bold print which they appear to reserve for their more outrageous attempts at unsubstantiated bluff!) that: "There is no sort of research which can answer the question 'how much does environment and how much do genes contribute to differences in intelligence between middle class and working class, or Black and White children?' because it is not a scientifically meaningful question which is susceptible to answer." As we have seen, this is utter nonsense. Apart from the irrelevant introduction of social/political concepts of "class", all scientists adopting either an environmentalist or a hereditarian view of this question, which appears to be everyone working in this field apart from Professor S. P. R. Rose and Dr. K. Richardson, thereby implicitly accept that it is both "scientifically meaningful" and "susceptible to an answer". They may, and do, differ as to what that answer may be, or whether the state of knowledge at present is sufficient to provide a clear answer, but that such an answer exists almost no one disputes. And, as more and more evidence pours in, it is becoming ever clearer, if indeed it has not already become clear, what that answer must be. That is why arguments on behalf of what is looking more and more like the losing side, the environmentalist side, are becoming, in certain quarters, ever more strident, silly and blatantly ideologically motivated.
It is an interesting comment on any claims to impartiality which Rose and Richardson may advance (although in fairness to them, they do not actually do so ― such claims are advanced on their behalf by their publishers) that on this point they put forward a viewpoint which is so far from the generally accepted one that virtually no one, from the Soviet Academy of Sciences to the Racial Preservation Society, from Dr. Oliver Gillie to Professor Hans Eysenck, would concur with it!
The reality of racial differences in average intelligence not even Rose and Richardson dispute (though they do dispute the existence of races at all, a specious and rather silly argument we have already dealt with). After all, even Dr. Oliver Gillie concedes in the very book Rose and Richardson recommend (and, since unlike Rose and Richardson's effort, it does do justice to the environmentalist case, such as it is, so do we) that "No one seriously disputes" (except Rose and Richardson, who dispute the existence of "various races", but perhaps they are "no one serious"!) "that the intelligence of various races . . . measured by available IQ tests, does differ. The IQ of US Negroes has repeatedly been found to be on average 15 ― 20 points lower than that of US Whites." And Professors Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, the eminent human geneticists, in their standard University textbook on human population genetics not only admit the existence of such racial differences in average IQ but cite a study by Kennedy and others in 1963 which showed a mean US Negro/White IQ difference of 21.1, that 95.5% of the 1800 randomly chosen Negroes tested had IQ's below the White American average (101.8), and, moreover, that 18.4% of the Negroes, compared with 2% of Whites, had IQ's below 70 (i.e. were clearly mentally defective).
Distribution of IQ scores of a sample of negro and white children, tested in 1960. The graph shows the number of subjects whose scores fall into each five-point interval of IQ (40-44, 45-49 etc.). The mean scores are 80.7 (negro) and 101.8 (white).
So these differences are quite considerable. Professors Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, writing in 1971, stated that "presently available data are inadequate" to resolve the question of the genetic or environmental origin of these racial intelligence differences "in either direction": this of course flatly contradicts Rose and Richardson's assertion that "It is not a question of . . . 'more research is needed' " because they think the question is inherently unanswerable, and we suspect that the learned Professors may speak with perhaps a little more authority here than the evidently rather less learned on this subject Rose and Co. (In fact, as implied above, even Dr. Gillie disagrees with Rose here: on page 54 of the very book Rose and Co. themselves recommend, he says: "In theory, science might indeed settle the issue with relevant evidence.")
So it seems that, contrary to Rose and Richardson's assertions, racial differences in average intelligence are a 'meaningful' phenomenon (and a very significant one) and do reflect basic differences in the genetic endowment of the races.
This view, unlike the eccentric ramblings of Rose and his associate, has a long and distinguished scientific pedigree. For example, the great Charles Darwin, who laid the foundations of our modem knowledge of Evolution, wrote in his classic work, The Descent of Man, "There, is, however, ho doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other ― as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference . . . Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct." Darwin's great advocate, the eminent T. H. Huxley, in his own work Man's Place in Nature, stressed the range in variation of the brain between different races. The man who has been described as "the founder of the science of comparative ethnology," Sir E. B. Taylor, wrote in Anthropology: "Anthropology finds race-differences most clearly in stature and proportions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within, characters of features, skin, eyes and hair, peculiarities of constitution, and mental and moral temperament ... In comparing races, one of the first questions that occurs is whether people who differ so much intellectually as savage tribes and civilized nations show any corresponding differences in their brain. There is, in fact, a considerable difference."
Since these great men made their pioneering observations, numerous scientists have described significant racial differences in the size, shape and structure of the brain (see e.g. reference 15 for a detailed list of some of these important papers), and the noted British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith even went so far as to contend that the "primary marks of race are psychological." Sir Ronald Fisher, Professor of Genetics at Cambridge University, and one of the world's leading geneticists, has added his weight to the idea that, as he puts it "human groups differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development."
