₦airaland Forum

daretodiffer:
IPOBS and narcissism

If you had taken time to go through the history of other ethnic groups, you would know that this so not new!

Gerrarahea nao b4 tunda faya u

xharder:
Gerrarahea nao b4 tunda faya u

Don't mind her, she's a pained yoruba islamist

Presidiotbuhari:
Don't mind her, she's a pained yoruba islamist

You are all fools

The stupid mofo is busy posting ethnocentric madness of Ur tribe by powers nd forces greater than them... So tell me what's breathtaking abt ur foolhardiness under a white Man's leash... I swear u guys re animals with a cow instinct

xharder:
Igbo 1921 population census report say igbos are more than half of southern Nigeria while the yorubas are one-third of southern nigeria

Forget the political census nonsense on paper. Even the yorubas know that the Igbo are far more populous than them. A group that as globally Ubiquitous as Igbos is yet to be seen, It has been determined that there is at least one Igbo man resident in 197 countries in the world.

In nigeria, outside their homeland they are second most populous after the Indigenes of those states but the 'numero-challenged' monkeys devoid statistical intelligence wants us to believe Igbos are just 18% of the country's population. How scientific is that? Because they mustn't get more than 18% of national resources even when Today's Eastern region produces more than 60% of national resources but the fulani-led region produces 0%.

Only in that cesspool inhabited by dogs and baboons will such be obtainable!

abdul123:
You are all fools

Cheiii... See painment, from another islamist............ntoor

.

No, Blacks Aren't All Alike. Who Said They Were?
Peter Frost


https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/CapandSkull-Robeson.jpg
In 1915, Paul Robeson became the third African American ever enrolled at Rutgers College, being one of four students selected for its Cap and Skull honor society. His father was of Igbo descent . Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Chanda Chisala has written another piece on IQ and African immigrants to the UK:

One of the biggest problems I had with the commenters were readers who apparently were only exposed to the statistical concept of Regression to the Mean from outside the IQ debate. [...]. The problem is not that the black immigrant children were not regressing to the point of equaling their source population mean IQ (that’s also not what hereditarians predict either), but that they were clearly not even moving (or being pulled) towards that extremely low IQ, as hereditarians predict.

The correct term is not “regression to the mean.” It’s “non-inheritance of acquired characteristics.” In other words, each person has a single genotype and a range of possible phenotypes. A culture can push its members to either limit of this range, thus creating a phenotype unlike that of other people with the same genetic endowment. But this phenotype has to be recreated with each succeeding generation. For instance, there used to be a Chinese custom of binding a girl’s foot to make it four inches long and of limited use for walking. When the custom was outlawed, the next generation of women had normal feet. The phenotype bounced back to its initial form, so to speak, much like an elastic band when you stop stretching it (see note 1).

Regression to the mean is something else. It happens because ofgenetic change. For instance, a man with above-average IQ will likely marry a woman with above-average IQ. But only part of their above-averageness is genetic. The rest is due to favorable circumstances. Or simply luck. So their children’s IQ will likely be a bit closer to the mean of the overall population. That second generation will in turn marry people with similar IQs. And their children will likewise be closer still to the population mean. Eventually, several generations later, the descendants of that original couple will have a mean IQ that matches the population mean.

That’s regression to the mean. It’s a multigenerational genetic change. It’s not what happens when genes stay constant and culture changes.

Chanda is really talking about what happens when a culture stops pushing people to excel. The phenotype reverts to its usual state and the pressure to excel comes only from within. This is a legitimate argument, and it may have great explanatory value. When people from certain cultures move to Western countries, the second and third generations do a lot worse than the first generation over many indicators—academic achievement, crime rates, family stability, etc. This is a frequent outcome when people move from an environment where behavior is tightly controlled by family and community to one where behavior is much more self-controlled.

Such social atomization is less toxic for people of Northwest European descent because they have adapted to it over a longer time. For at least the past millennium, they have had weaker kinship ties and stronger tendencies toward individualism than any other human population. This cultural environment has favored individuals who rely less on external means of behavior control and more on internal means, specifically guilt proneness and affective empathy (Frost, 2014).

But that isn’t Chanda’s argument. That’s the argument he attributes to something called “the HBD position.” In reality, there are at least three HBD positions:

1. African immigrants to the UK perform better than whites academically because they are a select group, either because they have elite backgrounds or because they tend to be more motivated than the people who stay behind.

2. African immigrants perform better than whites academically, but this academic performance is weakly linked to the heritable component of IQ, especially in modern Britain. Teachers tend to “over-reward” black students who satisfy basic requirements (regular attendance, assignments turned in on time, non-disruptive behavior, etc.). African parents also invest in private tutoring to improve exam results.

3. Most African immigrants perform worse than whites academically. Only certain African groups excel, notably the Igbo of Nigeria. Igbo excellence is due to their specific evolutionary history and cannot be generalized to all sub-Saharan Africans.

Are African immigrants better than the Africans left behind?

Chanda attacks the first argument, saying that the average African immigrant is very average:

I actually know that the average African immigrants to the UK from any nation or tribe are not from the African elite class, economically or intellectually (even if there is a small segment from the super-professional class)

He also points to the example of African American families. The children of middle-class and even upper-class African Americans do worse on IQ tests than the children of lower-class Euro-American families. So even if you select from the black elite, the next generation will still underperform whites.

One could counter that the African American middle class largely works for the government. In Africa, the middle class is more likely to be self-made men and women. Also, a selection effect may exist despite the averageness of most African immigrants to the UK. Even if most are average, it may be that fewer are below-average. Below a certain level of ability, many Africans may not bother to emigrate.

Fuerst (2014) has studied this question and found that black immigrants to the U.S. have a mean IQ that is one third of a standard deviation above the mean IQ of their home countries. So there is a selection effect. But it seems too weak to explain the difference in IQ—more than one standard deviation and possibly two—between African immigrants to the UK and Africans back home, unless one assumes that migration to the UK is a lot more selective than migration to the US.

What does the GCSE actually measure?

We now come to the second explanation. It is assumed in this debate that the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) is a good proxy for IQ, which in turn is a proxy for the heritable component of intelligence. Is this true? Or does the GCSE largely measure something that is culturally acquired rather than heritable? Perhaps something as simple as showing up for class, doing one’s assignments, or having a private tutor. This point is raised by one commenter:

[...] black Africans in London, even if poor and living in social housing, hire private tutors for their children. White British do not, especially the working class. This much better explains the GCSE results, a very tuition friendly test [...]

