Nigerians, Jews and Scrabble: An Update on the IQ Debate

Let’s begin by acknowledging a couple of kind (re)tweets from the hereditarian-HBD side on my last Unz article on IQ and race (Why Do Blacks Outperform Whites in UK Schools?):

Murray tweet:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1231220639371014144&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Farticle%2Fnigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=500px

Sailer tweet:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1230404426147328006&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Farticle%2Fnigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=500px

After the recent death of the great James Flynn, I thought I should finally get back to writing some updated articles on expert Scrabble and why, after all these years, it still poses a fatal statistical problem for the race-IQ genetic hypothesis. I will address some of the rebuttals that have been written since my last Scrabble series, including one published in an academic journal (by Emil Kirkegaard), which has been lauded by some HBDers as clearly refuting my thesis (yes, of course Kirkegaard argues that Scrabble is not really cognitively demanding!) I will also share some new data concerning Ashkenazi Jewish performance in Scrabble, which should put to rest the question of how cognitively demanding competitive Scrabble is. After all, Jewish overrepresentation is expected to rise with increasing cognitive demands on a fair competitive achievement, going by the same HBDers’ position on Ashkenazi IQ.

The Scrabble thesis is simple: if it is true that on average black Africans in Africa score extremely low on scholastic/intelligence tests because they grow up with much less educational and other modern cultural resources (as Flynn would agree), then they should perform “extremely well” (by comparison) in those “g-loaded” cognitive contests that do not require too much of such quality cultural exposure (as Jensen would agree). Expert Scrabble requires access to only one old book that is fairly available in every country that uses a Western language: the dictionary. Beyond that, mastery depends on ability to mentally manipulate and anagram the letters you have on your rack (you have only 2 minutes on average per play), while simultaneously assessing the squares that will maximize your points above your opponent (which means you have to also constantly estimate your opponent’s most probable plays). No access to well-trained teachers, big libraries, computers or even TVs (for educational shows like Sesame Street) are needed; just raw, unfiltered mental aptitude.

What the genetic hypothesis actually predicts is that it is in those very kinds of relatively culture-free non-academic cognitive “tests” that a biological g (general intelligence) gap should be most conspicuous (see Arthur Jensen’s Spearman’s Hypothesis).

Nigeria happens to be the world’s top performing nation in English Scrabble, while francophone African countries are also the most dominant in French Scrabble, despite the fact that the top players in Western countries are super-high-IQ nerds with visibly exceptional mathematical talents (yes, competitive Scrabble is much more a math game than a word game because of that requirement for the endless calculations and strategies with tile placement).

Also, observe that Nigerian players are relatively greater in number at higher ratings. This should not happen if the reason for their good performance is their higher participation or a stronger Scrabble culture. It should be the other way around.

Country	# Players in Top 10	Top 100	Top 1000
Nigeria	2	28	58
United States	1	20	73
England	1	9	127

The top 3 Scrabble countries. Source: WESPA ratings, last updated Oct. 17, 2020.

When I first published my series on expert Scrabble and why it presents an anomaly for the racial genetic hypothesis of IQ, the initial reaction from many in the Human Biodiversity community (HBDers/IQists) was immediate dismissal or derision, with some even showing a bit of panic, as they could instinctively see a potentially fatal problem for their treasured hypothesis, if top-level expertise in this game was indeed as cognitively demanding as I was suggesting. They stubbornly insisted that it was not cognitively demanding. Others went as far as suggesting that it is mostly a game of luck at best (which should explain why one lucky guy has won the English world championship five times and the French one two times?)

Leaning on Lynn

Well, God never fails to entertain us with his own grand sense of humor, if we can just be a little patient. Not too long after I completed my Scrabble series, I was stunned to see someone quite respected in the HBD community — the prodigious researcher and intellectual godfather himself, Richard Lynn — start using the exact same Scrabble argument, not in his usual race gap debate, but to defend his equally controversial gender gap hypothesis (adult men are biologically smarter than adult women, he says, as demonstrated by top Scrabble performance!) He even cited the same sources I used for proving the high cognitive demands of top expert competitive Scrabble that makes it discriminate objectively on mental ability.

