Belligerati

John Derbyshire calls this the Dogma of Zero Group Differences, or DZGD.

There are three things to be said about the DZGD. * First, it is empirically false. * Second, it contradicts everything we know about the natural development of populations of living creatures. * Third, it causes discord, disorder, and hatred when let loose in a multiracial society. I would go so far as to say that it is a dangerous, poisonous, and evil doctrine.

· Empirically false. The empirical falsehood of the DZGD has been so often demonstrated that only a willful stubbornness, joined with an ingrained terror of being thought insufficiently “anti-racist,” could lead anyone to deny the evidence, once it has been fairly presented to him.

There is a widespread public impression that this evidence is of a scattered and dubious sort, assembled by people with axes to grind, probably for nefarious purposes. The late Stephen Jay Gould, who, as well as being a committed “anti-racist,” was a Marxist (and not a psychometrician, but a paleontologist), wrote a book to this effect, still widely read and quoted.

This impression is, however, a false one. Good-quality empirical evidence on the quantification of the human personality and human mental abilities now goes back nearly a century. All conceivable objections to this evidence on grounds of methodology have been pondered, debated, and corrected for. Researchers from all over the political spectrum, from Charles Murray, who is a libertarian conservative, to James Flynn, a liberal activist so far to the Left he fled the 1960s U.S.A. on principle to live in New Zealand, are in basic agreement on the core facts of group differences. Statistical differences in scores on various tests of personality and mental ability are as well established as the orbit of the Moon. (An academic sociologist of my acquaintance refers to the famous one-standard-deviation black/white gap on IQ scores as “the fundamental constant of American sociology.” The statistically-challenged should note that among the mathematical consequences of this gap is the fact that at least six million black Americans score higher on IQ tests than the average nonblack American.) Because the DZGD holds such sway in the public and political spheres, the academics who know all this stuff perfectly well are mostly silent about it when confronting the general public; but get the man in his lab or study, and you will hear it all.

And the evidence is not, in fact, all locked away in technical literature. If you read a newspaper, even a liberal broadsheet like the New York Times, you cannot fail to have noticed the recurrent stories about how some city fire department, or county police department, or some other public agency with strict entrance requirements, is being sued because black applicants fail the written admission exam at far higher rates than nonblacks.

These stories have been appearing at regular intervals for thirty years, to my certain recollection, and you would have thought that the collective ingenuity of a mighty and populous nation would by now have figured out the cause of them, and the proper means of correction. No, nobody can; it is a perfect bafflement! An unfathomable mystery! The only response anyone can come up with is to keep dumbing down the tests. In my local police department (Suffolk County, Long Island), after a number of lawsuits, this has now gone so far that the test questions are of the type: “What was your favorite athletic activity in high school?” Everyone passes, and applicants are then selected on a straightforward numerical quota by race. Problem solved!

(Similar remarks apply to that other hardy perennial of the broadsheet press, the story about school districts, despite heroic efforts, mysteriously failing to bring black test scores into line with nonblack ones. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required by law to redouble their efforts in this regard—to advance from the merely heroic to the superhuman. States are responding in the only way they can, by cooking the books.)

· Contrary to biology. In almost any population of a living, interbreeding species, you will observe some variations between individuals. The individuals are not all identical. Some of these variations (red hair, in a human population) are heritable; some (appendectomy scars) are not. Some (fleetness of foot in prey animals, camouflage in moths) increase one’s chances of surviving and reproducing; some (poor eyesight, a defective immune system) decrease those chances.

Darwin’s great insight was that those variations that are both heritable and advantageous will increase in frequency in the population over time, because of differential breeding success. That, said Darwin, is how populations change. And if a population divides, with one part going here and breeding mainly among itself, and another part going there and doing the same, then because the two sub-populations will have different starting “menus” of variation in them (“founder effect”), and perhaps also because they are now in different environments, under different survival stresses, the environment favoring some variations and disfavoring others (“natural selection”), they will diverge from each other over time. And that, said Darwin, explains the origin of species.

The group of modern humans who emerged from Africa 50,000 or so years ago split up in just this way, and settled in various parts of the world as populations interbreeding mainly among themselves. These human groups, and subgroups, and sub-subgroups, developed their own peculiarities as a result of founder effect, natural selection, and some other minor effects I need not go into. There was nothing like enough time for speciation to occur—we are indeed all one species—but there was plenty of time for group differences to develop.

If human groups, long mostly isolated from each other, in severely different environments, and interbreeding mostly among themselves, had not developed distinctive group characteristics, that would be biologically astounding. And of course, we all know that such group characteristics exist. We can see them—skin color, hair texture, stature, muscle-to-fat ratio, epicanthic fold, and so on. Fortunately these visible group characteristics were excluded from the DZGD when we dropped the word “physical.” Phew!

Thus, the obvious, visible group differences we are all familiar with are the only ones. There are no others. There are no group differences other than physical ones. That is the DZGD.

It is, as I have said, biologically preposterous. Physical differences are not biologically “privileged” in any way. Since great swathes of our personalities and mental abilities are known, in good functional detail, to be products of brain activity, the physical/mental dichotomy is to a large degree, and perhaps entirely, an artificial one. The brain is an organ. It has an ontogeny and a phylogeny, like any other organ. We know a lot about that ontogeny and that phylogeny, and are learning more at a galloping rate.

· An evil doctrine. Why do I say that the DZGD is a dangerous and evil doctrine? It is false, to be sure; but a false doctrine need not be dangerous. If the generality of Americans came to believe that Jupiter is further away from the Sun than Neptune, they would have come to believe a falsehood; but in all probability, society would go on much as before, and only pedants would feel any distress.

Suppose you are a black American. (You might, of course, actually be a black America—no offense. If you are not, suppose you are.) Looking around, you notice all the familiar statistics of black America: the high rates of incarceration, single parenthood, and other dysfunctions. You also note that black Americans do not do very well in school (statistically speaking), do not have a fair proportion of good jobs, and so on. What is your logical deduction from all this?

If you cleave to the DZGD, as everyone from the President on down insists that you must in order to be accepted into polite society, there is only one possible conclusion you can come to: Some force is keeping black people down. Since, on the DZGD, the statistical profile of your group on all measurable abilities is just like the statistical profile of any other group, there must be some force keeping black people away from society’s goods. What other force can that be, but the malice of nonblack people? Oppression! Racism!

The DZGD thus generates discord and hatred. It is touted as a sine qua non of the modern civilized outlook. In fact it is a poisonous, anti-social doctrine, as well as a false one. How on earth did it come to have such a grip on our culture, against all the evidence of our own eyes, all the accumulated experience of the ages, and all the researches of our best minds?

The DZGD also lies behind our county’s current insouciance towards mass Third World immigration. If any ten thousand Somalians (say) are statistically indistinguishable from any ten thousand Americans, what difference does it make? It’s just a matter of numbers—and we all know that swelling numbers guarantee national wealth and success (look at China, India, Brazil,…). If the DZGD is false, then of course it may not be just a matter of numbers… but that is unthinkable, unsayable. And so the deluge continues. This is a topic all by itself, but it is well aired elsewhere, and I only want to note that the DZGD is a driving force in mass Third World immigration, as well as in inter-racial domestic discord.