Is Race Science Real?

Reading "Superior" by Angela Saini

I generally don’t watch YouTube shows or listen to podcasts. This is not out of any sense of intellectual superiority or a belief that these mediums are insufficiently high-minded, it’s just that I hate feeling like a captive audience for anything. A few months ago, however, my interest was piqued enough by the news that the “No Jumper” show would be having far-right gadfly Nick Fuentes on as a guest to convince me to sit through a whole episode. To say that it was interesting would be an underselling it. Fuentes, if you are not familiar, is an online zoomer activist who has been widely denounced for his anti-Semitic outbursts and has recently been seen hanging out with Kanye West. No Jumper is a relatively mainstream program, but because of the relatively fluid norms of online talk shows someone like him can still make it on.

Fuentes really did not disappoint, particularly if you’re looking for provoation. In the course of the episode he unpacks one of his core beliefs that people of European-descent are intellectually superior to Africans, and that this justifies a social order where white Americans as a caste call the shots indefinitely. This was an argument stated brazenly to which the show hosts (two of three of whom were black), failed to challenge or push back on at all. After Fuentes confidently outlined why, due to reasons of genetic predetermination, the intellectual and material accomplishments of white people throughout history have dwarfed and always will dwarf those of black people, Adam22 simply replied, “Yeah…I don’t know how to respond to that,” as the other hosts stared mutely. If you think I’m exaggerating, go ahead and watch the clip.

Proponents of race science like to portray their arguments as practical wisdom buttressed by scientific evidence, which others are simply too cowardly or polite to accept. There are highbrow academic proponents of this view, but these days it is more commonly expressed online by the galaxy of talking-heads that collectively make up the alternative-news public sphere. People love simple explanations for why the world is as it is, particularly when they are self-flattering ones.

The issue is that when you actually start unpacking the claims of people who say that “X race is quantifiably more intelligent than Y race,” or why “Z race is inevitably and irrevocably doomed to failure,” the edifice starts to unravel. It’s not a sound argument at all, and the fact that it’s not discussed regularly is because its a waste of time. Even adding the smallest amount of historical perspective, which race science proponents never seem to do, inserts pretty much fatal contradictions into their worldview. The No Jumper hosts were clearly unprepared to talk to Fuentes or engage with his arguments, and in failing to do so they gave their audience the impression that he must be right. That’s a shame, because his arguments are genuinely fallacious and uncompelling. Every generation needs to have things explained to them anew, evidently, which is why Angela Saini’s book “Superior: The Return of Race Science,” should be a necessary read on this topic, particularly for young people who seem to have become skeptical of colorblindness. I will summarize a few of its arguments that I think are most pertinent to this segment.

Many years ago, researchers settled upon IQ testing as the most effective means to measure cognitive ability. Pointing out IQ differentials among various global populations has now become a favorite talking point of the online far-right, such that people like self-described “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux (who as far as I’m aware, despite this lofty title, has never developed an original philosophy) have come to describe it as a master-key to understanding human relations. Some races are just inherently superior to others, and we should just look at the map with its score differentials and see where everyone stacks up – Europeans scoring higher than Asian, who score higher than Latin Americans, who score higher than sub-Saharan Africans. The problem with IQ however is that it’s highly malleable, almost to the point of absurdity, and rapidly changes over short periods of time. The more that one takes an IQ test, or becomes accustomed to the structural format of such a test, the higher that one will score. In the early-20th century global average IQ’s were in the 70s, whereas today they have risen roughly 30 points, mainly in countries that have experienced widespread urbanization. The average Scandinavian in the mid-20th had an IQ roughly half as high as they do today, and similar rapid increases have been observed in other countries that recently modernized.

Unless one believes that some populations genetically evolved in the course of a generation or two, such that they became almost a different special from their grandparents, it stands to reason that these scores are not measuring innate cognitive ability but rather how acclimated one has become to the psychology of test-taking and other forms of reasoning that occur in a highly structured society. Urbanization and the corresponding modernization of lifestyles are by this point clearly not unique to the West and are continuing their ceaseless march around the world. As such, one should not be surprised to see a similarly rapid about face in score results in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America over the coming century. IQ arguments are reductive to the point of absurdity (our ancestors likely were smarter than us in many ways in my opinion, and this is deterioration in cognitive function is likely to continue as we outsource more of our cognitive labor to technology) and anyone trying to rest upon test scores to make a race superiority argument is going to become disillusioned and confused very quickly.

Another favorite gut-feeling argument made by race science proponents is that people of European-origin must be genetically superior because of their material accomplishments. Beautiful cities, orderly infrastructure, technological triumphs – all these, as Fuentes described it in his No Jumper segment, are things that whites have achieved and others have not, thus serving as physical evidence of their elevated genetic nature. Europeans and their descendants surely do have the right to be proud of their achievements. Yet as much as some would like to consider their ascendence to power as an expression of timeless human nature, the historical record of the past few centuries does not support this. There is a concept of “deep time,” which Saini touches on in her book, that offers a more logical way of understanding history than genetic predeterminism. If you were to return to the human race a millennia ago, you would find the great cities, buildings, and scientific achievements happening not in Europe, which was then backwards, but in China, India, and the Middle East. There were also notable centres of civilization in what is now Latin America, as well as West and East Africa. What this clearly suggests is that power and civilization are transient. Rather than belonging to one race, they belong to those who know, “how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it,” as Nietzsche said. Power shifts, and the achievements of one people is effaced from time and the historical record. Yet power will shift again, and if you look at trends today you can see that it is already on the move. One century from now, or even much sooner than that, one should not be surprised to see the frontiers of civilization being plowed in places where peoples are now denigrated as timelessly inferior. To draw genetic conclusions from how power is arrayed in one particular slice of time is self-serving and also just intellectually absurd.

My own perspective is that, while race has a social reality, it has no biological reality, and certainly not any worthy of making generalizations about merit across entire swathes of humanity. I don’t say this to be politically correct, personally defensive, or because I am shy of “harsh truths.” This is really what I believe to be obvious and have observed in my own life. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life have been simple laborers in developing countries who were never afforded the change to attend institutions that could recognize their talent. Many have been illiterate. I’m sure they’d score poorly on an IQ test, but I’m just as sure that their test result would be as meaningless as the result of a coddled and overeducated Ivy League ignoramus of any race. Global populations are shifting, such that Asians and Africans, today still mostly poor and rural yet rapidly urbanizing, will make up the overwhelming majority of the human race by the end of this century. If the Nobel Prize still exists at that time, and if political and climatological conditions permit, I expect that the major awards in science, literature, and medicine will be routinely won by Nigerians, Indians, Iraqis, Vietnamese, and Peruvians, as it is often won by peoples of European-descent today. When that happens it will say nothing about their genetic superiority, nor the inferiority of anyone else.

If you are having doubts about this subject Saini’s book offers a rather decent set of counterpoints to the arguments of Fuentes, Molyneux, and many others in the online right-wing intelligentsia. It definitely should’ve been recommended to the No Jumper hosts before they decided to have a guest on whose talking points they had never even contemplated seriously engaging with.