In a 2017 special issue of Mankind Quarterly dedicated to analyzing Lynn’s gender gap developmental hypothesis (which included a critique from James Flynn himself), Lynn wrote:

“Scrabble is another cognitively demanding game involving combining letters to make words. It has been shown by Toma, Halpern and Berger (2014) that top scrabble experts have “extraordinarily high levels of visuospatial and verbal working memory capacities” and score 1.23d higher than elite college students who scored at the 93rd percentile of the quantitative SAT. There have been 38 winners of the American National Scrabble Championships 1978-2016 and 16 winners and runners-up of the Canadian National Scrabble Championships 1996- 2013. All of these have been men.” [Emphasis added]

I searched in vain for one voice among HBDers who thought it was “ridiculous” for Lynn to use Scrabble performance as an objective means of comparing the heights of cognitive potential between any two groups — constrained by how many people they can have at the extreme right end of the intelligence bell curve. A deafening silence befell the chattersphere of IQism!

Since I’ve studied this issue a bit more than my surprising new Scrabble partner, Richard Lynn, I can offer a small but important factual correction to his gender statement above for free: there has actually been one woman who won the American national Scrabble championship. The late Rita Norr, a computer scientist, won in 1987; no woman has come anywhere close to winning the English Scrabble world championship, and it has also now become equally unlikely for Norr’s achievement to be repeated on the national level, as more and more math nerds have been drawn to the game after publication of a strangely inspiring book called ‘Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, And Obsession In The World Of Competitive Scrabble.’ Whether this difference in performance does indeed show an average gender cognitive gap or simply a range difference in distributions of the IQ curve (or even just a specific gender gap in math aptitude), is an issue I will choose to be agnostic about in this analysis. What matters is that white women are supposed to be much smarter than black men, especially those from Africa, according to the race hypothesis.

If Lynn saw my Scrabble articles, including the part where I actually also talked about the curious gender performance gap at the top (in a game with actually higher female participation in the US, unlike chess), it would be understandable why he wouldn’t cite my work. His readers would see exactly how I already used this apparent gender cognitive gap to logically challenge Lynn et al’s racial cognitive gap hypothesis since you can’t logically affirm both of those propositions (the biological gender gap and the biological Black-White racial gap), given this contrasting evidence.

Using Scrabble to affirm a gender gap is therefore an inadvertent own-goal against the racial gap hypothesis (and Lynn has been quite the prolific game-ending own-goal scorer over the years): if the gender gap in Scrabble confirms a biological cognitive gap, then for the exact same reasons, it refutes the genetic racial hypothesis since the Black-White racial gap is supposed to be much bigger than the gender gap (30 points or more between black Africans and whites vs only 4 points or less between white men and white women). What this implies is that if there is a real genetic Black-White intelligence gap at all, it would have to be smaller than that proposed gender gap of 4 (or less) IQ points (and at that point, the genetic gap could go in either direction, frankly), if it is indeed true that sex is differentiated in all such distinctions by a gap in cognitive potential. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

Even those few HBDers who reject Lynn’s claim of a real gender IQ gap (perhaps because they don’t want to be “cancelled” on too many fronts) can’t escape this problem. Firstly, even if you believe that the only reason women are universally outperformed at the top of cognitive fields and contests is because of the higher range of male ability (more men at the top and at the bottom), you still have a problem explaining African performance since the latter’s nominal IQ is supposed to be so low that a slightly smaller white female range of ability should still put them way ahead of African men in any cognitive contest (assuming black men have a higher range). It also doesn’t help that the same hereditarians even claim to have found that black range of ability is significantly smaller than the white range (black Americans have an IQ standard deviation of 12 compared to 15 for whites, according to Jensen; this would make it smaller than white female SD and add more problems for the race hypothesis). But we do not even need to assume that lower black SD claimed by Jensen in this analysis, as that would make our effort to quantitatively falsify the genetic hypothesis much too easy!

Besides, if African men’s performance above white women is only resulting from something else in males that trumps the white female advantage in intelligence (testosterone or competitiveness or something to do with the Y chromosome), there would be no African women performing at such high levels of expertise since they would be disadvantaged by both lower racial intelligence and lower gender range of ability (or testosterone or whatever it is that supposedly disadvantages women). Nigeria’s top female player, Tuoyo Mayuku (who is almost never given a visa to travel to tournaments outside Africa), is so good that she was once able to defeat the strongest player in the world, Nigel Richards (2-1), when he played in a Nigeria-hosted tournament in 2010, a very rare feat for any female player. She was just one step from becoming the first woman to win a Nigerian tournament when she was defeated in the final by the Nigerian former world champion, Wellington Jighere.

