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June 14, 2005	Articles for deletion	Kept
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This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

"Topics that spark Wikipedia 'edit wars' revealed". BBC News. 18 July 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2013.
Doug Gross (July 24, 2013). "Wiki wars: The 10 most controversial Wikipedia pages". CNN. Archived from the original on July 27, 2013. Retrieved July 27, 2013. Circumcision and "race and intelligence," both with obvious controversy attached, made the list, alongside a possibly more surprising page: a list of professional wrestlers on the roster of World Wrestling Entertainment.
Justin Ward (March 12, 2018). "Wikipedia wars: inside the fight against far-right editors, vandals and sock puppets". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on March 12, 2018. Retrieved March 17, 2018. In the article on "race and intelligence," relatively equal weight is given to the two sides of the debate — hereditarian and environmentalist — though environmentalism is the mainstream perspective in psychology.

Section sizes

Section size for Race and intelligence (31 sections)
Section name	Byte count	Section total
(Top)	2,582	2,582
History of the controversy	2,154	10,684
Early IQ testing	3,662	3,662
The Pioneer Fund and The Bell Curve	4,868	4,868
Criticisms of race and intelligence as biologically defined concepts	84	9,871
Intelligence, IQ, g and IQ tests	3,425	3,425
Race	6,362	6,362
Group differences	2,023	10,786
Test scores	5,972	5,972
Flynn effect and the closing gap	2,791	2,791
Environmental influences on group differences in IQ	56	36,309
Health and nutrition	12,973	12,973
Education	4,605	4,605
Socioeconomic environment	3,643	3,643
Test bias	6,354	6,354
Stereotype threat and minority status	8,678	8,678
Research into possible genetic influences on test score differences	4,775	25,429
Genetics of race and intelligence	3,205	3,205
Heritability within and between groups	4,904	4,904
Spearman's hypothesis	2,749	2,749
Adoption studies	4,255	4,255
Racial admixture studies	2,450	2,450
Mental chronometry	1,939	1,939
Brain size	937	937
Archaeological data	215	215
Policy relevance and ethics	2,750	2,750
See also	142	142
References	18	50,068
Notes	28	28
Citations	31	31
Bibliography	49,991	49,991
Total	148,621	148,621

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Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Is there really a scientific consensus that there is no evidence for a genetic link between race and intelligence?

Yes, and for a number of reasons. Primarily:

No evidence for such a connection has ever been published. A statement signed by 143 senior human population geneticists states categorically that genetics research in no way supports the view that "recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results". (See this, this, and this for context.)
As understanding of the human genome and the science of population genetics advances, it has become increasingly clear that race is not a biologically meaningful way to categorize human population groups. See for example this statement by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Even if we take ancestral population groups to be proxies for race, most subject-matter experts agree that cognitive differences between such such groups are unlikely to exist. A group of prominent geneticists explains why here.
Extensive evidence has been published which indicates that observed differences in IQ test performance between racial groups are environmental in origin. A group of leading psychologists summarizes some of these findings here.
Most researchers view the idea of a genetic connection between race and intelligence as scientifically obsolete. See e.g. this statement by the editorial board of Nature.

Isn't it true that different races have different average IQ test scores?

On average and in certain contexts, yes, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. Crucially, the existence of such average differences today does not mean what racialists have asserted that it means (i.e. that races can be ranked according to their genetic predisposition for intelligence). Most IQ test data comes from North America and Europe, where non-White individuals represent ethnic minorities and often carry systemic burdens which are known to affect test performance. Studies which purport to compare the IQ averages of various nations are considered methodologically dubious and extremely unreliable. Further, important discoveries in the past several decades, such as the Flynn effect and the steady narrowing of the gap between low-scoring and high-scoring groups, as well as the ways in which disparities such as access to prenatal care and early childhood education affect IQ, have led to an understanding that environmental factors are sufficient to account for observed between-group differences.

And isn't IQ a measure of intelligence?

Not exactly. IQ tests are designed to measure intelligence, but it is widely acknowledged that they measure only a very limited range of an individual's cognitive capacity. They do not measure mental adaptability or creativity, for example. You can read more about the limitations of IQ measurements here. These caveats need to be kept in mind when extrapolating from IQ measurements to statements about intelligence. But even if we were to take IQ to be a measure of intelligence, there would still be no good reason to assert a genetic link between race and intelligence (for all the reasons stated elsewhere in this FAQ).

