IQ's of East Asians
One of the major arguments against heredetarianism is the claim that East Asians’ higher IQs than Europeans is merely a result of effort, and are in fact an example of effort raising the IQ of an entire group by about 4 points relative to 100, which is presumably what they would score if they were as “lazy” as Europeans.
There are 3 reasons to be highly skeptical of this claim:
1. The results of East Asian adoption studies
2. The global patterns of East Asian IQ scores and low verbal IQ relative to their other scores
3. Facts strongly suggestive of genetic causation of the White-Asian differences — such as myopia, the scores of mixed-race East Asians and specific gene variants East Asians have compared to Europeans.
Adoption Studies
Results of four adoption studies:
Children were admitted at Holt Adoption Service, and were in three groups:
1 — Malnourished: below 3rd percentile in height and weight
2 — Moderately nourished: 3rd to 24th percentile in height and weight
3 — Well-Nourished: 25th percentile plus
The fact that these adopted East Asians perform at or better than East Asians raised by East Asian parents calls into question the value of that parenting. It’s possible that some adoptive parents provide the same kind of intensive environment that the East Asian parents create, but there’s no particular reason to believe that. Especially five times in a row.
- A Global Pattern and Subtests
The IQs of racial groups in the United States, including East Asians, has been covered in detail here.
This includes data from the NAEP, TIMSS, PISA, ACT and IQ tests, that puts the East Asians in the US at 103.3 to the US Whites 100. And the East Asians do relatively worse on verbal tests than on mathematical tests in every single test in every single year.
I hunted down the Pieke study, and it was very interesting because it was looking at the offspring of first generation immigrants, some of whom had begun schooling in China, and so this is a real, bona fide example of how Chinese for whom Dutch is a second language perform compared to other ethnic groups in Holland for whom Dutch is their first language:
That Chinese immigrant children are out-performing multi-generational Turks and Moroccans on verbal tests, but probably never passing the European verbal scores, is evidence of just how overwhelming genetics is, and how rapidly environmental factors just melt away since, presumably, the Chinese in Holland are now at about the level of Chinese in Canada in terms of verbal score in their respective language.
And the global pattern is overwhelming. East Asians have higher IQs everywhere and it’s always on nonverbal tests. The idea that it’s down to “Asian languages” just seems weird for two reasons; first of all, this relatively lower verbal score persists into 3rd and 4thgenerations, and second of all, these East Asians are beating every other group except Whites in verbal scores.
So this “cultural” disadvantage that impacts language but not math is precise enough to set East Asians just below Europeans on verbal scores, but above everyone else, and it stays that way for multiple generations even as East Asians beat out the Whites on math? And this is supposedly true in Brazil, Canada, the UK, Holland, and most extensively documented the US?
A tortured environmental explanation for this is unnecessary when genes can explain it:
“East Asians are genetically geared toward mathematical and visual-spatial intelligence, less toward verbal, and that’s why they score higher on that than on verbal in every country at every point in history on every large-scale IQ or IQ-like test ever given.”
In addition, their overall IQ or IQ-like scores are always higher than the white population in every country they go to if not immediately, eventually.
- Things Suggestive of Genetic Causation
- There are three things suggestive of genetic causation of the European / East Asian IQ gap. Mixed race East Asians / Europeans, knowledge from specific genes, and prevalence of myopia (nearsightedness).
Mixed Race
First is the results, as presented by Richard Udry in 2003, from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. In it he found that the Picture Vocabulary Test (PVT) score and GPAs of White / Asian hybrids were intermediate in both PVT and GPA.
This is interesting because Europeans do better on the PVT, but worse on GPA. And the hybrids score lower than Europeans but higher than Asians on the PVT, and lower than Asians but higher than Europeans on GPA.
This is a bizarre level of precision for the White-Asian IQ differences to be down to environment.
Rushton 1997 looked at the Collaborate Perinatal Project. He found that the average IQ of East Asians in the project was 114, Europeans 102, and the hybrids were 103. However, of the 37 hybrids, 32 were white / asian, and 5 were asian / black. Under heredetarian assumptions, this should have cost the hybrids 1 point.
While the hybrids in this sample were a bit lower than heredetarians would predict given the very high 114 IQ of “pure” East Asians in the sample, the hybrids were still intermediate; besides, it was a small sample.
Specific Gene Data
David Piffer showed that, on 9 gene variants that are associated with intelligence (positively or negatively), East Asians did “better” on 6 of the 9 genes compared to Europeans (either having less of a “negative” allele or more of a “positive” allele).
Obviously we have a long way to go until molecular genetic evidence can tell us much about group differences in IQ (if we went by molecular genetics studies, we’d have to believe that there was almost no genetic component to variation in height), but the limited data that exists evidences a genetic component to the East Asian / European IQ gap.
Myopia
Last is near-sightedness (myopia). Myopia is robustly associated with higher nonverbal IQ. Myopia has a heritability of about 0.42. According to Douglas R Fredrick, about 70–90% of East Asians are myopic, 30–40% of Europeans are myopic, and only about 10–20% of Africans are myopic. This is just one more line of evidence that the differences between Europeans and East Asians are largely a result of genetic differences.
Conclusion
For any of these things in isolation, you can come up with an environment-only explanation.
The problem is that so many lines of evidence point to genetics, and an environmental explanation would have to explain the pattern of intelligence in east asians (relatively lower verbal) and higher IQs — all around the world and for decades.
It would have to explain the intermediate scores of mixed European-Asians, the coincidences of higher rates of myopia and East Asians having certain alleles that predict higher IQs.
Not only can a genetic explanation explain this data — all of these things positively bolster a genetic explanation, while an environmentalist orientation would at best just have to cope with all of this.
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