Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country. Typical of his results is this paper, which ranged from 60 (Malawi) to 108 (Singapore).

People obviously objected to this, and Lynn spent his life embroiled in controversy, with activists constantly trying to get him canceled/fired and his papers retracted/condemned. His opponents pointed out both his personal racist opinions/activities and his somewhat opportunistic methodology. Nobody does high-quality IQ tests on the entire population of Malawi; to get his numbers, Lynn would often find some IQ-ish test given to some unrepresentative sample of some group related to Malawians and try his best to extrapolate from there. How well this worked remains hotly debated; the latest volley is Aporia’s Are Richard Lynn’s National IQ Estimates Flawed? (they say no).

I’ve followed the technical/methodological debate for a while, but I think the strongest emotions here come from two deeper worries people have about the data:

First, isn’t it horribly racist to say that people in sub-Saharan African countries have IQs that would qualify as an intellectual disability anywhere else?

Second, isn’t it preposterous and against common sense to compare sub-Saharan Africans to the intellectually disabled? You can talk to a Malawian person, and talk to a person with Down’s Syndrome, and the former is obviously much brighter and more functional than the latter. Doesn’t that mean that the estimates have to be wrong?

But both of these have simple answers, which IMHO defuse the worrying nature of Lynn’s results. These answers aren’t original to me, but nobody has put them together in one place before. Going over each in turn:

1: Isn't It Super-Racist To Say That People In Sub-Saharan African Countries Have IQs Equivalent To Intellectually Disabled People?

No. In fact, it would be super-racist not to say this! We shouldn’t conflate advocacy with science. But if we did, Lynn’s position would make better anti-racist advocacy than his detractors.

The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.

We know that in the US, where we do give people good IQ tests, whites average IQ 100 and blacks average IQ 85.

If IQ was 100% genetic, we should expect blacks everywhere to have an IQ of 85, since they all have the same genes. This isn’t quite technically true - US blacks are a little more intermixed with whites than African blacks - but it’s close enough.

But if IQ was 100% environmental, we should expect populations’ IQ to vary based on the quality of nutrition, health care, and education that they get. Therefore, because whites in the US have IQ 100, and blacks get on average worse nutrition, health care, and education than whites, we would expect them to have some lower IQ, like 85.

If there were some group that got even worse nutrition, health care, and education than US blacks, we should expect them (under the environmentalist hypothesis) to have an IQ even lower than 85. How much lower? It depends how bad the nutrition/health/education are.

Which gap in nutrition/health/education is bigger - the gap between US whites and US blacks, or the gap between US blacks and Malawian blacks? It’s the US/Malawi one, right? US whites and blacks mostly eat the same number of calories, go to the same hospitals, and attend the same schools. Meanwhile, in Malawi, children still sometimes starve to death, 30% of the population is infected by parasitic worms, and only 40% of students graduate the eighth grade. So under the environmental hypothesis of IQ, we should expect Malawians to be more than 15 IQ points behind black Americans. If Lynn is right and Malawi has an IQ of 60, they’re 25 IQ points behind black Americans.

If you actually take anti-racism seriously, this should make you breath a sigh of relief! This finding on its own doesn’t disprove a genetic component to racial IQ gaps. But it does suggest that the genetic component is less than 100%. Practically no one ever claimed it was 100% (Charles Murray estimates 50%), so this doesn’t refute anybody. But it’s consistent with what both sides of the debate say, and a natural prediction of the environmentalist position.

On the other hand, if we doubt Lynn and insist Malawi must have a true IQ in the 80s, then the environmentalist argument falls apart and we should insist on a genetic one.

2: Can’t You Talk To A Malawian And An Intellectually Disabled Person And Notice That The Former Is Obviously More Functional Than The Latter?

Thanks to Emil Kirkegaard for the blog post that finally cleared this up for me.

Kirkegaard explains that when we think of intellectually disabled people we’ve met, we’re usually thinking of people with some specific syndrome - often Down’s Syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, or severe autism. These people have abnormally low IQ. But their syndromes also cause motor deficits, executive function deficits, emotional processing deficits, and many other forms of deficit.

For example, people with Down’s Syndrome may have trouble speaking, or speak abnormally. But this is primarily because Down Syndrome affects hearing (through ear structure abnormalities) and speech production (through tongue/mouth/chest abnormalities). The cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the deficit.

Likewise, people with severe autism might be prone to violence, but this is because their sensory issues are constantly irritating them until they melt down. Normal very-low-IQ people don’t have as much of an excess predisposition to violence.

A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, restaurant work, or writing for the New York Times. A country centered around people at this level probably won’t win any space races, but it can certainly continue to exist.

So I think Lynn’s IQ data is, in some sense, reason for optimism. The large difference between sub-Saharan Africans in developed countries (eg the US) and in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that the latter aren’t performing at their genetic peak, and that developmental interventions - again, nutrition, health care, and education - are likely to work.

There’s probably a bidirectional relationship between national IQ and development; development improves nutrition/health/education and boosts IQ, but IQ allows more advanced industries and boosts development. It’s unclear how strong each direction is, but probably the IQ → development direction is greater than zero. Even if you’re generally skeptical of charity because all good things come from development, Lynn’s IQ estimates suggest there’s lots of room for charitable nutrition/health/education interventions to work.