Isn't there research showing that there are genetic differences between races?

Yes and no. A geneticist could analyze a DNA sample and then in many cases make an accurate statement about that person's race, but no single gene or group of genes has ever been found that defines a person's race. Such variations make up a minute fraction of the total genome, less even than the amount of genetic material that varies from one individual to the next. It's also important to keep in mind that racial classifications are socially constructed, in the sense that how a person is classified racially depends on perceptions, racial definitions, and customs in their society and can often change when they travel to a different country or when social conventions change over time (see here for more details).

So how can different races look different, without having different genes?

They do have some different genes, but the genes that vary between any two given races will not necessarily vary between two other races. Race is defined phenotypically, not genotypically, which means it's defined by observable traits. When a geneticist looks at the genetic differences between two races, there are differences in the genes that regulate those traits, and that's it. So comparing Africans to Europeans will show differences in genes that regulate skin color, hair texture, nose and lip shape, and other observable traits. But the rest of the genetic code will be essentially the same. In fact, there is much less genetic material that regulates the traits used to define the races than there is that regulates traits that vary from person to person. In other words, if you compare the genomes of two individuals within the same race, the results will likely differ more from each other than a comparison of the average genomes of two races. If you've ever heard people saying that the races "are more alike than two random people" or words to that effect, this is what they were referring to.

Why do people insist that race is "biologically meaningless"?

Mostly because it is. As explained in the answer to the previous question, race isn't defined by genetics. Race is nothing but an arbitrary list of traits, because race is defined by observable features. The list isn't even consistent from one comparison to another. We distinguish between African and European people on the basis of skin color, but what about Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American people? They all have more or less the same skin color. We distinguish African and Asian people from European people by the shape of some of their facial features, but what about Native American and Middle Eastern people? They have the same features as the European people, or close enough to engender confusion when skin color is not discernible. Australian Aborigines share numerous traits with African people and are frequently considered "Black" along with them, yet they are descended from an ancestral Asian population and have been a distinct cultural and ethnic group for fifty thousand years. These standards of division are arbitrary and capricious; the one drop rule shows that visible differences were not even respected at the time they were still in use.

But IQ is at least somewhat heritable. Doesn't that mean that observed differences in IQ test performance between ancestral population groups must have a genetic component?

This is a common misconception, sometimes termed the "hereditarian fallacy". [1] In fact, the heritability of differences between individuals and families within a given population group tells us nothing about the heritability of differences between population groups. [2] [3] As geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell explains:

We need to get away from thinking about intelligence as if it were a trait like milk yield in a herd of cattle, controlled by a small, persistent and dedicated bunch of genetic variants that can be selectively bred into animals from one generation to the next. It is quite the opposite – thousands of variants affect intelligence, they are constantly changing, and they affect other traits. It is not impossible for natural selection to produce populations with differences in intelligence, but these factors make it highly unlikely.
To end up with systematic genetic differences in intelligence between large, ancient populations, the selective forces driving those differences would need to have been enormous. What’s more, those forces would have to have acted across entire continents, with wildly different environments, and have been persistent over tens of thousands of years of tremendous cultural change. Such a scenario is not just speculative – I would argue it is inherently and deeply implausible.
The bottom line is this. While genetic variation may help to explain why one person is more intelligent than another, there are unlikely to be stable and systematic genetic differences that make one population more intelligent than the next. [4]

What about all the psychometricians who claim there's a genetic link?

The short answer is: they're not geneticists. The longer answer is that there remains a well-documented problem of scientific racism, which has infiltrated psychometry (see e.g. [5] and [6]). Psychometry is a field where people who advocate scientific racism can push racist ideas without being constantly contradicted by the very work they're doing. And when their data did contradict their racist views, many prominent advocates of scientific racism simply falsified their work or came up with creative ways to explain away the problems. See such figures as Cyril Burt, J. Phillipe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Hans Eysenck, who are best known in the scientific community today for the poor methodological quality of their work, their strong advocacy for a genetic link between race and intelligence, and in some cases getting away with blatant fraud for many years.

Isn't it a conspiracy theory to claim that psychometricians do this?

No. It is a well-documented fact that there is an organized group of psychometricians pushing for mainstream acceptance of racist, unscientific claims. See this, this and this, as well as our article on scientific racism for more information.