Furthermore, many African immigrants may be targeting those exams they can do best on and avoiding those they are less sure about:

[...] one needs to know how many children from each racial group take the exams. For example, the pass rate for Higher Mathematics is very high, not because the exams are easy, but because they are hard, and frighten off most applicants.

Interestingly, Chanda replies to this GCSE skepticism by pointing out that the same “Nigerians” (Igbos) who do well on the GCSE also do well in Nigeria:

For example, the subgroups within the Nigerian group that are the best in Nigeria or even in the US etc are also the best on the GCSEs. Also, the Traveller white (or whatever precise race) groups are placed by the GCSEs exactly where you would expect to find them.

The Igbo factor

This brings us to the third explanation. It’s the one I favor, although the other two probably play a role. African excellence in the UK seems largely driven by a single high-performing people: the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria. Let’s begin with the example of Harold Ekeh, whom Chanda describes in glowing terms:

Harold Ekeh showing off his acceptance letters to all 8 Ivy League Schools. He was born in Nigeria and migrated with his parents at age 8.

Ekeh is an Igbo name, and the Igbo (formerly known as Ibo) have a long history of academic success within Nigeria (Frost, 2015). Chanda himself referred to this success in his first article:

The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on “case study” model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites. (Chisala, 2015a)

This superior achievement was widely known in Nigeria by the time of independence:

All over Nigeria, Ibos filled urban jobs at every level far out of proportion to their numbers, as laborers and domestic servants, as bureaucrats, corporate managers, and technicians. Two-thirds of the senior jobs in the Nigerian Railway Corporation were held by Ibos. Three-quarters of Nigeria’s diplomats came from the Eastern Region. So did almost half of the 4,500 students graduating from Nigerian universities in 1966. The Ibos became known as the “Jews of Africa,” despised—and envied—for their achievements and acquisitiveness. (Baker, 1980)

The term “Jews of Africa” recurs often in the literature. Henry Kissinger used it back in the 1960s:

The Ibos are the wandering Jews of West Africa — gifted, aggressive, Westernized; at best envied and resented, but mostly despised by the mass of their neighbors in the Federation.(Kissinger, 1969)

To what degree is African success Igbo success? If we go back to Chanda’s first article, we see that high African achievers are overwhelmingly “Nigerians” (Chisala, 2015a). This is evident in a chart that lists mean % difference from the mean English GCSE score in 2010-2011 by ethnicity:

Nigerian: +21.8

Ghanaian: +5.5
Sierra Leone: +1.4
Somali: -23.7
Congolese: -35.3

Clearly, high academic achievement is due to something that is very much present in Nigeria, a little bit in Ghana, and not at all in Somalia and Congo. Could this something be the Igbo? The Igbo make up 18% of Nigeria’s population and form a large diaspora elsewhere in West Africa and farther afield. In fact, they seem to be disproportionately represented in overseas Nigerian communities, making up most of the Nigerian community in Japan and a large portion of China’s Nigerian community (Wikipedia, 2015). Statistics are unfortunately lacking for the UK.

Conclusion

What happens when we remove Igbo students from the GCSE results? How well do the other Africans do? To some degree, Chanda answered that question in his first article. African excellence seems to be overwhelmingly Igbo excellence.

So why doesn’t he speak of Igbo excellence? Probably because he assumes that all sub-Saharan Africans are fundamentally the same. Or maybe he assumes that all humans are fundamentally the same. Both assumptions are wrong, and neither can be construed as an “HBD position.”

We are all genetically different, even within our own families. So why the surprise that different African peoples are … different? The Igbo have for a long time specialized in a trading lifestyle that favors a certain mental toolkit: future time orientation; numeracy, and abstract reasoning. This is gene-culture coevolution. When circumstances push people to excel in a certain way, there will be selection for people who can naturally excel in that way, without the prodding of circumstances. And it doesn’t take eons of time for such evolution to work.

Will we hear more about the Igbo in this debate? Probably not. There is a strong desire, especially in the United Kingdom, to show that blacks are converging toward white norms of behavior, including academic performance. There is indeed some convergence, but almost all of it can be traced to the growing numbers of high-performing “Nigerians” (Igbos) and the growing numbers of biracial children (the census now has a mixed-race category, but most biracial people still self-identify as “black”). In the UK, 55% of Black Caribbean men and 40% of Black Caribbean women have a partner from another ethnic background. It’s very likely that half of all “black” children in the UK are at least half-white by ancestry (Platt, 2009, p. 7).

Nor is it likely that we’ll hear more about the Igbo from Chanda. As he sees it, the debate should be over. The academic excellence of Igbo students proves that the black/white IQ gap in the U.S. cannot have a genetic basis:

[It is not] a function of global racial evolution (Sub-Saharan African genes versus European genes), as most hereditarians believe, especially those who identify with the Human Biodiversity or HBD intellectual movement (generally known as “scientific racism” in academic circles, but we are avoiding such unkind terms).

Thank you, Chanda, for avoiding unkind terms. Well, I know a bit about HBD. The term was coined by Steve Sailer in the late 1990s for an email discussion group that included myself and various academics who may or may not want their names disclosed. It’s hard to generalize but we were all influenced by findings that genetic evolution didn’t slow down as cultural evolution speeded up in our species. In fact, the two seemed to feed into each other. This is why genetic evolution accelerated over 100-fold about 10,000 years ago when humans began to abandon hunting and gathering for farming, which in turn led to ever more diverse societies. Our ancestors thus adapted much more to their cultural environments than to their natural environments. These findings were already circulating within our discussion group before being written up in a paper by Hawks et al. (2007) and later in a book by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending (2009).

Yes, previously it was thought that genetic evolution slowed to a crawl with the advent of culture. Therefore, groups like the Igbo couldn’t possibly differ genetically from other sub-Saharan Africans, at least not for anything culture-related. But that kind of thinking wasn’t HBD or even racialist. It was simply the old anthropological narrative, and it’s still accepted by many anthropologists, most of whom aren’t “scientific racists.”

Oh sorry, I forgot we promised to avoid that term.

Note
(1) Of course, if the cultural pressure is maintained long enough, there may be selection for individuals who naturally produce the new phenotype—with no prodding and pushing. Let’s suppose that foot binding had never been outlawed in China. Through chance mutations, some Chinese women might be born with tiny feet, and their descendants would become more and more numerous because of their better life prospects. So what began as a new phenotype could end up becoming a new genotype. Culture pushes the limits of phenotypic plasticity, and then favors genotypes that don’t have to be pushed. That’s gene-culture coevolution.

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/no-blacks-arent-all-alike-who-said-they-were/

The IQ Gap Is No Longer a Black and White Issue: Chanda Chisala

If only environmental factors were responsible for the different IQs of different populations, we should expect to find some countries where Africans had higher IQs than Europeans. The failure to find a single country where this is the case points to the presence of a strong genetic factor.” Richard Lynn.