Professor Carleton S. Coon, President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, argues in his Origin of Races that racial differences are so great, and the fossil evidence such, that the modern races of Homo sapiens must have evolved separately and at different times from the "ape-man" Homo erectus, so that the most intelligent modern races, the Caucasoid and the Mongoloid evolved to the "sapiens state" first (though separately) to be followed by the Negro over 200,000 years later and the even more primitive Australids and Bushmen after that. This theory, for which Professor Coon marshals an impressive array of evidence, would certainly explain the present situation, and even Professors Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, although they do not subscribe to Professor Coon's theory, say merely that "it is at present impossible to accept or to reject" it until further fossil evidence comes to light.
Beside these titans of Science, the likes of Rose and Richardson pale into total and not undeserved insignificance. Perhaps they are aware of this themselves, for nowhere in their booklet, which is supposed to be "a guide to the facts and issues," do they dispute any of these learned opinions: they simply ignore them completely. The trick of ignoring inconvenient evidence to which the authors have no answer is common in such learned journals as Pravda and the Peking Daily but it is somewhat chilling to see it appearing in an allegedly "essentially correct" publication of a British Trades Union. (It may of course be suggested that this reply itself ignores some of the work of environmental-theory scientists, but it does deal with all the relevant evidence, such as it is, offered by Rose and Richardson here, and if, in any forthcoming edition of their booklet, they care to cite any more evidence to support their ideas, we shall be glad to answer it in a future edition of this reply or elsewhere.)
To those readers wishing to learn more about the evidence for inherited racial differences in intelligence we would recommend, as an excellent review of most of the work done up to 1974, Dr. John Baker of Oxford University's learned tome Race, published by Oxford University Press, which contains over 600 pages of "facts and issues" which Professor Rose, Dr. Richardson and, it would seem, the NUT prefer to ignore.
From all the foregoing, it appears today increasingly certain that the position with regard to racial differences in intelligence, like that for individual differences in intelligence which we have already examined, is similar to the position with regard to racial differences in some other, mainly inherited, continuously variable characteristic.
An example, between sub-races rather than full races, would be the observed differences in average adult height between Ituri Forest Pygmies and their standard-sized Negro neighbours. Here it has long been accepted by all, without demur, suggestions of fraud, fascism etc., or NUT booklets, that these differences are basically hereditary in origin, and that an optimal growing environment, whilst it might cause both groups to grow, on average, taller, would not greatly reduce, still less eliminate, the differences between them. The position with regard to the differences in average intelligence between Whites and Negroes is much the same: an optimal learning environment might raise the average IQ of both groups a little (indeed, studies have shown that improvements in environment have raised the average IQ of British schoolchildren a little, at least in Aberdeen between 1932 and 1947; a similar effect has also occurred for average height of British adults in the last 100 years) but would, as has been shown, not significantly reduce the differences in average IQ between them, still less eliminate them entirely: racial differences in intelligence are here to stay, whether Professor Rose and his friends like them or not.
The total lack of controversy and fuss over the Race/Height issue, compared to the terrific furore over the (scientifically virtually identical) Race/Intelligence issue can only be due to the influence of factors, ideological obsessions, and powerful vested interests quite distinct from the legitimate interests of science. (Perhaps if our excitingly multi-racial society were widened still further to include Congo Pygmies this situation might change ― maybe the consequent shortage of Pygmies in the Metropolitan Police would be ascribed to "environment", "racism", "capitalist society", "faked scientific results", and "meaningless social concepts"!)'
So, in conclusion, Rose and Richardson's Point Four goes the way of its fellows. Indeed, it hardly warranted the relatively much greater amount of space we have devoted under its heading, but so incompetent was Rose and Richardson's "Summary of Main Points" that we were quite unable to find one which dealt specifically with the main point they are discussing, the question of the origin of racial differences in intelligence, so we were forced to discuss this crucial issue under the "Main Point" which seemed most relevant, however vaguely, to it. It perhaps epitomises Rose and Richardson's whole approach to this discussion that all their "Main Points" are more or less totally irrelevant to their actual Main Point!
As for this real Main Point, that the question of whether the differences in average intelligence between human races is due primarily to the influence of environment or that of heredity is "scientifically meaningless" and in principle "not susceptible to an answer", this Point has been exposed as sheer nonsense with no foundation in reality or, apart from a very few isolated eccentrics such as these authors, in modern scientific thought.
