MOREFIELD: Race, Genetics, And IQ: Why The Great Taboo Is So Important To Discuss

Modern humans, particularly of the historic Western Civilization variety, are typically a non-confrontational, go-along-to-get-along bunch. There’s a limit, sure, but by and large we tend to avoid difficult truths in large part because we don’t want to hurt feelings. And if we have any reason whatsoever to believe a comfortable lie rather than a difficult truth, we’ll choose the lie almost every time.

One influential view, often described as a “blank slate” conception of human nature, holds that differences between people are overwhelmingly shaped by environment rather than biology. There is an understandable appeal to that idea: If disparities are primarily the product of upbringing, institutions, or culture, then changing those conditions could change the outcomes. Biology is less accommodating.

Some traits are influenced by genetics, and genetic influences cannot simply be legislated away. To make broad assumptions based on immutable characteristics has become one of the greatest “sins” of the current cultural order. In terms of polite discussion, allowances can be made for race-specific genetic diseases or obvious biological differences between populations and sexes, probably because the lie would be too absurd to be believable. However, discussions about group differences in intelligence, especially what might cause them, have long been among the most taboo of all taboos.

The mentality is understandable. Nobody wants to think their limitations, or the limitations experienced by their group more broadly, may be the result of something they have zero control over. If external factors are holding us back, they can be identified, opposed, and even legislated against. If our own behavior or culture is holding us back, we could conceivably change those things and reach a better place. If it’s our own genetics, though, there’s not much to be done except work with what we have.

Political arguments about disparities tend to emphasize different explanations. Progressives often place greater weight on historical discrimination, institutional barriers, and continuing socioeconomic inequalities. Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to emphasize family structure, individual behavior, culture, and other factors operating within communities. Both sets of explanations can matter.

What receives considerably less attention is the possibility that biological differences could also contribute to some observed differences between populations. That possibility does not make biology the only explanation, nor does it establish that any particular disparity is genetic. It simply raises a question that should be examined rather than declared off-limits.

Both external and internal factors can certainly contribute to disparities, and addressing them may narrow the gap somewhat. Measured IQ scores also differ substantially across countries and environments, underscoring just how important nutrition, education, health, and culture can be.

So, in a way, they are all correct to some degree, but not exclusively. Whether racial IQ gaps in the United States will ever close completely is impossible to know. The scientifically serious question is what proportion, if any, of observed group differences can be attributed to genetic rather than environmental causes.

It’s obviously a touchy subject all around, so it’s important to provide as much evidence and precision as possible before examining the social consequences of making any explanation effectively unspeakable.

First, average differences in measured IQ between racial groups in the United States have repeatedly been observed. The more contentious question is why those differences exist. An American Psychological Association task force report published in 1996 reported a black-white difference of roughly one standard deviation at the time and concluded that the gap could not simply be dismissed as an artifact of biased test construction or socioeconomic status. Crucially, however, the task force also said the available evidence did not establish a genetic explanation.

The first question, therefore, is relatively straightforward: Do average differences in measured cognitive ability exist between racial groups? The second is far more difficult: What causes those differences?

Those are separate questions. Establishing that a group difference exists does not establish why it exists, and acknowledging a possible biological contribution does not establish that biology is responsible for all, or even most, of the observed difference.

There is evidence that intelligence predicts consequential outcomes at both the individual and societal level. At the individual level, cognitive ability correlates with educational and occupational outcomes. Internationally, national test scores and measures of cognitive ability have also been correlated with economic development. But such international comparisons cannot establish that racial genetics cause national differences in wealth. Countries differ in institutions, geography, health, education, political stability, history, capital formation, and countless other variables.

In other words, national GDP patterns might raise interesting questions, but they are not strong evidence for a genetic theory of racial IQ differences and shouldn’t be presented as such.

Researchers have also directly examined whether genetics could contribute to observed differences between populations. One prominent example is the 2005 review by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, which argued that the available evidence supported a partial genetic contribution to the black-white difference in cognitive test scores.

There is also substantial evidence that intelligence is heritable within populations, although that does not, by itself, prove that genetics accounts for differences between populations. Twin and family studies have consistently found a significant genetic component to variation in cognitive ability, while molecular-genetic research has identified genetic variants associated with cognitive traits. A major 2015 meta-analysis of five decades of twin studies likewise found substantial heritability for cognitive traits.

But this is another distinction that frequently gets lost in arguments about the subject: high heritability within a population does not tell you why two populations have different averages. Height, for example, is highly heritable, yet average height can change dramatically across generations when nutrition and health improve.

More recent research, published in Psych in 2019, found a statistical association between degree of European genetic ancestry and general cognitive ability. Another paper, published in the American Journal of Psychology in 2021, called “Between-Group Mean Differences in Intelligence in the United States Are >0% Genetically Caused: Five Converging Lines of Evidence,” argues that environment alone is unlikely to account for group intelligence differences.

Those papers are evidence for one side of an unresolved debate, not definitive proof. Any serious treatment of the subject should acknowledge both that such evidence exists and that researchers vigorously dispute how much can legitimately be inferred from it.

Transracial adoption studies are particularly interesting, because they offer one way of trying to disentangle inherited and environmental influences. The famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study found that black and interracial children raised in white adoptive families improved substantially relative to some comparison groups but nevertheless showed persistent average score differences by adolescence.

Supporters of a genetic explanation have pointed to those results as evidence that the family environment cannot account for the entire gap. Critics have challenged aspects of the study’s design, classification of adoptees, and interpretation. The study therefore contributes evidence to the debate, but it does not resolve it on its own.