“Regression would explain why Black children born to high IQ, wealthy Black parents have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents.” Arthur Jensen.

The fact that black immigrants to the United States have shown achievements that are superior to native black Americans has been a phenomenon studied since at least the 1970′s. At first it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome. As black Africans kept immigrating into the US, they showed even higher levels of achievement than the native blacks. Many scholars theorized on the reasons for these differences, from Thomas Sowell’s proposal that this disproved the validity of discrimination against native blacks as an explanation for their underachievement (Sowell, 1978), to other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).

What most of these theories failed to predict was that the children of these immigrants would also show exceptional achievements, especially academically. It is only in recent years, as the immigrants have stayed long enough to produce a sufficiently high number of offspring, that it has been observed that they are over-represented among high academic achievers, especially when compared to native blacks, particularly at very elite institutions. What has been missed in the IQ debate is the full logical implication of these achievements: they have effectively nullified any arguments for a racial evolutionary explanation of the well-known IQ test score gap between blacks and whites. Even more fatal for the racial hereditarian side of the debate has been the corroborating data of school children performance in the UK, particularly when the black Africans are divided into their respective nationalities and tribal ethnicities, as reported in the latter section of this article.

Arthur Jensen gave at least two empirical tests that could potentially falsify his thesis of a race based genetic explanation for the black-white IQ gap. Firstly, if the gap is caused by genetic racial differences, the blacks with more white admixture should tend to show a higher IQ than blacks with less whiteness. Secondly, “regression to the mean” implies that children (or siblings) of extraordinarily high IQ blacks should tend to a lower IQ than the children or siblings of similarly high IQ whites. Social experiments concerning the first test have not been decisive, especially due to the difficulty of separating out environmental factors since lighter American blacks have historically faced more favorable socioeconomic conditions. The second test did indicate some evidence of regression to a lower black mean for African Americans, which only means that the racial genetic hypothesis was not nullified; it remained a valid proposition. Until now.

Using Jensen’s own empirical framework, the racial genetic hypothesis can be tested by comparing black African immigrants with native blacks, intellectually. If the genetic hypothesis is correct, children of elite African blacks will tend to have lower IQs than children of native black Americans, and perhaps even lower than children of low IQ blacks, the same phenomenon observed between American blacks and whites since native blacks are basically “more white” than African (or Caribbean) immigrants.

In the US, it is not only at elite universities where there is a clear over-representation of black immigrant children, it is also at public gifted schools and any kinds of intellectually gifted programs that are highly selective on intelligence. For example, when the New York Times did a story to show the experiences of blacks at Stuyvesant High School in New York, they had to use the personal account of a West Indian black child there (Ann-Marie Miller); if they had many native blacks, that would have certainly been their preferred subject. Furthermore, the only other student who was interviewed for that article, Opraha Miles, a former president of the black student society at Stuyvesant, also just happened to be Jamaican; no black American student was mentioned in the story. A close look at a number of other such institutions shows even more clear evidence of a tendency for black immigrants to be over-represented as selectivity requirements for an academic institution (or complexity of a subject) goes higher.

In the world of intellectually gifted schools, perhaps the most selective in the United States is a special program called the Davidson Academy started by Jan and Bob Davison in 2006 in Reno, Nevada. The tiny school boasts of selecting only the most profoundly gifted children (the highest of the five levels of giftedness) whose IQ is so high that “only one in every ten thousand children in America” can qualify to the school in any one cohort; it is more selective than Stanford or Harvard can ever be. The school makes no efforts or pretensions to affirmative action and as such, they have had very little “diversity.” However, a search through the promotional materials of the school for a black student – all schools and colleges will always show some black faces in their promotional materials if they have any – reveals that they have had at least one black student, and it was, unsurprisingly, a Nigerian Igbo name (the parent is interviewed in the ad posted on Youtube).https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-1.png
At the tertiary level, a special program to promote African American academic pursuit of Science and Engineering called the Meyerhoff Scholars program was started by philanthropists Robert and Jane Meyerhoff at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). The program has attracted funding from a lot of companies by gaining a reputation for achieving something totally unexpected in American society: black students who take a deeply passionate interest in engineering and science majors and even proceed to advanced studies at elite universities. According to a book co-written by the Meyerhoff program’s leader, UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski III, they believe they have succeeded against all odds by having “strong academic advising and personal counseling, emphasis on group study and peer support, appropriate tutoring and mentoring, [and] involvement with faculty in research and access to role models in science.”

The program has been so successful that educators in other states and universities have been seeking to replicate its success by imitating its key principles and management practices. However, a closer look at the program reveals that their key to success is much simpler than it appears: they simply fill up their program with Caribbean and African blacks! For example, listening to the names of the graduating class of 2008 posted on youtube, this author could identify about half of the blacks in this class who were clearly of African (immigrant) descent. The other half can be expected to have a good number of Caribbean blacks, besides blacks with only an African immigrant mother (and black American father).

Many programs that have tried to emulate the Meyerhoff Program in other universities have failed, particularly in solving the problem of retention rates, according to one report in Science Magazine. One program that has also solved this apparently difficult task of keeping blacks enrolled after they enroll in a STEM course is another minority-focused program called the Biology Scholars Program (BSP) at UC Berkeley. However, it appears their secret to success is not different from Meyerhoff’s secret. Their homepage has a section on their members and it features the profiles of five minority students in their program, two of whom are black. Both blacks just happen to be of African (immigrant) descent!

Contrary to their boasting, neither the Meyerhoff Scholars Program nor the Biology Scholars Program has solved the intractable problem of low retention or low achievement in the real African American community (especially the African American male problem that the Meyerhoff’s program was originally intended for); their students simply come from black immigrant groups that already have those achievement and retention rates whether in their home countries or in the U.S., the U.K and elsewhere. This is not disclosed in Hrabowski’s triumphantly titled book, “Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males” or in its sequel on African American women!

Finally, browsing through some names of the competitive National Achievement scholars, which is the National Merit‘s program aimed at specifically recognizing and awarding academic scholarships to the best black high school graduates, also showed signs of clear over-representation of African immigrants, especially for STEM scholarships. In the 2014 Annual Report on their web site, they do not give all the names of their winners, but they give some special profiles of their most outstanding scholars. Of the three long profiles given in the report, one of the names is from the West Indies, and the other two are from Africa (one Ghanaian and one Nigerian); there is no native black American. The West Indian was awarded a scholarship to study multiple languages (including Arabic) due to her extraordinary talent in this area that has apparently been recognized by the State Department; the Ghanaian was awarded for medicine and the Nigerian for electrical engineering. Among the other smaller profiles given, the black immigrant names are still over-represented, especially for the harder sciences. This should put to rest the usual reasons given for why black immigrants are accepted into Ivy League universities more than native blacks, including the charge that these universities just favor immigrant blacks because “[whites] find them easier to get along with”, or native blacks just don’t apply to these universities, and so on. Apparently, occam’s razor wins again: they may just be smarter on average (for whatever reason).