This "unanswerable in principle" argument is, in truth, nothing but a cowardly evasion. It has been established that significant racial differences in average intelligence exist. These differences must logically be due principally either to environmental or to genetic effects. It is becoming absolutely clear that they cannot be due principally to environmental factors, but instead of accepting the consequent conclusion that they must be due principally to genetic factors these authors retreat, behind a smoke-screen of vituperative, uncalled-for, scurrilous, unpleasant and quite baseless personal abuse of those in no position to defend themselves, to a position that the question cannot be answered anyway. This behaviour is more reminiscent of that of a small child who, losing in a ball game, tries to run off with the ball on the grounds that "If I can't win none of you can play, so there!", than that of mature and serious scientists. There is also a most disturbing undertone of violence and criminality on the part of other erstwhile environmentalists, reflected in the intimidation and beating up of leading hereditarians (like a child who decides to beat up his playmates because they are winning the game), though there is no evidence to implicate Rose and Richardson, or the NUT in any of this latter behaviour, as far as we are aware. Many opponents of the hereditarian position have the courage and honesty to face the fact that the question of the origin of racial differences in intelligence is "meaningful" and "answerable" and that it may very well be answered in a way contrary to their present ideas. One may well wonder if Rose and Richardson lack these qualities, or if, as seems more probable, they are merely blinded by their own irrelevant ideological preconceptions. Personally, we suspect the latter.
Onward to the final "Main Point" . . .
Their Main Point Five: “The determinants of 'civilisation' and the development of different human societies should be sought in social, economic and historical factors, not in biology."
OUR REPLY
This issue is an enormous one. Fundamentally it is a question of the nature of man. Is "human nature" (human behaviour, social patterns, ethics, desires, ideals, morality etc.) the inherited product of millions of years of evolution as the "natures" of all other animal species are, or is it merely the acquired, learned result of each individual's social, economic and cultural conditioning: does, therefore, human nature create human society or do human societies create human nature?
If the latter, if human societies determine the human nature of their members, then in theory it should be possible one day to create a society which would, in turn, create in its members a human nature conforming to any given idea of perfection (though the sorts of society so far actually created by those, like Professor Rose, upholding this view have merely manifested in their members such perennial features of "human nature" as tyranny, treachery, greed, brutality, cowardice, self-deception and savagery, albeit on a scale unmatched in human history prior to the advent of Messrs. Marx and Lenin, which seems to prove only that either they have a funny idea of "the perfect human nature" or they don't have the foggiest idea of what they are doing and how to achieve their aims ― or, perhaps, that human nature is not environmentally acquired after all.
If, however, human nature is inherited and hence unchangeable by any number of wars, revolutions, show trials, purges, sectarian witch-hunts, forced labour camps, genocides or any other of the Marxists' "social changes", then we will just have to live with it, and with its consequences, among which are certainly pride of Race and Nation and, if we are prepared to fight to defend them, freedom and human decency.
The issues at stake here were well summed up, in a slightly different context, by the American writer Poul Anderson: "Life as it is imagined to be against life as it is. Plan against organic development. Control against freedom. Overriding rationalism against animal wholeness. The machine against the living flesh. If man and man's fate can be planned, organized, made to conform to some vision of ultimate perfection, is it not man's duty to enforce the vision on his fellow man, at whatever cost?" We know what side we're on, and what side Steven Rose is on. What side are you on?
But this issue is one upon which the greatest minds of human history have pondered long, and over which tens of millions of men have died, and as many women and children been murdered, in the course of imposing the "vision of ultimate perfection" shared by Professor Rose and many others. It is, therefore, certainly not one which, unlike Professor Rose's other points, we can settle in a relatively few words here. Perhaps it cannot ever be settled by reasoned argument. For Professor Rose, as a self-confessed Marxist, has his views on this issue, views he may well be prepared to die for, views which, if he follows the precepts of his ideological mentor Lenin, he will certainly be quite prepared to lie for (perhaps even to himself?), but hardly views he is likely to abandon in the face of mere reason. Religious fanatics, even if their faith does not include a God and places Paradise on an indefinitely post-poned future Earth, seldom do.
Certainly, this matter cannot be settled by the page of argument ('Civilisation: Social or biological?') Rose and his co-author present us with in their booklet. All this does prove is that these authors seem to know even less about History than they do about Biology!
In the space of a single page they transform the history of the World, creating an indigenous civilisation in West Africa out of thin air, obliterating an indigenous civilisation in Western Europe with equal carefree abandon (presumably Stonehenge and all the other sophisticated megalithic astronomical observatories were put up overnight by sinister groups of fascists in the 1920's and 30's ― perhaps when they were hiding all the magnificent ruined cities in the Nigerian jungle and forcing the natives to live in mud huts!), and conclusively demolishing the claim that genetic change keeps pace with cultural change which, unfortunately for their well-argued case against it, happens never to have been made (outside the Soviet Union at least!) ―in fact, those who seek an explanation for human civilisation in biological terms (the "sociobiologists" against whom Rose has often railed) base their entire case on the very opposite, that genetic change has not kept pace with cultural change. So, on this latter point, Rose and Richardson are evidently so confused that they have ended up accidentally arguing the case for their opponents!