This obviously doesn’t mean that Mayuku is as strong as Richards (who is still deservedly revered by Nigerians as the Greatest of All Time). In fact, when Richards returned to Nigeria in 2013, he got his revenge against her, before he was also defeated by veteran Nigerian-American player, Sammy Okosogah, Nigeria’s most celebrated player, who was ranked first in the U.S. itself at the height of his active playing career (see game against Richards).

Despite her inability to play internationally to gain more rating points, Nigeria’s top female player is still ranked among the top 5 women in the world. Again: this should be very unlikely if the only reason white women cannot play at the level of African men, despite their supposed racial cognitive advantage, was some mysterious non-cognitive element in females. It appears that the most parsimonious conclusion is inescapable: black African males outperform white females in cognitive games for the same cognitive reasons that white males outperform the same white females. However, this should not be true if the racial hypothesis is also true: race should be a much more insurmountable barrier than gender.

Secondly, for those HBDers who reject Lynn on gender but embrace him on race, it actually makes no sense to accept the biological race gap while rejecting the biological gender gap. If you have to accept only one of these “permanent” gaps, you logically have to choose the gender gap, not the race gap. This is simply because the performance “evidence” is much more consistent for a gender gap than for a supposed racial gap. Men outperform women at the top of all cognitive fields in every society in every year and for time immemorial, no matter how “progressive” a society was; this mirrors how biological or genetic gaps work (like the universal gender gap you see in physical sports). In the same way, the developmental cognitive gap between adults and children is evidenced by the consistently universal superior adult performance that is also identical to their superiority in physical sports. There are no exceptions (for both children and women, against men), no matter where you look, and it matters not if you motivate them or reward them. Why does this consistent pattern only break when you discuss black cognitive “inferiority” when the racial gap is supposed to be even bigger?

The IQ given for adult black Africans is literally lower than the intelligence of 12 year old white children. Yes, the same 12 year old white children who fail to beat 12 year old black African children when they grow up in the UK school system are somehow smarter than fully grown African parents!

We can see this claim documented in the controversial HBD book, Erectus Walks Amongst Us, which did a fairly good job of sourcing its data from the IQist literature in its chapter on intelligence (although its self-published author put the alleged IQ of “Homo erectus” in the wrong column of his summary table):

This claim — fully developed black adults are cognitive equals of whites when they are only 11 years old — predicts that whatever can be cognitively achieved by the best of African adult brains can equally be achieved by the best of 11 year old white brains (the best 12 and 13 year old whites would be too smart for the best black African adults!) This obvious absurdity is just one of the many real-life empirical refutations of the racial genetic hypothesis that I’ve constantly pointed out to HBDers, but which they refuse to acknowledge without giving any explanation.

Of course it would be considered a divine miracle if a group of children — white, Asian or even Jewish — from some country qualified to participate at the world championships of any true cognitive contest, never mind being the best performers there – which would be too extravagant even for God!

Some HBD friends have therefore proposed that African champions are probably using something other than general intelligence when they outperform these mentally gifted white champions. But such sudden betrayal of parsimony is what constantly pushes this once-valid hypothesis towards the scary fringes of pseudoscience.

The only hope that remains for HBDers is to continue trying as hard as they can to prove that world championship level Scrabble does not take that much cognitive ability, despite all the evidence we clearly see, including results of tests cited by their own Richard Lynn. This is obviously an absurd goal, but someone has to do the fool’s errand, lest the cherished faith succumbs to the painful fangs of reality.

Kirkegaard

One HBDer who has boldly insisted that top competitive Scrabble players are not really that smart is independent researcher Emil Kirkegaard. He published a paper in Mankind Quarterly responding to my Unz Scrabble articles.

Kirkegaard’s counter-thesis, crudely put, is that countries that are good at one complex cognitive game (including video games) are also good at the other complex cognitive games, and that therefore a game that departs more from such a correlation matrix will be less dominated by the smarter countries (and of course he “found” that Scrabble is not all that smart compared to the e-sports video games!) The reasoning sounds obviously fallacious, since national prowess at these games could easily reflect some other variable mediated through historical cultural investments. But we don’t need to debate in esoteric terms when we can just see the simple glaring contradictions in his own results.