The predictable response of the hereditarians is to adopt the environmentalist argument of super high immigrant selection to explain this unexpected trend: where some environmentalists propose that these immigrants are the most driven achievers in their countries, the hereditarians say they are the most intellectually elite, the ones from the topmost segment of the IQ bell curve in their countries; the outliers who got some lucky genes in an otherwise poor-gene environment. But like the hyper-driven-personality hypothesis, this argument cannot explain the equally, if not more impressive, achievements of their children: lottery winners never have children who also win the lottery. The stubborn refusal of their children to conspicuously regress to the much lower African genetic mean IQ (and not even to the African American mean IQ) predicted by hereditarians is simply inexplicable under their racial genetic hierarchy.

In a Harvard University paper that later sparked some unfortunate controversy, Richwine (2009) estimated the IQs of the black African immigrants from a supposedly culture-free test of backward digit span as 89. Although many in the hereditarian HBD crowd accepted these numbers on faith (and the Heritage Foundation used his paper to try to influence immigration policy), such estimates can be highly misleading. They lump together black Africans into one homogenous group when there are different kinds of black Africans, including a good number coming in as refugees from highly troubled countries, while other nationalities consist of the most educated ethnicities in America. As I demonstrate below with UK data, the different groups of African immigrants can have very large background differences that reflect in cognitive gaps among them that are even higher than the gap between American blacks and whites (and yes, these are reflected on “culture-free” tests too). In other words, the mean IQ of African immigrants may be as unrepresentative of black Igbo immigrants as it is of white South African immigrants. It’s a meaningless mean.

Without accepting this fact, the IQ approximations of Africans do not make sense in the context of their academic achievements in the US compared to black Americans. For example, when one HBD blogger broke down the IQs of black Americans by state using one of Lynn’s methods for estimating national IQs, he found over 30 states that had black IQ above 89, i.e., higher than the black African immigrant IQ found by Richwine. If these black immigrants really have a representative mean IQ from a normal distribution that is lower than the black mean in 30 whole states, there is no way they would dominate the native black Americans so conspicuously and predictably in all academically elite institutions. The black Caribbean immigrant IQ of 83 (assuming it is represented under “Central America/Carribean”), which is lower than Alabama’s black IQ, is even more implausible in the context of their well-noted achievements. Correcting the different states’ black IQ by subtracting 5 IQ points from each state would still not fix the problem of plausibility: if there is even one state with blacks that are definitely smarter than (or just equal to) the black immigrants, it would be the children of the blacks from that state who would be conspicuously over-represented in those elite programs. There certainly would be no Caribbean names there.

The only plausible way to possibly salvage Richwine’s data is to accept that there are such large variations mediated by highly variable environmental factors (rather than restrictive genetic factors) within the African (or Caribbean) immigrant group that their mean IQ is totally inappropriate to use for estimating social expectations for every black immigrant group within the United States. As the UK data below shows, it is very unlikely that children of immigrants from the Igbo or Yoruba groups of Nigeria or the Ashanti group of Ghana, for example, have an average IQ below the white mean IQ.

AFRICAN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN THE U.K.

The most definitive proof of Africans’ grossly underestimated genotypic IQ (80 according to Lynn, or 70 according to Jensen and Rushton, et al) has come in recent years from the performance of African school children in the UK. These results sparked instant reactions in the IQ debate world as soon as they started being reported by the news media, with some strong hereditarians suddenly becoming some kind of neo-environmentalists just to explain why white school children were not showing the kind of academic superiority over blacks that they have become accustomed to in the United States (wrong tests, declining white culture, an alleged war on whites, etc – the same kinds of reasons they always dismissed from liberal environmentalists explaining black underachievement in the US).

The first report that caused some consternation in the IQ blogosphere indicated that black African pupils were apparently catching up with British white pupils on their GCSE tests and that in fact, they had already overtaken them at the lower end: the poor black kids were now performing better than poor white kids (The Guardian, 2010). Hereditarian psychometricians and scholars from Jensen to Gottfredson, Lynn, Rushton, et al had after all declared that IQ predicted test scores on all kinds of tests since a common factor of intelligence, g, was highly robust.https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-3.png
(How Fair is Britain? Credit: Guardian 2010)
A couple of years after that news and more stories of black and other minority progress on GCSEs, GL Assessment, an independent testing organization, published results of their Cognitive Assessment Tests (CAT), indicating the performance of different ethnic groups. The CAT, though given to children at age 11, is highly correlated with GCSE results at age 16. The CAT results confirmed what the GCSEs had shown: that black Africans were catching up with British whites, and this sparked even more panic in the IQ-human biodiversity blogosphere.
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-4.pngMany bloggers and commentators came up with countless explanations for the unexpected trend among blacks from Africa who were expected to be around two standard deviations (30 IQ points) below whites in average IQ scores, but were only half a standard deviation below. Almost all the guesses on what could be causing this unexpected trend assumed that the upward trend would not continue in future to the point of actually equaling white scores, an event that could cause a crisis in the hereditarian camp.

In fact, what most scholars and bloggers in the IQ world seemed to not know is that by the time these pieces of news were coming out in the media, there were already African nationalities that had overtaken the white average by a significant margin. The reason it seemed that the black Africans were only trying to catch up now was the usual academic tendency of lumping Africans together into one big racial group when other groups were being identified by nationality (e.g. Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, etc rather than “Asian” or “South-East Asian” etc). Grouping Africans into the monolithic “Black African” ethnicity concealed the different experiences of African immigrants from different nations, some of whom had emigrated as refugees from war-torn countries, while others lad left countries that did not speak much English and were thus disadvantaged in the tests. A negative correlation with English as Another Language was evident on both the CAT scores and the GCSE scores.https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-5.pngNumber of Black African pupils in the 27 LAs using extended Black African ethnicity codes for 90% or more of their Black African pupils in 2005 (excluding City of London).
Source: Ethnicity and Education: The Evidence on Minority Ethnic Pupils aged 5-16, Department for Education and Skills, 2006.
The pupils from these groups also had varying degrees of poverty levels, determined by how many were eligible for free school meals (2008):
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-6.png
The performances of these groups were highly varied, with some of them having already overtaken the British average, at least as far back as 2003.
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-7.png

Source: Back to Basics: Towards a Successful and Cost-Effective Integration Policy
As the table above shows, some African nationalities, particularly Ghanaians and Nigerians, score way above the England mean (and the white British mean), while others, like the Somalis and Congolese, score way below (but still not as low as the Portuguese immigrants, apparently). The low scoring African groups are the ones that migrated as refugees and/or could not speak English, besides being very poor. Improvements among the Somalians have been impressive, especially due to programs dedicated to teaching them English.