Isn't this just political correctness?

No, it's science. As a group of scholars including biological anthropologists Agustín Fuentes of Princeton and Jonathan M. Marks of the University of North Carolina explain: "while it is true that most researchers in the area of human genetics and human biological diversity no longer allocate significant resources and time to the race/IQ discussion, and that moral concerns may play an important role in these decisions, an equally fundamental reason why researchers do not engage with the thesis is that empirical evidence shows that the whole idea itself is unintelligible and wrong-headed". These authors compare proponents of a genetic link between race and IQ to creationists, vaccine skeptics, and climate change deniers. [7] At the same time, researchers who choose to pursue this line of inquiry have in no way been hindered from doing so, as is made clear by this article: [8]. It's just that all the evidence they find points to environmental rather than genetic causes for observed differences in average IQ-test performance between racial groups.

What about the surveys which say that most "intelligence experts" believe in some degree of genetic linkage between race and IQ?

These surveys are almost invariably conducted by advocates of scientific racism, and respondents to these surveys are also almost exclusively members of groups that promote scientific racism. In short, they are not representative samples of mainstream scientific opinion.
These surveys tend to have very low participation rates, and often consist of fewer than 100 respondents.
Many of the surveys suffer from methodological flaws, such as using leading questions. This leads to an increase in responses from those who agree, and a decrease from those who disagree.
Generally speaking, the better the methodology of the survey, the lower agreement it shows with the claim of a genetic link between race and intelligence.
Even the most poorly structured surveys, conducted among members of groups that are dominated by advocates for scientific racism, show much doubt and difference of opinion among respondents.
The vast majority of respondents have absolutely no qualifications to speak on genetics.

Is there really no evidence at all for a genetic link between race and intelligence?

No evidence for such a link has ever been presented in the scientific community. Much data has been claimed to be evidence by advocates of scientific racism, but each of these claims has been universally rejected by geneticists. Statistical arguments claiming to detect the signal of such a difference in polygenic scores have been refuted as fundamentally methodologically flawed (see e.g. [9]), and neither genetics nor neuroscience are anywhere near the point where a mechanistic explanation could even be meaningfully proposed (see e.g. [10]). This is why the question of a genetic link between race and intelligence is largely considered pseudoscience; it is assumed to exist primarily by advocates of scientific racism, and in these cases the belief is based on nothing but preconceived notions about race.

What is the current state of the science on a link between intelligence and race?

Please see the article itself for an outline of the scientific consensus.

What is the basis for Wikipedia's consensus on how to treat the material?

Wikipedia editors have considered this topic in detail and over an extended period. In short, mainstream science treats the claim that genetics explains the observable differences in IQ between races as a fringe theory, so we use our own guidelines on how to treat such material when editing our articles on the subject. Please refer to the following past discussions:

Lead References

Sad socks :( Generalrelative (talk) 06:37, 31 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Hi @Grayfell: why did you delete the references? ETDS554 (talk) 04:30, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

ETDS554, Grayfell was right to revert your edit. Per MOS:LEADCITE, it is not necessary to supply references in the lead when they are supplied in the article body. In a case like the present article, where the number of possible citations is very extensive, including only a few may give the reader the false impression that these are the only ones available to support the claims of the lead. Given that the topic of this article is very controversial as well, the weight of that concern is all the more pronounced. I hope that makes sense. Generalrelative (talk) 04:39, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I see that you also added a reference to the Washington Post, which violates the special sourcing requirements for this page. This page has a special restriction where we are only supposed to use peer-reviewed academic sources. That may have been why Grayfell identified your edit summary as misleading. Generalrelative (talk) 04:43, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