To be crystal clear, everyone knows that environment plays a huge role in intelligence. Traits can be highly heritable but still vary widely in response to environmental factors. Provide a solid education, good nutrition, a stable home life, and a little discipline, and those children will generally have better developmental and educational outcomes than those who didn’t grow up with those things. And it doesn’t just work for intelligence. For example, though height is highly heritable, children provided with proper nutrition and healthcare will tend to be taller on average than their malnourished, unhealthy counterparts.

That is precisely why anyone claiming to know the exact genetic contribution to racial IQ differences should approach the question with considerable humility. Human beings are not controlled experiments; racial categories are imperfect proxies for ancestry; and genes and environments interact in complex ways.

Sadly, due at least in part to the natural human tendency not to hurt feelings, anyone in the science or social science community who dares to open the door to the possibility that genetics could contribute to population differences is almost guaranteed to receive blowback.

Author and social scientist Charles Murray, who in many ways brought the debate into the mainstream with 1994’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life and has since published books including Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America and Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, has faced decades of accusations of racism.

James Watson, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, lost institutional honors and positions after making highly controversial statements about race and intelligence.

Prominent British psychologist Hans Eysenck, a pioneer of behavior therapy who, before he died in 1997, was the most quoted living psychologist in peer-reviewed literature, had his reputation maligned, received bomb threats, was punched in the face by a protester, and even fielded threats against the lives of his children for asserting that the difference in the racial IQ gap wasn’t entirely environmental.

Author and longtime New York Times science journalist Nicholas Wade received intense scientific and media backlash, and the dreaded ‘racist’ label, for covering the topic in 2014’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History.”

Respected geneticist Razib Khan was briefly hired at the New York Times as an opinion contributor in 2015, then dismissed a day later when his views on race and genetics came to the attention of management. This UnDark hit piece on Khan, published in early 2017, combs through every possibly ‘problematic’ connection from Khan’s past while also admitting: “For all of this, dismissing Khan as a crank would be a mistake. While his associations are extremist, his science is not, and very little of what he writes about human genetics falls outside the pale of ordinary scientific discourse.”

In other words, the only thing people like Khan and others who dare to be open to the possibility of a genetic link are guilty of is talking to the ‘wrong’ people and causing ‘hurt feelz.’ So yeah, it’s hard to be surprised when the vast majority of scientists are still either silent on the issue or loudly on the other side.

Even ‘conservative’ outlets have been guilty of bowing to the cancel mob. Jason Richwine, who holds a PhD in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, was essentially forced to leave his job as senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation in 2013 after un-PC facts in his 2009 dissertation, titled “IQ and Immigration Policy,” came to light, including the partial genetic link between race and IQ and the need for an immigration policy that takes IQ into account.

Rejecting racism and declaring particular scientific questions morally impermissible to investigate are not the same. A healthy society ought to be capable of making that distinction.

But why does any of this matter if people should be treated as individuals?

Precisely because equality under the law should not depend on the assumption that every population is statistically identical in every measurable trait. A genetic contribution to a population-level difference, even if one were ultimately established, would say remarkably little about any particular person. The distributions would still overlap enormously, and individual variation would remain far more important when judging an individual.

Nor would biology determine moral worth. Human dignity, equal rights, and equality before the law are principles that apply to individuals regardless of their ancestry or their statistical characteristics as a group.

That, in fact, is the strongest reason to permit the discussion. A commitment to equal treatment should be robust enough to withstand biological differences among human beings rather than depend on the proposition that no meaningful differences can exist.

The danger of denying every possibility of group differences is that statistical disparities can be too easily treated as proof of discrimination. If unequal outcomes must necessarily arise from unequal treatment, institutions face constant pressure to engineer proportional representation by race.

That logic can lead institutions toward some of the worst excesses of DEI: lowering or manipulating standards, giving explicit racial preferences or judging institutions by the racial composition of their employees rather than by whether they apply fair and relevant standards to individuals.

The objection to those practices does not require assuming that a black doctor, Hispanic pilot, or any other minority professional is unqualified. Quite the opposite: racial preferences create precisely that corrosive suspicion, including toward people who earned their positions entirely on merit.

That is one reason race-conscious hiring can be unfair even to its supposed beneficiaries. Nobody should look at a successful minority professional and wonder whether standards were lowered for them. The surest way to prevent that is simple: establish appropriate standards, apply them consistently, and judge the person standing in front of you rather than their racial group.

And none of this requires pretending that discrimination never happened, that environment does not matter, or that every observed disparity has a genetic explanation. Those propositions would be every bit as intellectually lazy as insisting genetics can never matter.

The scientifically and morally defensible position is more modest: human traits arise from enormously complicated interactions among genes, families, cultures, institutions and environments. We should be willing to investigate those influences wherever the evidence leads while refusing to translate population averages into assumptions about individuals.

People should be hired and promoted according to legitimate, job-related qualifications and performance, and if the result is that fewer or more people of a particular race hold those positions, so be it.

A society genuinely committed to equality should be able to tolerate unequal group outcomes without immediately assuming either discrimination or biological inferiority. It should care first about whether every individual is being treated fairly.

And that principle holds regardless of what future research ultimately concludes about the relative contribution of genes and environment to racial differences in intelligence.

Scott Morefield is a Senior Columnist for the Daily Caller. He spent three years as a media & politics reporter with the Daily Caller from 2018 to 2021, another two years with BizPac Review before that, and was a weekly columnist at Townhall from 2018 to 2026. His op-ed bylines can also be found on Newsweek, TheBlaze, The Hill, Breitbart, National Review, The Federalist, American Greatness, and many other sites. Follow him on Twitter @SKMorefield.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.