Although the Chinese and Indians are still very conspicuously above even the best African nationalities, their superiority disappears when the Nigerian and other groups are broken down even further according to their different tribal ethnicities. Groups like the famous Igbo tribe, which has contributed much genetically to the African American blacks, are well known to be high academic achievers within Nigeria. In fact, their performance seems to be at least as high as the “model minority” Chinese and Indians in the UK, as seen when some recent African immigrants are divided into languages spoken at home (which also indicates that these are not multigenerational descendants but children of recent immigrants).
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-8.png
Source: Raising the Achievement of Black African Pupils: Good Practice in Schools
Africans speaking Luganda and Krio did better than the Chinese students in 2011. The igbo were even more impressive given their much bigger numbers (and their consistently high performance over the years, gaining a 100 percent pass rate in 2009!). The superior Igbo achievement on GCSEs is not new and has been noted in studies that came before the recent media discovery of African performance. A 2007 report on “case study” model schools in Lambeth also included a rare disclosure of specified Igbo performance (recorded as Ibo in the table below) and it confirms that Igbos have been performing exceptionally well for a long time (5 + A*-C GCSEs); in fact, it is difficult to find a time when they ever performed below British whites.
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-9.pngIt should be noted that in fact, the Chinese and Indian groups in the UK have the smallest number of pupils qualified for free school meals, a proxy for level of poverty.
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-10.png
Percentage of pupils in maintained schools eligible for FSM by ethnic group (2005).
Source: Ethnicity and Education: The Evidence on Minority Ethnic Pupils aged 5–16 , Department for Education and Skills, 2006.
The Chinese and Indian levels of Free School Meals are even lower than the Ghanaian and Nigerian pupils when the Africa segment is broken down into nationalities.

If these Nigerian groups really performed so well under the years in question when the media started catching the news, one would expect some names of their students to be reported in the news among the best performing students in the country. Statistically, if girls outperformed boys and Igbos outperformed other ethnic groups in 2010, one would expect an igbo girl to be among the top performers in the country. In fact, according to a Daily Mail report on the GCSE results of 2010, the best student in the whole country was indeed a Nigerian girl, Chidera Ota. A check on Nigerian names confirms that she is of Igbo descent. Ota scored 15 A*s, higher than any Chinese, Indian or white student, and higher than any student from prestigious elite schools like Eton College (she was at a state funded selective high school for girls).

To put it into perspective, these results mean that the children of black Africans (or at least West Africans) are not only not scoring below the scores of low-IQ poor white children, as Jensen’s calculations would predict, they are even able to score above children of elite whites too (who go to Eton college etc).

What are the chances of a girl from a small minority group of immigrants whose home country is 2 standard deviations below the host country’s mean IQ achieving the best academic results in the host country? If the average IQ of SubSaharan African adults is equal to 11 year old Europeans, as their IQ scores estimate (Rushton, 2004), what are the chances that an African child of such adults would ever beat all European children in academic achievement? Had the low phenotypic IQ of black Africans truly been biologically caused even to some degree, such feats should be as rare as having the fastest 100 meters runner in the world coming from the slowest running ethnicity in the world. In short, what are the chances of say, an Indian immigrant to Jamaica winning the national 100 meters sprint? Even more incredible, what are the chances that the children of such “super-selected” Indian immigrant athletes would also (on average and on top) beat the children of native Jamaicans and other immigrants known for their superior athleticism?

The academic performance of the African students in the UK is even more remarkable when the well-known fact of higher black involvement in sport and athletics (at any level) is taken into account. Whereas Chinese and Indian students are not exactly expected to lead their schools or colleges to winning athletic championships, many black students are actively involved in athletics even when they have a strong academic focus. For example, a check on the Cambridge web site reveals that Chidera Ota, the UK’s best GCSE student in her cohort, was also the fastest runner in the girls 100 and 200 meters team for Cambridge (she qualified to Cambridge’s premed program after subsequently achieving straight A’s on her A-levels). Since she could not have just become a fast runner in college, it means that she achieved her academic performance in high school while being very active in athletics. It is quite plausible that the higher athletic commitments of black African students probably hinders them from achieving even further than they do in academics; it is especially difficult to develop a deep mastery of a specific academic field since this requires much more intensive focus and time commitments. On the other hand, it is also difficult for them to suppress their natural athletic (or artistic) gifts and interests for an unbalanced academic existence.https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chisala-11-280x300.jpg
Chidera Ota, Cambridge Athletics.
This trend of African blacks (especially West Africans) being expected to achieve exceptionally in both athletics and academics is not limited to their experience in the UK. African immigrants in the US (on average) are also highly involved in athletics, like other black students, while also being expected to perform exceptionally well in academics by their parents. A story in the SFGATE in 2009 confirms this typical double commitment of African immigrants. A Ghanaian American Owusu family had five star athletes at elite American universities who also just happened to be star students because if they ever got anything less than an A, “I will take them out of sports,” threatened their father, Francis Owusu. Owusu had migrated to America on an athletics scholarship from Ghana. His sons combined star athleticism and academic performance in such elite institutions as Stanford and Harvard (with a daughter at Colombia University), a data point that in itself goes against familial regression to the low African mean predicted by hereditarians.

NBA star Andre Iguodala (Nigerian heritage), the Most Valuable Player of the 2015 NBA Finals, was not an exception to this African requirement of combining academic excellence (and character) with athletic prowess, despite having decided early to become a professional basketball player. He was an Honor Roll student in high school besides being a star basketball player.

The tendency of black Africans to excel in both academics and sport may be one reason they are on such high demand with elite academic institutions in the United States. These universities get to preserve a reputation for academic excellence while also gaining some profitable athletic contributions to their student body, besides enhancing their “diversity” public profile.

