Thomas Sowell vs. Richard Lynn
“It should be noted that a study of black and white Americans is not a study of Negro and Caucasian races in any global sense.” – Thomas Sowell, 1978 (Essays and Data on American Ethnic groups, p. 206).
I will now respond to some hereditarian scholars who wrote some articles in response to my data and arguments on the Black-White IQ Gap (Fuerst, Frost and Thompson). I hope to cover every valid concern brought up so far, including technical issues on data reliability, etc. I will also address some of the alternative explanations that have been suggested for our ethnic data that shows much higher than expected academic performance of Black immigrant children in Western countries, which I have presented as a refutation of the racial genetic hypothesis for Black-White test score differences.
FIRST, FUERST
Hereditarian scholar, John “Chuck” Fuerst, has written a lengthy piece responding to my last article, in which he offers to give us a tutorial on how to do rigorous research (like himself!). That’s certainly kind of him. So, in the collegial spirit of academic exchange, I will also present this article as a tutorial on how to employ rigorous common sense in research. This might save us from the endless need to pursue a lot of superfluous data before making intelligent judgments, especially on investigations where perfect data is sparsely available.
The data we have from both the US and the UK concerning school performance of children from different ethnicities is certainly not perfect, but it is more than sufficient when you bring some common sense to the task. For example, we know that under a genetic hypothesis it is extremely unlikely that an African ethnic group could have a high school pass rate that is much higher than the white pass rate or, even more improbable, equal to or higher than the Chinese pass rate, so we can rightly be skeptical about a 2007 report that suggests that a certain Nigerian tribe has accomplished this in the UK. But when we also see another verified report saying that that same tribe has at times produced the top student in the UK, beating every white or Chinese student, common sense should tempt us to reconsider our skepticism in that first report, even if it was only in Powerpoint format!
Read the full article HERE.