On the basis of their vast historical erudition, our learned authors conclude that: "Certainly the study of history offers no support for the notion of genetically graded 'races'." Arnold Toynbee, a historian of some little reputation (even Professor Rose may have heard of him!) came to a rather different conclusion (albeit only on the basis of a lifetime's study): "It will be seen that when we classify mankind by colour, the only one of the primary races . . . which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilisations is the Black Race." I think that Professor Toynbee may be a little more of an authority on human history than Rose and Richardson ― he did, after all, write rather more than a page on the subject!
At the end of this section, Rose and Richardson leave us with this 'Weighty Thought': "it (the study of history) suggests that history would have been impossible without our common humanity." Apart from being worthy of a United Nations Resolution at its best, this statement is a fine example of the noble-sounding but quite meaningless hot air which tends to gush from racial egalitarians at frequent intervals. Presumably history would have been quite possible if we had not all been human ― if the inhabitants of Africa, say, had been intelligent giant squid or something ― but as that was not the case, in the absence of a Martian invasion or the confirmation of Erich von Daniken's flying saucer theories, we shall never know. Certainly it does not, as its authors seem to think, contradict the idea of racial inequality: in fact, since it means nothing, it contradicts nothing.
For those readers who are interested in the question: "Civilisation ― and human nature, which is an essential component of Civilisation ― social or biological?", we would recommend a study of the works of Professor Konrad Lorenz, Dr. Desmond Morris, Robert Ardrey, Drs. Tiger and Fox, and Professor Edward O. Wilson; and, in fairness to the other side, of Dr. Oliver Gillie and (also very good for acute insomnia ― brings instant relief!) Karl Marx.
Although it is perhaps equally relevant to the points raised in the final section of Rose and Richardson's booklet, we would offer one item of "Food for Thought" in concluding our analysis of "Main Point Five". Rose and his allies often accuse (and they do it here) the exponents of the hereditarian view of human nature, intelligence, racial differences etc. of being latent totalitarians, whereas they see "environmentalists" such as themselves as being warm-hearted, humanitarian egalitarians. Yet the two most night marish fictional visions of future totalitarian societies, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and the two most nightmarish factual examples of present-day totalitarian societies, Soviet Russia and Red China, are based explicitly on a purely "environmentalist" view of human nature. Indeed, if the hereditarian view is correct, neither of the fictional societies could exist in the first place and, insofar as they pay more than lip service to their ideological bases, the two actual societies are doomed to frustration and ultimately to collapse or effective abandonment of their original ideals (arguably this has already happened). If the hereditarian view is correct ― as it increasingly appears to be ― then we may not be able to create a Heaven on Earth but we are also strictly limited in the extent to which we can create a Hell.
And, perhaps, an honest acceptance, understanding and application of the biological basis of the human condition could lead to the creation, one day, of a 'Better Society', which might not be perfect but which, unlike the blundering efforts made by "environmentalists" in Eurasia and East Asia, would actually work, and work, moreover, without drowning its members in a sea of their own blood.
Their Conclusion: "Why the debate about 'race'?
Why indeed? In view of the overwhelming weight of evidence now available, the answer must be that this "debate" is largely sustained, long after the stage at which normally Science would have considered matters well established, by a small, vociferous, and on occasion violent minority of politically motivated left-wing extremists.
However, being associated with that minority, that is, not surprisingly, not what Rose and Richardson conclude. Instead, they launch into a tirade of paranoid nonsense about the sinister influence of Western capitalist society, a tirade which, to judge by some of his other writings, Professor Rose at least has been restraining himself with extreme difficulty and masterful self-control from unleashing throughout the preceding pages.
Predictably, the 1939-45 war is dragged in, apparently as an influence which in some way brought racial biology "into deserved disrepute". Since as far as we are aware no significant scientific developments in this field occurred during or as a result of this conflict, this is an open admission that the criticism of the hereditarian viewpoint is basically politically motivated, a conclusion reinforced by the irrelevant introduction of the "Nazis" in the very first paragraph of Rose and Richardson's work (we are at least spared photographs of dead Jews such as usually adorn such irrelevant and intellectually dishonest attempts to smear the work of reputable and decent scientists). No doubt Professor Rose and his ilk would be the first to complain if discussion of their position on Race and Intelligence were liberally interspersed with pointed comments about Stalin and photographs of Soviet tanks smashing their way into Budapest and Prague (or some of the 150 million or so people murdered by the Communists), yet this would be far more appropriate in their case than the 'Nazi' smear in ours. After all, Professor Rose, and many of his fellow racial egalitarians, are self-confessed Marxists, whereas as far as we know no leading hereditarian scientist is a Nazi!