Sporting victories and diversity are apparently not as important in UK universities as they are in American universities, at least in practice. This might explain why the two most elite universities, Oxford and Cambridge do not feel too pressured to take up as many black students as would be predicted by their impressive performance on the GCSEs. When pressed about this issue, the spokeswoman for Oxford admitted that there were many more blacks that academically qualify to enter their university each year than are accepted (the minimum qualification is three A’s or better on A-levels). She explained that one of the main reasons they do not accept as many blacks as would be expected is simply that they tend to apply to oversubscribed subjects (specifically, economics and management, medicine, and maths). Although this is a plausible explanation, it also highlights the difference between black American student performance (in the US) and black African performance (in the UK): can anyone imagine a similar situation happening in the US? What is the likelihood of the top universities in America turning down many black Americans who have scored among the very top high school students in the US, and then having, say, the Harvard University spokesman coming out to explain why they could only take a small portion of blacks with top SAT scores? (The reason itself is unimaginable in the US: too many blacks want to do maths!)

Another story that emphasizes this difference between black African performance in the UK compared to African American performance in the US was a report on London’s spectacular improvements in GCSE school achievement. The capital city has in recent years been doing so well compared to other areas of the country that it attracted some hot debates from different scholars about the causes. The main reason that has been offered and debated so far came from a highly reputable scholar who argued that these achievements of London are not due to any government policy but simply a result of three high achieving groups moving to London in recent years: Chinese, Indians, and Black Africans. The fact that such a statement can even be made proves how different the black Africans in the UK are from black Americans. How conceivable is it that researchers in America would propose something like, “the reason New York City is now leading in school performance nationwide is because it has a lot of Chinese, Indians and black Americans who have recently moved into the city in high numbers”? Mentioning blacks as part of the explanation for the academic success of any American city would sound like a page from an environmentalist science fiction novel, and yet it is accepted as a valid argument for the academic success of the biggest city in the UK!

Finally, it has to be noted that even if hereditarians can somehow manage to convincingly argue that the Nigerian (or Igbo) children in the UK do in fact have a lower IQ than average white children, as their biological model predicts (despite our evidence), they also have to show that these West African children even have a lower IQ than average black American children (since the latter have more white admixture)! At the very least, they should show that these children of “elite” Africans actually have a lower IQ than the children of equally elite native black Americans: the same elite black Americans whose children already score lower than poor whites, according to Jensen. That is by no means the most enviable task in academic history.

Chanda Chisala, originally from Zambia, has been a John S. Knight Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Reagan-Fascell Fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy.


References
Sowell, Thomas (1978).Three Black Histories. Essays and Data on American Ethnic Groups.The Urban Institute, pp 41-48
Butcher, K. F (1990). Black Immigrants to the United States: A comparison with native blacks and other immigrants. Department of Economics, Princeton University.
Business Insider (2015). An Elite Group of Students accepted to all 8 Ivy League Schools have one thing in Common
Murray T, et al (2010). African and non-African admixture components in African Americans and an African Caribbean population. Genet Epidemiol.
Anekwe, P N (2009). Characteristics and Challenges of High-achieving Second Generation Nigerian Youths in the United States, Universal Publishers.
Jill Rutter (2013). Back to Basics: Towards a Successful and Cost-Effective Integration Policy
White British Children outperformed by Minorities The Guardian 2013
Ethnicity and Education: The Evidence on Minority Ethnic Pupils aged 5–16
Gottfredson, L. S. (1998). The general intelligence factor. Scientific American Presents, 9(4), 24-29.
The Grio (2011). Harvard has more black students than ever, but are they African-American?
New York Times (2004). Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
The Guardian (2013). White British Children outperformed by Ethnic Minority pupils, says Think Tank
Feyisa, D. (2009). Raising the Performance of underachieving Children: Success Factors
Feyisa, D. (2013). Raising the Achievement of Black African Pupils: Good Practice in Schools. Lambeth Council
SFGate (2009). Speed Runs in the Owusu Family,
Science Magazine (June 2009). Minority Retention Rates are Sore Spot for Most Universities AAAS
The Economist (2013). Ethnic-minority pupils are storming ahead, thanks partly to tutors.
Hrabowski, F. et al (1998). Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Males. Oxford University Press.
Richwine, J. (2009). IQ and Immigration Policy. Department of Public Policy, Harvard University.
The Guardian (2010). How Fair is Britain?
The Guardian (2015). Is London’s ethnic diversity driving its school success story?
Okoye, P. (2014). Academic Achievement of Nigerian and Ghanaian Students: Report on Academic Achievement of Nigerian and Ghanaian students in Camden Schools
Strand, S. (2015). English as an Additional Language (EAL) and educational achievement in England: An analysis of the National Pupil Database. University of Oxford Department of Education
Rushton, J. P., & Jensen, A. R.. (2005). Thirty years of research on Black-White differences in cognitive ability.Psychology, Public Policy, & the Law, 11, 235-294.
Rushton, J.P. (2004). Solving the IQ Conundrum. Vdare.com
Jensen, A.R. (1999). The g Factor: the Science of Mental Ability. Precis of Jensen on Intelligence-g-Factor. Psycoloquy: 10(023)
Lynn, Richard;Vanhanen, Tatu(2002). IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
Lynn, R. (2008).The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide. Augusta, Georgia: Washington Summit Publishers.

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

NARCISSISTIC Yeeboos - the chestbeating no be 2day 0- No wonder nobody likes u

Closing the Black-White IQ Gap Debate, Part I

Although I was not surprised that my article (The IQ Gap is no Longer a Black and White Issue) attracted a lot of interest, I was actually shocked that it also impressed the Google Search algorithms. It became a top “authority” not only on topical searches like “black white IQ gap”, but even on very generic short search terms like “black IQ” or “white IQ”, proving once and for all that Google is indeed the wisest search engine!

In that article, I proposed that the academic performance of black immigrant children should have already sealed the debate on the black-white tested IQ gap in America, particularly on the question of whether it is a function of global racial evolution (Sub-Saharan African genes versus European genes), as most hereditarians believe, especially those who identify with the Human Biodiversity or HBD intellectual movement (generally known as “scientific racism” in academic circles, but we are avoiding such unkind terms). After going through many of the readers’ comments and all the response articles, I believe I have identified where the misunderstandings were (there were also a lot of educative comments). I will address the reactions (both from the comments and the articles) in a two or three part series of articles before giving my final position on what I believe is the true explanation of the mysterious black-white IQ gap in the US (I disagree with both environmentalist and hereditarian conclusions as presently conceived).https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_JustinOtor.jpg
Justin Otor, a son of African born Igbo immigrants, pictured with the founders of the super-elite Davidson Academy (minimum qualification: 99.9th percentile IQ) on his graduation. Otor was subsequently both a National Achievement and National Merit finalist before proceeding to study Astrophysics at Princeton.
WHICH MEAN DO WE MEAN?