On national esports competitive ability, Kirkegaard’s ranking methodology involves looking at the earnings of global e-sports players. This of course puts Africa at the bottom and happily confirms the HBDer’s genetic hypothesis of intelligence!

It appears that my interlocutor in the Scrabble debate, Dr. James Thompson, has now deferred to Kirkegaard’s paper as the stronger and more final rebuttal to my Scrabble thesis. While recommending Kirkegaard’s paper, Thompson rightly cautions about the problem of internet access in some countries, but he somehow still endorses the paper’s non sequitur:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-2&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1019183390619299840&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.unz.com%2Farticle%2Fnigerians-jews-and-scrabble-an-update-on-the-iq-debate%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=500px

Well, that is actually a weakness that makes the entire project worthless, Dr. Thompson.

Think about it. Kirkegaard has rebutted my claim — that Africans in Africa only do badly on scholastic tests because of their extremely low access to modern educational/cultural resources — by pointing out that they also do badly on contests involving computers!

This reminds one of the French Revolution fable of the infamous Queen, Marie Antoinette who, when told that the French peasants could no longer afford to buy bread, allegedly retorted, “well, let them eat cake!” Problem solved!

What makes this even more unforgivable is that Kirkegaard himself seems to have been conscious of this obvious confounding error when he wrote this paper. When addressing the anomalously poor performance of North Korea in esports, Kirkegaard has one and only one explanation: limited resources in North Korea!

“The strongest negative outlier was North Korea,” Kirkegaard writes in the conclusion, “presumably due to very limited internet access despite presumed high IQ.”

Correct.

But did Kirkegaard seriously fail to see that this makes it a decisive limiting factor for his entire project since he is also dealing with poor African countries with “presumably… very limited internet access”? Besides controlling for availability of high speed internet access, you should also find out which countries can afford to use personal computers to access that internet (e-sports are played on PCs). I know that in Nigeria, for example, any claims of superficially high internet access would be mostly through their cheap mobile phones (more than 80 percent). Additionally, Africans still have the slowest internet connections in the world. “Many countries on the continent still have bandwidth as low as 64 kilobits,” reported The Africa Report in 2019. “This is in contrast to the 270,000 megabits per second in the US.”

Arthur Jensen coined the term “sociologist’s fallacy” to describe the tendency of most people to automatically assume that all populations are genetically identical in all important traits, as they analyze any social differences. I think that most HBDers conversely commit what one might call “the hereditarian’s fallacy,” which is probably a worse equalitarian fallacy: the presumption that all environments are effectively equal, or at least that their differences cannot affect phenotypic rankings of populations on any trait. How else can one fail to see the obvious impact of such clear differences in resources?

Even if Kirkagaard somehow showed that all such internet data is wrong and that African countries secretly have sufficient resources for a booming e-sports culture, it still wouldn’t save his project as it has many other unsalvageable errors. When I looked at these high-paying e-sports tournaments, for example, I also discovered that in fact the bulk of these earnings come from local regional contests, which cannot even be accessed through the internet. You can easily see this at the website that Kirkegaard used by simply clicking on “offline earnings” and compare that to “online earnings.” The highest offline earner has made almost 7 million dollars in his video game career, whereas the top online earner has made over ten times less.

This means that if Africans had good access to good computers and high speed internet, their earnings would still have been sharply constrained by the number of locally organized video game tournaments and the prize money that corporate sponsors would put up, a factor that is doubly confounded by other economic variables. You might of course argue that economic differences are themselves determined by IQ, but that would be the circular argument fallacy: it is that very direction of causality that is contested here.

Note that Africa market is also the smallest for video games generally and the top 3 nations are also top 3 in competitive esports. Source: Fandom.com

Finally, if there’s any doubt left, consider the fact that Kirkegaard’s results do not even distinguish between the strategy video games and the shoot-em-up ones — officially called “First Shooter Person” games — in levels of cognitive demand.

In one of the top papers Kirkegaard cited for proof that esports are cognitively demanding, the authors (Kokkinakis et al) did in fact find a big difference between the strategy video games and the shooting games, as we would all intuitively expect.