Rose and Richardson also cite the distinguished biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, as a supporter of theirs. This is rather ironic, as Haldane, although nominally a Marxist, was, as Oliver Gillie points out on page 111 of the very book Rose and Richardson recommend us to read, a convinced hereditarian! Indeed Haldane resigned from the Communist Party over this very issue, specifically the antics of the Soviet 'environmentalist' biologist, T. D. Lysenko, who apart from blatantly faking his results had got into the habit, even more frowned upon in reputable scientific circles, of having those who disagreed with his theories shot, and over the attempt by one J. V. Stalin to impose views not very dissimilar from those of Professor Rose on the scientific world at gunpoint.
Since the hard factual basis of this silly gibberish appears to boil down to the claim, which few would contest, that many leading hereditarians were "deeply convinced" hereditarians, and that they founded modern psychological testing, we shall waste no more time on it.
A few points are worthy of serious comment, however. The first concerns the quotation the authors cite from the second draft (the first draft having been greeted with such unanimous derision by the scientific community that it had to be hastily withdrawn and "toned down") of the 1951 UNESCO Statement (not, as Rose and Richardson claim, a "massive study") on Race.
This quotation, from what was in any case a purely political and scientifically worthless propaganda tract, opens with the claim that: "according to present knowledge, there is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect of intelligence or temperament." In 1951 there was certainly no proof of this, though most scientists believed it to be true, and even today it is possible to argue that it has not been absolutely proved (absolute proof, after all, is rare in Biology). But the vast weight of evidence, then and more so now, was overwhelmingly in favour of the existence of such innate mental differences. The UNESCO Statement does not deny this, indeed, its defensive tone ("there is no proof") is itself evidence of where the probable truth lies.
Their quotation continues: "The scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is much the same." Of course this is true, but the range of mental capacities has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject under discussion, the differences in average mental capacity between ethnic groups. Of course, in all ethnic groups mental capacity ranges from genius to moron, but the point is that some such groups produce proportionally more of the latter and fewer of the former than others! So this statement, as is true of so much that Rose and Richardson write or cite, is totally irrelevant.
Since the first part of this quotation concludes nothing, and the second part draws a conclusion which is both wholly true and equally irrelevant, Rose and Richardson are able to proclaim, without undue fear of contradiction, that "no new scientific evidence has been adduced since 1951 to challenge this conclusion" ― indeed, it is hard to think of any "new scientific evidence" which could do so!
The next sentence, however, indicates the full enormity of its authors' ignorance and confusion: "Authors of popular books designed to 'prove' racial differences and the propagandists of extremist racist groups, such as the National Front, are forced to dig back into the long-discredited 'research' of the 1920's and 1930's to support their claims."
Well, firstly, unless one is blind, deaf and without the senses of smell and touch, in the Britain of today one does not, unfortunately, need any "popular books" to prove the existence of racial differences: one has only to walk down the local High Street to observe them for oneself!
Secondly, in discussing the less obvious racial differences, for example in average intelligence, authors, the National Front and, for that matter, many scientists whose eminence, qualifications and professional reputation (and, to judge by their booklet, intelligence and reasoning ability!) considerably exceed those of Rose and Richardson, do not need to "dig back" to the 1920's and '30's to support anything (indeed, in this reply we have hardly cited any research prior to around 1950 to support our "claims"). They can, and do, quote such studies as those of Shuey (1958), McGurk (1953 and 1961), Kennedy and others (1963), Sir Cyril Burt (whose 80% heritability figure, so fatal for the environmentalists' case, is based mainly on work carried out in the 1950's and early '60's and was not published until 1966), the enlarged and revised edition of Shuey's work (1966), the Coleman Report (1966 ― one of the largest scale studies ever undertaken, and with official US Government backing), Jensen (1969 to the present day), Eysenck (1971 to date), Munsinger (1975) to name but a few, and such classic works on Race as Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races (1963), Coon and Hunt's The Living Races of Man (1966), Eysenck's Race, Intelligence and Education (1971 ― presumably Rose and Richardson named their booklet in Professor Eysenck's honour!), and Baker's Race (1974). Indeed, the leading scientific journal in this field, Mankind Quarterly, did not commence publication until 1960, reflecting the growth in the volume of published work on Race, and the learned professional society publishing it, the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, was founded at the same time. Despite increasing politically-motivated and sometimes illegal persecution, there is probably more work being done on Race and Intelligence by scientists today than ever before. If Rose and Richardson are, as they seem to be, unaware of all this work then they are clearly utterly ignorant of and quite incompetent to give any sort of scientific opinion on the question of Race and Intelligence, and their booklet is a piece of the most colossal impertinence and sheer bluff, fit only for the dustbin.
Thirdly, there is nothing wrong with the research done in the 1920's and '30's, much of which is of the highest standard. No one, except the hysterical Communist crank Leon Kamin, has ever 'discredited' these findings, many of which are due to investigations carried out by bodies, such as the US Army Medical Corps, considerably more reputable than Kamin's dubious "Psychologists for Social (-ist?) Action"!