One of the biggest problems I had with the commenters were readers who apparently were only exposed to the statistical concept of Regression to the Mean from outside the IQ debate. Perhaps because they do not know exactly how it has been used as an empirical tool in hereditarian arguments, they understood my argument as being as follows: “Black African immigrants to the UK and the US are supposed to have children who have the same average IQ as everyone else in Africa through Regression to the (African) Mean; since they do not, I have just falsified all of hereditarian science since Francis Galton.” This made them immediately think it was an easy task to correct me by simply explaining (repetitively) that “that’s not how regression works,” or “those immigrants are not representative”, and so on, until they beat the poor straw man to its grave.

My actual argument was a bit less simplistic than that (and my goal was specifically to falsify the hereditarian conclusions on the question of the cognitive potential of blacks globally – it was not to “disprove” the validity of heredity or human population genetics as such; I’m not a “blank slatist”). The problem is not that the black immigrant children were not regressing to the point of equaling their source population mean IQ (that’s also not what hereditarians predict either), but that they were clearly not even moving (or being pulled) towards that extremely low IQ, as hereditarians predict. If the parents only barely survived the UK cognitive environment because they were a highly select group, then any such expected steep regression towards the black or African mean would ensure that their children would absolutely fail to survive in that complex environment, but it appears they do just as well as white children, if not better. Which means that either the regression to the mean principle has suddenly stopped working, or their source population genetic IQ potential average is much higher than what has been estimated by hereditarians; and these “impressive” parents were in fact not far above that average to begin with, which falsifies the models that led to such low genetic estimates.

The data indicates that the mysterious cognitive gap between blacks and whites in America would persist even if the whites were replaced with black Africans.

BLACK AMERICAN REGRESSION

Psychologist Arthur Jensen’s genetic hypothesis predicted that children of black elites with good incomes and attending fairly good schools would have a much lower mean IQ than children of white elites of equal IQ because the former come from a population with an IQ that is depressed by genes rather than just environment, relative to whites (after all, such high-income educated black elites are unlikely to provide a very harmful environment to their children).

The academic performance of American blacks indeed seemed to bear Jensen out. The children of high income black elites were scoring even lower than children of low IQ, poor whites on academic tests!

And this wasn’t just “racist” Arthur Jensen lying for some secret eugenicist cause. His reports have been confirmed in more recent times by none other than the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) and their data is probably even more damning than Jensen’s, even though their aims for reporting these astronomical gaps were obviously different.
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_RacialSATs.pngPublished by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

This table is so disturbing that every IQ environmentalist should have been honest enough to acknowledge that it was a very strong point for the Jensen side, no matter what their motives may be. It does indeed appear as if black children are regressing toward a mysterious lower mean intelligence when a child of black parents making 200,000 dollars a year scores lower than a white child from a less than 20,000 dollars a year home – probably living in much worse neighborhoods and going to much worse schools. Almost all the excuses I have seen for this strange pattern do not hold up under scrutiny. The fact that a black family at 200,000 dollars income has less total wealth than a white family at the same income level is not a convincing explanation to me for this extreme SAT score gap. Africans in the UK who have both low income and low wealth have children performing at the white average or even above (and as I will definitively prove in part 2, this is certainly true of African immigrants in America too).

Neither is the supposed pervasive white racism argument too convincing. It’s just hard for me to see how racism can make black children of over 200,000 dollar income parents perform below 20,000 dollar whites (what’s that about?). The fact that these high income blacks live in good neighborhoods with high quality schools should have indicated to policy makers that the solution for black children underachievement is not more spending on education or taking poor blacks to schools in better neighborhoods (since the ones already living in good neighborhoods still perform badly); it is not even about improving their incomes, clearly. But that would be in a world where policy is driven by cold logic and data rather than hot sentiments and ideology (from the left or the right).

Instead of arguing directly against Jensen or rejecting his data (after I saw such numbers), my task was simply to show that these trends are not quite true for black African immigrants anywhere in the developed world, which means that hereditarians are also wrong on at least the racial factor in their explanation of black American underachievement. Hereditarian literature is full of extrapolations of these American social “experiments” to the whole world of blacks, which has led to the development of a number of evolutionary models on global racial intellectual potential differences that are creative but empirically indefensible, as our data is clearly showing when properly understood.

I actually know that the average African immigrants to the UK from any nation or tribe are not from the African elite class, economically or intellectually (even if there is a small segment from the super-professional class), as many people on both sides of the debate assume, but even if we granted that they are elites in this analysis, it can not be denied that their children do not “experience” anything close to the regression observed in children of confirmed black American elites in the US, regardless of parental income or wealth.

To make this totally clear, we can perform a short thought experiment. Let’s say we took a number of black American elites to the UK as expatriate workers, selected only from those professionals who make 200,000 dollars a year in their homes. Would their children perform significantly above the white average in the UK on academic tests? No. It is the same children who perform below the poor white children in America; a plane ride would not suddenly make them smart. This means that there will also be a gap between black American children and black African children (especially the English-speaking ones) in the UK that is similar to (or even larger than) the persistent gap between blacks and whites in America, thus confirming that their regression in America has nothing to do with racial IQ genetic potentials (it’s not a black and white issue).

If, on the other hand, these children of expatriate black American elites did somehow perform as well as children of black Africans (thus also closing the gap with whites), unlike their regressed performance in America, then the racial hereditarian case would still be falsified: it would point to something in the American environment that specifically affects native blacks rather than a simple genetic issue. Either result falsifies the HBD case: it’s one of those rare genuine cases of heads I win, tails you lose!

What this says is that it does not even matter if it is assumed that the black immigrants from Africa are highly select elites – even as highly select as the 200,000 dollar a year native blacks – because the performance of their children still defies the Jensen prediction of strong regression by performing way above where children of highly select black American elites perform.

This means that the genetic hypothesis is empirically falsified by black Africans even if it was validated by black Americans, despite the fact that the latter are supposed to even be helped by the presence of more white genes in them, as the same hereditarians have always argued!

Does this make sense so far?

THE BREEDER’S EQUATION

HBD blogger Jayman-from-Jamaica introduced the Breeder’s Equation counterargument into the discussion, which he apparently learnt from geneticist Gregory Cochran, as a model that he believes explains away all this data very easily. The basic idea is that the black immigrants are not only a highly select group, but that they basically form a new “breed” of people by marrying among themselves, rather than taking partners from the source population. This means that the children of such immigrants ultimately do not regress toward the mean IQ of the source population, but rather to the mean of the new higher-IQ parental sub-population, and it should thus easily explain away our “mystery.”