Here’s how esportsearnings.com, the site used by Kirkegaard, describes the game of Overwatch, which ranks quite high on Kirkagaard’s cognitive list:

“Overwatch is a squad-based first-person shooter developed by Blizzard Entertainment. …
It moves away from Blizzard’s mainstay of real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II and WarCraft III. … Many of the best Overwatch players transitioned over from other competitive scenes such as Quake Live, Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield 4 .”[My emphasis]

From Kirkegaard’s paper:

Notice that the shooter games Overwatch (ow) and Counter-Strike (cs) load more on this Jensenian “general mental sports” factor and even predicts national IQ better than the strategy game Dota 2, according to Kirkegaard. If anything, the paper just proves that you can easily (mis)use Jensen’s “Method of Correlated Vectors” to support some spurious correlations, as others have long pointed out.

To absolutely confirm this conclusion, I took a brief look at the countries that are the best at the shooter game Overwatch. South Korea has 17 of the top 20 Overwatch players. South Korea is also dominant in some strategy video games (13 of the top 20 in League of Legends). The only logical inference here is that intelligence has little, if anything, to do with the esports dominance of countries like South Korea (notice that it is even more dominant in a first person shooting game than in a strategy one). The only explanation is just differential cultural investment, but this is where the biggest blindspot comes in for HBD IQists: they always confuse the direction of causality because they tend to ignore all historical trends that could easily explain a society’s artificially elevated “cognitive” performance, because in their minds it all begins in the genes. (Of course when black Africans perform well, the same HBDers suddenly become cultural anthropologists and swiftly explain away that “anomaly”!)

The Wikipedia page on e-sports gives us some history that is more consistent with our observation of South Korea being good at both strategy games and shooter games:

“The popularity and recognition of esports first took place in Asia, specifically in China and South Korea, with the latter having licensed professional players since 2000…The growth of esports in South Korea is thought to have been influenced by the mass building of broadband Internet networks following the 1997 Asian financial crisis.”

It’s easy to see why this logically produced a pattern that appears to correlate with Lynn’s IQ of nations list. Any collection of “achievements” in which East Asians are first, and Africans are last, will (by default) have Europeans etc in the middle, and will therefore tend to correlate with Lynn’s IQ ranks even if they have absolutely nothing to do with IQ. I am pretty sure that if you rank nations by their achievements in ping-pong, for example, you will find quite a decent correlation with Lynn’s IQs of nations. I would not be shocked if ping pong loads higher than Scrabble on Kirkegaard’s “general mental” factor!

What IQ?

Now, if we “steel-man” Kirkagaard’s thesis by ignoring all the errors and contradictions, is there a chance that the top video game players (at least the ones who are good at strategy games) are smarter than the top Scrabble players? No. And the simple reason we know this for certain is that their intelligence was apparently also measured. When Kokkinakis et al say that top League of Legend players are very smart, they mean “115-120 IQ” smart. Yes, 115 – 120 is higher than the IQ of an average American university, but it is probably lower than the IQ of a selective elite university, at which the average SAT quantitative score is at the 93rd percentile. By contrast, the tested top American Scrabble players scored more than 1 standard deviation above such good students of an elite university on raw cognitive tests. Kirkegaard gets it exactly the opposite.

1.23d above elite college students is stratospheric levels of gifted intelligence.

I checked the SAT scores of these elite college students in the Toma study cited by Lynn: it is above 1400. This is approximately equivalent to an IQ above 137. These top Scrabble players are then 1.23d above that in intelligence, as Lynn reports(!) The fact that this sample had about 25% women says that these are not even the very top of Scrabble players since there are almost never more than 5 women in the top 100 of Scrabble. In fact, Thompson did report that at IQ 155, you do find that a quarter are women, which is exactly what you find if these Scrabble masters are at 155, although it indicates that the very top (where there are only 5% women) might be even higher in IQ.

If we just limit ourselves to IQ 155, then statistically there should be practically no Nigerian there, given population mean IQ of 70 and SD 15. If we protest this IQ as too high and assume the top Scrabble players be only IQ 145 (because the researchers mis-tested them and the gender ratio confirmation by Thompson is just a coincidence), we still can get only 57 people in the whole of Nigeria, compared to 442, 914 people in the US alone at that lowered 145. It is still impossible to explain Nigerian performance.