From these remarks, and other scathing references to work "done several years ago now" on page 11, it would seem that Professor Rose and his colleagues are under the impression that scientific findings, like eggs, "go off" after a while and cease to be valid. We can assure them that this is not so, and, for example, if Professor S. P. R. Rose would care to step off the top of his ivory tower he will find out for himself in a very short time that the findings of Sir Isaac Newton, although made "several years ago now" (in the 17th Century, to be exact!), and his conclusions are still perfectly valid today!
Fourthly, any tendency amongst scientists not to oppose publicly these UNESCO "conclusions" in more recent times has owed little to scientific considerations.
As Professor William B. Provine, a Historian at Cornell University says:17 "In 1951, judging from the response to the UNESCO second statement on race and comments in genetics literature, most geneticists agreed . . . that races probably differed in significant average mental traits. By 1969, when Arthur Jensen advocated this view in his controversial article, most geneticists who spoke publicly on the issue had adopted an agnostic position. Knowledge of hereditary racial differences in IQ had scarcely changed since 1951, but society had changed considerably in racial attitudes."
Although Professor Provine also seems unaware of the post-1951 work on hereditary racial differences (which has reinforced their validity) he makes it clear that it is not the scientific evidence but the "attitudes of society" which have caused many geneticists to keep their hereditarian views to themselves. But what Professor Provine doesn't mention is that many of these scientists have not been silenced by any sensitivity to the alleged "attitudes of society" but by the rather more direct threat of being beaten up, sacked from their University posts, or even murdered by gangs of Marxist thugs.
As Oliver Gillie describes in the book Rose and Richardson are so anxious we should read (pages 46-47), eminent scientists such as Professor Eysenck, Professor Jensen and Professor Herrnstein of Harvard have been beaten up, their lectures smashed up, attempts have been made to get them dismissed from their Professorships because of their views, and in at least one case threatened with being stabbed. Gillie, disturbingly, does not condemn the criminal elements responsible but appears to blame the unfortunate scientists for "failing to communicate" (how one is supposed to communicate when one is lying on the floor of one's own lecture theatre being kicked in the face by hordes of Communist stormtroopers he does not explain).
This disgraceful campaign of terrorist intimidation continues to the present day. At the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 1978, for example, Professor Edward O. Wilson of Harvard, whose "crime" was merely to suggest that certain features of human behaviour might have a biological explanation (he never even mentioned Race) was set upon in front of a horrified audience of scientists by a gang of thugs from the sinister Communist-front "International Campaign Against Racism" ― fortunately on this occasion his assailants had to flee before they had done much more than soak Professor Wilson with the contents of his own water carafe. At the same meeting, the same organisation, ICAR, was behind a plot to strip Professor Jensen of his AAAS Fellowship, an honour awarded for distinguished scientific work, on political grounds. Again, the assembled scientists stood up to these bullies and their designs were foiled.
Most geneticists still believe, more firmly than ever before, in the reality of inherited racial differences in intelligence. But few have the outspoken courage of Jensen and Eysenck, the spirit with which Galileo faced the Inquisition in defence of Science and Truth. Most are humble seekers after knowledge, who have no wish to lose their jobs or live in fear for their lives and the safety of their families and therefore keep their views to themselves or to whispered asides at scientific conventions. This NUT booklet is itself part of a campaign, for example, to eradicate hereditarians from the teaching profession: the next step, the expulsion from the NUT of all hereditarians or racially conscious teachers, was put before their Conference at Easter 1979. This reign of terror, this organised persecution of scientists holding "heretical" ^iews, this systematic campaign of fear without precedent in the West since the Inquisition burned those who said the Earth goes round the Sun, is the ugly reality behind the ramblings of Rose and his friends.
Finally, the very last sentence of Rose and Richardson's booklet is of particular interest, for it reveals a slight difference of opinion between this booklet's authors and its publishers. For here Rose and Richardson say: "The purpose of this short pamphlet is to help in this task" (the multi-racialist brainwashing of children, no less) "by exposing the fallacies and dangers of 'scientific racism'."
Fair enough, this is still, in theory, a free country. But it isn't what NUT General Secretary Fred Jarvis said its purpose was. He said it was: "to answer some of the questions in the minds of many people ― adults as well as children ― concerning the concept of 'race' and its relevance to teaching and learning" and to "provide the teaching profession with factual and analytical material concerning the biology of race and intelligence." Nothing about "exposing" anything there: just a straightforward explanation of the "facts and issues." And nothing about brainwashing children either.
One wonders if it is simply that Mr. Jarvis is so ignorant of Science that he actually thinks the biased, abusive and quasi-Communist tirade he got was the impartial, fair "teachers' guide" he apparently wanted, or whether he has spent so long enshrouded in the pinkish murk of the higher strata of the NUT that he can no longer tell the difference, or perhaps (perish the thought!) that he is perfectly well aware of the real nature of the goods he is selling, and, maybe, their purpose . . .
