The issue of race and IQ comes up over and over again. While it’s never wrong to ask questions, there are three aspects of the association that make it fatally flawed. 1/9

#1: Intelligence and IQ (as its proxy) are mostly evolving cultural values rather than biological fact. This is shown conclusively by phenomena such as the Flynn Effect where IQ improves over time. 2/9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

#2: Race is a social construct. Except for extremely secluded groups (such as some indigenous tribes in Papua New Guinea), all modern populations are mixes of ancestral lines. So grouping by some superficial trait such as melanin is a fool’s errand. 3/9

David Reich’s 2018 book, Who We Are and How We Got Here is an excellent survey on what we learn from ancient DNA about human populations. 4/9 https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/why-i-wrote-book

#3: The genetics of complex traits is... super complex. Even highly heritable and diagnosable diseases like schizophrenia or autism have no cut-and-dry genetic explanation, despite decades of study. 5/9

Scientists don’t know how heritable intelligence is. It might run in families but how much of it is due to cultural, developmental or environmental factors? 6/9

Any genetic correlation that might one day be found would contribute negligibly to a group’s measure of intelligence. It’s like asking how much does a drop of water make the ocean wet. 7/9

So when it comes to intelligence and genetics, it’s not that our tools just aren’t there yet. It’s that intelligence cannot be reduced to a biological trait of a group. Full stop. 8/9

It should be cliché by now, but it still needs to be stated: Even if there is some trait that is truly associated with some group, it still says very little about how that trait is expressed in the individual. 9/9