Also recall that at IQ 145, the number of white females (in the US alone) will still be in the hundreds of thousands, compared to a few dozen Nigerian males. This is why we said Africans should numerically have no chance of outperforming white women if top performance is distinguished by a group’s population in that gifted range of ability (even if you offered that black Nigerian racial/national IQ is 85 and not 70, it still doesn’t work). The racial hypothesis can only survive this anomaly if Lynn is wrong about Scrabble’s performance being limited by intelligence at the highest levels.

However, we do have further conclusive evidence that such top performance is indeed strongly distinguished by intelligence, and that 155 IQ or higher is not an unreasonable threshold for the very best. And that further evidence is? Ashkenazim.

Remember that the more you lower an IQ threshold for distinction, the less Ashkenazi Jews can distinguish themselves numerically (due to their small population), which means that the awards which are the most cognitively challenging will tend to have the highest ratio of Jewish recipients, ceteris paribus.

Scrabbling Jews

“Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115…, although a recent review concludes that the advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation, Lynn (2004). …Ashkenazi Jews are just as successful as their tested IQ would predict, and they are hugely overrepresented in occupations and fields with the highest cognitive demands. During the 20th century, they made up about 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes and 25% of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.” – Cochran, Hardy, Harpending, A Natural History of Ashkenazi Jews.

So, Cochran et al say that Ashkenazi Jews are overrepresented in fields that have the “highest cognitive demands.” Lynn says competitive Scrabble is one such high cognitive demand game. How Ashkenazi-overrepresented is Scrabble?

In my past articles I referenced some sources (including the NewYork Times) that have alluded to some Ashkenazi dominance in Scrabble, but I could not tell its precise extent. Now I have more definitive evidence: at least by the year 2005, a good 50 percent of English Scrabble’s world champions had been of Ashkenazi Jewish descent!

This happens to be the same ratio of Ashkenazi Jews who had historically been chess world champions at that same time. Notice that Jews apparently find it even easier to be numerically dominant in these two cognitive games than in academic awards, probably because there’s some level of discretion involved in awarding the academic prizes (for example, some people argue quite persuasively that Ashkenazi Albert Einstein could have won the Physics world championship at least 7 times, if the awarding of the Nobel Prize was anywhere near as objective as the chess or Scrabble world championships).

Incidentally, this Jewish dominance in English Scrabble is not restricted to US players, which makes it even more convincing. The first British world champion of Scrabble was Jewish (the country only has a 0.3% Jewish population), as was the first Canadian world champion (from 1.2% of the population). More recently (2017), Australia has produced its first Scrabble world champion in David Eldar (whom I had expected to win it one day, from his performance stats, and whose ethnicity I had guessed as Ashkenazi Jewish from a few clues in his bio.) The Australian Eldar is indeed now confirmed to be Ashkenazi Jewish too, in a country that has only 0.5% Jews.

My point is that there should be no high visibility of black Africans at the top of any cognitive field that is also visibly dominated by Jews if the only explanation for such Jewish dominance is their relative abundance among super-gifted people (at the extreme right tail end of the IQ bell curve: the only region where women are extremely scarce.)

Another visual from Erectus Walks Amongst US makes this quantitative prediction more transpicuous and its refutation less ambiguous, at least to the honest naked eye:

Besides the Scrabble anomaly, you should also intuitively see from this graphic why it is irrational and silly to keep arguing that children of anglophone black Africans perform so well in Western schools (above IQ 100) simply because their many thousands of migrant parents are self-selected from that “gifted” range (before their children’s regression towards the mean). There are simply not supposed to be enough black Africans in the region of IQ required to make such a claim even remotely plausible.

The Scrabble case is particularly persuasive because these players are all Africans living in Africa, many of them under conditions of poverty (Wellington Jighere, former world champion from Nigeria has now quit Scrabble because it left him in even worse poverty — which contradicts those HBDers who flippantly claim that the Nigerian team is only good because their government pays them so much money that they are among the wealthiest citizens!)

Bottom line: the predictions of the genetic racial hypothesis are empirically contradicted here. The more liberally a cognitive activity rewards Ashkenazi ethnicity for occupying the right end of the intelligence bell curve, the more severely it should punish black African ethnicity for being genetically constricted to its left end.

Chanda Chisala, originally from Zambia, has been a John S. Knight Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.← Electoral Fraud in Black and White Tweet Reddit Share Share Email Print More • Category: Race/Ethnicity, Science • Tags: Africans, Blacks, IQ, Jews, Race/IQ, Scrabble The Race/IQ Series