Conclusion: "Race, Intelligence and Education" or "Rubbish, Ignorance and Extremism", and why was it ever printed?
Professor Hans J. Eysenck, one of the world's leading authorities on Race, Intelligence and Education, has described Professor Rose and Dr. Richardson's booklet Race, Intellligence and Education as "extremely one-sided, factually inaccurate and openly biased."
That it is one-sided and biased its authors themselves admit in the very last sentence of their work. That it is factually inaccurate and, indeed, largely irrelevant and often logically nonsensical we hope this review has shown.
Indeed, their booklet must surely be one of the worst collections of illogicalities, irrelevancies, ignorance, inanity and sheer unmitigated twaddle ever to be published under the name of Science. Not one of its conclusions is valid in itself, nor would it follow from what is evidently meant to be evidence adduced to support it even where such evidence is factually accurate.
Not only is it not, nor does it pretend to be, an impartial account of the "hereditarian" versus "environmentalist" controversy with regard to Race and Intelligence, in that it totally ignores where it does not misrepresent the hereditarian position, and resorts to untrue and often irrelevant insinuations regarding the motives and professional conduct of leading hereditarian scientists, but it is so atrocious in terms of accuracy and argument that it grossly debases the environmentalist position, which is not quite as silly and specious as it appears from Rose and Richardson's writings. Indeed, in many ways Race, Intelligence and Education must be a far greater embarrassment to those it purports to support than those it attempts to oppose!
Had Rose and Richardson published their work in scientific circles only, as a serious contribution to debate, this reply would have been quite unnecessary: Rose and Richardson's insubstantial effusions would have been blown away on the gale of learned laughter they provoked.
But an influential group of laymen has taken it upon itself to print tens of thousands of copies of this nonsense, and to distribute it to other laymen, most of whom know little about the matters covered but almost all of whom are in a particularly important position as teachers of our children and, moreover, to represent it to them as "essentially correct". Since these readers of Rose and Co.'s booklet might be taken in by its vaguely if speciously "scientific" air and its Union endorsement ― despite its evident falsity on logical, let alone scientific, grounds ― and might actually believe it, a full and careful scientific criticism and, where relevant, exposition of the "other side of the argument" was felt to be called for. It was felt necessary to "expose the fallacies and dangers" of " 'scientific' anti-racism".
One final question must be asked ― why ? Why should trained scientists such as Professor Rose, Dr. Richardson and their colleagues write, let alone put their names to, a tissue of nonsense such as this? And why should the National Union of Teachers endorse such nonsense, still less distribute over 50,000 copies of it to teachers all over the country in the expressed hope that it will be applied (and, horror of horrors! perhaps actually taught) to their pupils?
Surely Rose and Richardson, or at least some of the more biologically literate members of the NUT Executive, must realise that they are indulging in the deliberate dissemination of what can at best be called propaganda, and at worst a farrago of untruths and distortions, about an extremely socially important question. We must therefore seriously question the intention of those who persist in disseminating such material, and attempt to give it apparent scientific status.
They may all be such rabid Marxists that they actually believe their material to be true, but they can scarcely deny that it is not the sort of "unbiased factual material", putting both sides of any argument fairly, which, by their own Conference resolution, they are supposed to be making available.
So why publish it? Perhaps the answer really lies in the very social importance of the matter in question. For, were the British public to become aware of the real truth about Race, Intelligence and Education, it might very well start to draw conclusions from it, conclusions fatal to the survival of the "multi-racial" society which has already been imposed on us, and still more fatal to the Marxist tyranny which Professor Steven Rose and his friends would like to impose on us. And that would never do . . .
IN HINDSIGHT – THE VIEW FROM 2021
This booklet, written in late 1978 in response to one issued free to 50,000 teachers across Britain by the National Union of Teachers in September of that year, has aged remarkably well. Re-reading it over 40 years later, as one of its original authors I am struck by how little it has dated.
The only concrete point on which subsequent research has definitely invalidated any of the contents is on the somewhat peripheral matter of the total number of genes in the human genome. In 2003, the Human Genome Project published the first sequencing of said genome. It transpires that both the authors of this booklet and Professors Rose and Richardson were wrong. The total number of human genes is neither 5 million nor 100,000. It is about 22,000.
In hindsight this should have come as no surprise – it is typical of the number in other mammals, and there should have been no reason to suppose that our species’ specialization in large relative brain size needed any more extra genes to accomplish than the specializations of the horse for running, the tiger for hunting or the whale for marine life. Biologically, there is nothing special or unique about our own species. The differentiation into genetically distinct races, which in any other species biologists would have no qualms about classifying as sub-species, is also completely typical of a mammal with a global, until recently pretty geographically separated, distribution.