In that case I suggest having two or three references per statement in the lead. Many of the readers are just going to read the lead for a quick glimpse at the subject, it would be good for them to have at least a sample of the best resources in the literature. ETDS554 (talk) 04:59, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I suppose we will just have to agree to disagree on that one, since the guideline is clear that it can go either way based on local consensus as to whether lead citations are appropriate or not for each article. Perhaps others will show up who agree with you that the status quo should be overturned. Generalrelative (talk) 05:09, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Was there a talk page section about this at any point? I found it weird because a colleague told me the lead used to have references but no longer did. She also told me she wanted to improve this article but some white supremacist was blocking her. ETDS554 (talk) 05:32, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Yup, it's been discussed numerous times. See e.g. this one and the following thread. There isn't a strong consensus either way, but there is a longstanding status quo, which is considered WP:IMPLICIT. Re. your colleague: this is a tricky concern to discuss. On the one hand, this article definitely attracts a lot of white supremacists eager to push their fringe views into article space (or just rant about them on the talk page). However, one of our core behavioral policies is "assume good faith". That's not just a recommendation but a requirement. Unless someone outright proves that they are not acting in good faith, we will bend over backwards to assume that they are. Look through the talk page archives and you will see. So I'm not sure what your friend is referring to specifically. Several years ago there were some known white supremacists who exerted undue influence on this article, but they've since been blocked (though a few sad sacks keep on creating WP:SOCKPUPPETs). If your friend's edits were more recent, it could very well be that she made some well intentioned attempts to improve the article and mistook good-faith resistance for white supremacism. In any case the proper thing to do would have been to bring her concerns here or to a noticeboard like WP:FTN. Since the latest RfC in 2021, calmer heads have essentially prevailed. I hope that's helpful. Generalrelative (talk) 06:03, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hello. To clarify, the edit added sources, but it also changed the meaning of the article by adding an anachronistic claim that race and intelligence was being discussed since since at least them times of Aristotle. Since this claim is controversial and disputed it is misleading to present this with the edit summary "WP:ILC". It is also a typo, but that would be an easy fix. The added source makes an interesting point, but it's an extreme over-reach to say it claims or even suggests that Aristotle viewed human groups as 'races' in the modern sense of the word. If I'm wrong and Matthew A. Sears is claiming that Aristotle's view of races is the same as the modern one, we need a source where he explicitly claims that, and we would need to contextualize it against the mountain of existing sources which dispute it. Grayfell (talk) 07:02, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Since Aristotle

Sad socks :( Generalrelative (talk) 06:38, 31 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

These ideas are much older than the "modern concept of race" Aristotle is the first major thinker I am aware of. I can find peer-reviewed sources for that one. ETDS554 (talk) 05:54, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Please do. But note that the concept of "race" didn't really exist in the ancient world, at least according to most scholars. That's why both here and in the History of the race and intelligence controversy article we begin with the modern period. You'd need some pretty high-level sources to persuade us otherwise. Generalrelative (talk) 06:05, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Feel free to delete this whole section. Doug Weller talk 20:02, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Polygenic scores

Sad socks :( Generalrelative (talk) 06:40, 31 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Hi @MrOllie:, why did you revert my edit? ETDS554 (talk) 18:02, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I suspect you already know: Polygenic scores have been the intense focus of sockpuppet accounts, as detailed in the talk page archives. MrOllie (talk) 18:04, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Is that also the reason my colleague could not add them? I am sorry white supremacist desperately cling to any new scientific findings to justify their biases but that does not mean certain topics need to be salted from the encyclopedia ETDS554 (talk) 18:19, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Aha, so you're white supremacist long-term abuser User:Fq90 again. How boring. Generalrelative (talk) 18:26, 30 January 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Should IQ test figures be included?

I would like to include the following:

The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, lists figures of 105 for Northeast Asians, 100 for North and Central Europeans, 92-96 for South Europeans, 91 for Arctic peoples, 90 for Maoris, 89 for American Hispanics, 86 for Native Americans, 85 for Pacific Islanders, 84 for South Asians, 83 for North Africans, 71 for Sub-Saharan Africans, 62 for Australian Aborigines, 57 for Pygmies, and 55 for Bushmen.

Generalrelative reverted this edit, with the argument being that it is WP:UNDUE and WP:PRIMARY. However, I don't see how the edit gives undue weight to any particular source, since The Bell Curve is one of the most well-known publications in the field. In addition, it is a secondary source which summarizes primary source research in the field. What do people here think? Wiki Crazyman (talk) 23:01, 21 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Firstly, we shouldn't cite any source that old for data. And secondly, The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial source, and both its methodology and conclusions have been subject to heavy criticism from the scientific community. So no, the figures don't belong in the article. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:22, 21 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

RfC on racial hereditarianism at Talk:Eyferth study

Clueful editors are invited to participate at Talk:Eyferth study#Request for comment on hereditarianism subsection. Generalrelative (talk) 07:53, 14 March 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]