Two opposing hypotheses.
I’m not very much interested in the HBD fetish of IQ, and focus more on ultimate interests than a proximate ranking of group phenotypic characteristics. That said, it is sometimes useful to consider various questions regarding (real) racial science, as long as we are prudent in our hypotheses and data interpretation, and do not descend in politicized HBD pseudoscience.
One can consider the IQ question, particularly, IQ and historic group achievement. We can use the Negro as a model population here, a population noted for low average group IQ and a marked paucity of historical group achievement and productivity, a race whose contribution to human progress is best represented by a negative sign.
I propose two hypotheses: the Quantitative (QN) hypothesis and the Qualitative and Quantitative (QLQN) hypothesis.
The QN hypothesis asserts that poor Negro achievement is due solely to the low numbers (absolute numbers as well as proportion of their population) of higher-IQ individuals. QN states that high-IQ Negroes are essentially the same as high-IQ Whites; put another way, for matched IQ, Negroes and Whites are equivalent in human potential. It is the mere fact that there are so few smart Negroes, that their bell curve is shifted so far to the left, that regression toward a low racial IQ mean always depletes the right end of their curve, which is responsible for historical Negro backwardness. In any Negro polity, there will be too few people to create culture and civilization as well as science and technics, and too few moderate and moderate-high people to maintain those achievements.
The QLQN hypothesis agrees with QN that there are too few smart Negroes – hence the “QN” component is included in QLQN. But QLQN goes further: this hypothesis also asserts that there are qualitative differences between Negroes and Whites even when matched for similar IQ. Thus, high-IQ Negroes and high-IQ Whites are not equivalent: the Whites will be more creative, curious, dynamic, and productive, and the Negroes less so in every way. Note the same deficits may apply for the curiously uncreative “high-IQ Asians.”
These two hypotheses make different predictions. If QN is correct, than a theoretical Negro polity highly enriched in high-IQ Negroes – and with some sort of selective pressures to prevent regression toward the low Negro IQ mean – will be as productive and progressive as a polity filled with high-achieving Whites. Hence, for QN, as long as we have sufficient numbers of smart Negroes, all will be well, and there will be no significant differences compared to an advanced Western society.
QLQN says something different. One could set up the same polity, with the same enrichment of smart Negroes and the same preventive approaches to impede IQ regression, but the levels of achievement will be markedly less than a White polity full of similar IQ level Europeans. The Negroes will lack some quality not captured in (most – all?) IQ tests, some spark of creativity, some Faustian impulse, some quirk of racial character, some inner drive to overcome, some ability to recognize and solve societal problems, which the White society will have.
If I had to pick which is more likely, I’d choose QLQN – the example of Asians suggests that there are racial traits in addition to “raw IQ” that determine how much progress and productivity is derived from a given level of intelligence, from a given level of “g.”
If I had to pick which is more likely, I’d choose QLQN – the example of Asians suggests that there are racial traits in addition to “raw IQ” that determine how much progress and productivity is derived from a given level of intelligence, from a given level of “g.”
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