The rest of the Reply has stood the test of time pretty well. The NUT booklet in response to which it was written, in contrast, has not aged well.
Notably the basis of their whole “Main Point Two” has now been wholly discredited. That Point was based on the 1972 paper by R.C. Lewontin, The Apportionment of Human Diversity, in which, based on his work on the genetics of blood, he claimed that the vast majority (85 per cent) of genetic differences were within classical races, not between them. Only 6 per cent of differences segregated by race.
This paper was demolished as “Lewontin’s Fallacy” in 2003 by the mathematician Anthony Edwards. Edwards showed that if you aggregate multiple sites of variation across a genome, you can in fact predict the population, the race indeed, from which a person comes accurately, contrary to Lewontin’s claim. Even Rose and Richardson’s modern successor, half-Asian liberal media pundit and geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford, in How to Argue with a Racist, published in 2020, concedes this point.
Rutherford also reveals in the same recent book how far their Main Points Three and Four are likewise now wholly untenable. These Points were based on the “environmentalist” assertion that human intelligence is mostly determined by each individual’s environment since conception – education, socio-economic status, “oppression by an inherently racist society” etc etc. So that repeatedly observed differences in intelligence between races – which they did not dispute then and which are still not disputed now – do not reflect any underlying genetic reality.
Reflecting four further decades of research which actually served only to confirm what was long known but doggedly denied, the modern standard-bearer of Rose and Richardson’s cause, Rutherford, concedes the point here completely: “Intelligence is highly heritable. That is a seemingly simple sentence to say, but in those four words is some of the hardest and most misunderstood science that we have yet attempted. Broadly it means that a significant proportion of the difference we see between people is accounted for by DNA.”
He continues: “innate levels of intelligence are highly heritable.Tabula rasa – the idea that we are born with a blank slate on which our abilities and personalities are drawn – is not correct. And we’ve known this for decades. Estimates vary depending on the study, but the proportion of cognitive abilities that can be attributed to genetics rather than other things is somewhere between 40 per cent and 60 per cent. That means that roughly half of the differences we see are due to differences in DNA. These are not particularly new findings, nor are they very controversial: the slate is not blank – it is partially incompletely written at conception with the DNA of your forebears.”
Thus the modern scientific consensus accepted since it was written has made the whole “environmentalist” position underlying the NUT booklet untenable. Indeed, as Rutherford admits it was not really tenable decades ago. “Environmentalists” are now reduced to cavilling about what proportion of observed differences in intelligence are determined by heredity. Rutherford himself, as we see, is not yet willing to concede it, but the 80% figure given in this Reply may well prove correct.
Sadly additional research since 1978 has not likewise added much to the evidence supporting the Reply to the NUT on issues specifically around racial differences. Some work was done since by Professor Richard Lynn and, notably, Professor J. Philippe Rushton, whose 1995 Race, Evolution, and Behavior evolutionary theory to explaining the origin of racial differences in intelligence and social behaviour to notable effect. A copy of Rushton’s book is now curiously, one might even suggest sinisterly, hard to get hold of, although a very good precis is still just about available.
The reason advances in our knowledge of the genetic roots of differences in intelligence has not been matched by similar advances in the area of racial differences is hinted at in the Reply to Their Conclusion in this booklet.
Essentially in the “woke”, PC totalitarian world of modern academia it is career suicide to attempt such research, unless it is explicitly to “discredit scientific racism”. The latter is permitted, but has proved futile, and as its very manifest futility serves only to leave the previous scientific position, outlined in this Reply booklet, unchallenged even such inherently explicitly biased research has dried up. For decades now, the light of Science has not been shone on the field of Race, for fear of what it would reveal. But it had already revealed enough to counter the arguments in the NUT booklet.
Thus the science, such as it was, behind that booklet has largely been discredited since it appeared. But the political project which caused it to be distributed free to fifty thousand British schoolteachers has prevailed.
As this Reply ended by asking “why publish it? Perhaps the answer really lies in the very social importance of the matter in question. For, were the British public to become aware of the real truth about Race, Intelligence and Education, it might very well start to draw conclusions from it, conclusions fatal to the survival of the "multi-racial" society which has already been imposed on us, and still more fatal to the Marxist tyranny which Professor Steven Rose and his friends would like to impose on us. And that would never do . . .”
Marxism mutated into the current ideology of “woke” Political Correctness, but in that form its tyranny was indeed imposed on us. The 1970’s schoolteachers who read the NUT Booklet inculcated its ideas into their pupils, who in turn became the teachers, academics and politicians of today, “cancelling” any who question their ideology and tearing down statues of historical figures to rewrite history, as Orwell foretold long ago. That was the real point of the 1978 NUT booklet, and is why its rebuttal remains important today.