Not so fast. The regression to a higher bred population does not start with the first offspring population, according to the same Cochran article that Jayman linked to. These first ones should still regress toward the mean of the source population where their parents came from, and my article made clear that these were the main subject of our analysis, especially since substantial African immigration is a relatively new phenomenon. It is only their children (the grandchildren of the original immigrant parents) who would possibly stop regressing toward the source population mean if they married exclusively among fellow immigrants.
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_HaroldEkeh.pngHarold Ekeh showing off his acceptance letters to all 8 Ivy League Schools. He was born in Nigeria and migrated with his parents at age 8.
Jayman’s argument would probably be valid if this discussion was limited to the academic performance of multigenerational descendants of immigrants. But it applies to new immigrants (as stated in the article). For example, those children who speak African languages were likely born in Africa themselves before their parents migrated; they were certainly not born to UK-born parents. In fact, my examples of super-achieving Jamaican children like those at the gifted school in New York, were also actually born in Jamaica. Similarly, among the black African children who have been making news for their impressive school scores, all of them were either born in Africa before their parents migrated or they were born to recently migrated parents. The principle to remember (again) is that a plane ride does not change genes.

Interestingly, Jayman decided to quote some of the words of Cochran in a suspiciously selective fashion. He wanted to demonstrate that, contrary to my assertion, regression among self selected immigrants should only be “slight” or “a bit”, and therefore there is no “mystery” with our failure to observe a steep regression. In order to show this, he decided to quote Cochran’s words with an example that was actually inapplicable to our context and curiously omitted Cochran’s example that precisely confirmed my argument.

From Jayman in the comments section:

https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_Breeders.pngNow let’s look at the source link to see what words from Cochran’s article he replaced with those first three dots (see the omitted second paragraph, beginning “Do the same thing…”):
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_Breeders2.pngCochran’s original post, in short, shows that there should indeed be a large regression for blacks (whether immigrants or not), at least in that first offspring generation. Jayman conveniently left out the only relevant example and Cochran’s words explicitly confirming that the regression from a population of IQ 85 should “regress to a lower mean” – as I said. It should regress even lower for those from Africa.

He further omitted a few more words that again emphasized how steep this regression should be and introduced another three dots at the precise point where Cochran explicitly states this, which indicates that he was probably doing this quite intentionally (see omitted second sentence below, beginning “The 120-IQ parents…”):https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_Breeders3.pngThe sentence indicating that they “drop 17.5 points” is missing from Jayman’s quote above. This is apparently because he was preparing to say that his black immigrant family from Jamaica regressed from the migrating parents only “a bit,” as the Breeder’s Equation supposedly predicts. Except that if he truly believes that he is black (which is what our discussion is about), then the example with the 100 IQ mean population that he selected is obviously the wrong one since that is the IQ for white populations from Europe, not blacks from Jamaica. The much more appropriate example, using a population mean IQ of 85, had a regression amount that absolutely contradicts his claims of a slight regression. In short, Jayman’s own family life history, if it’s true that he is black and that his family regressed only “a bit lower,” is a data point that precisely refutes the empirically untenable HBD positions that he has apparently chosen to defend by any means necessary – including prevarication.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt at first, I assumed that Jayman just hadn’t read my article before rushing to comment and I told him as much. But after I noticed his selective pasting of Cochran and later, his comments on Karlin’s response article, I realized that the problem may be a bit bigger than that: The reason many of the super-confident pseudonymous HBD bloggers find reasonably complex issues to be “not a mystery” or “too easy” to explain, is probably because they do not understand them enough to appreciate their complexity or implications.

Anatoly Karlin’s response article, which Jayman praised for confirming that black immigrant IQ should be just “slightly regressed” (like his family’s), was actually built on a conceptual misunderstanding of the breeder’s equation. Karlin produced a breeder’s table showing how much African immigrants will regress to the mean before stopping to regress, thus forming a sub-population that is effectively white (like Jayman’s family!).
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_BreedersTable.pngPutting aside the glaringly obvious fact that these regressions are anything but “slight” (from the 115 IQ parent), the fatal mistake in Karlin’s calculations is that he is working with “genotypic” IQs. These are IQs sans the “luck,” in Cochran’s formulation of regression to the mean through the breeder’s equation. The parental averages of such “real” IQs would have to be passed on to the offspring without any downward regression, contrary to Karlin’s calculations and Jayman’s endorsements.

The reason Karlin found himself in this conceptual trap was that, unlike Jayman, he understood that any calculation that puts the black immigrants at around 3 standard deviations above their source population mean is completely unrealistic (120 IQ immigrants in Jayman’s Cochran example would be over 3 SD above the African mean!). He found a creative way of going round this problem by proposing that they were only 2 standard deviations selected (which is actually also very unrealistic, as I later explain), but that they were robbed of 15 IQ points by their environment. It solves that one problem, but it is a Pyrrhic victory because you can’t regress after you declare a genotypic IQ. In short, his calculations without that conceptual mistake would show that these economic migrants would intellectually be like Jews or like the high-IQ Indian immigrants, a conclusion that he explicitly rejects.

Karlin also acknowledged the special insight of another HBD blogger, Pumpkinperson, who also confidently asserted that “it is very easy” to explain away all this data, before twisting himself in all kinds of conceptual problems.

The thrust of Pumpkin’s counter depended on an assumption that is astonishingly misguided. Whereas most experts find it quite difficult to estimate the quantity or even direction of immigrant selection, Pumpkin believes he has found the easy way to do this: you can merely compare the incomes of the immigrants in their rich host country with the average incomes in their poverty-stricken source populations and you have an IQ differential that tells you how select the immigrants were since IQ and income are correlated!
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Chanda_UKAfricans.png
No matter how much I pointed out to him that there is no logical correlation between nominal individual incomes of people from such vastly different economies with IQ (no one has even claimed that), Pumpkin insisted that he had a useful tool that solves the problem. In short, he sincerely believes that African nurses who migrate to the UK have a higher real IQ than African surgeons who remain in Africa since such nurses are getting much more money in the UK compared to the surgeons!

I also have doubts on his mathematical application of “the parent-child IQ correlation” in these calculations, which looks like a non sequitur since that correlation doesn’t necessarily imply that the children should have a lower IQ than the parents. If this is what he is using for regression to the mean, it is very confused, not to mention that Karlin or Jayman should have jumped on him for contradicting the breeder’s equation since this is being applied after “several generations” of immigration, when regression should have already stopped.

At the end, Pumpkinperson even threatens to add more points to the immigrants’ estimated IQ since there are many other social benefits of being in the UK besides their nominal incomes (he already factored in their education levels in the UK after “several generations”, also compared between vastly different environments with incomparable educational opportunities).

With such liberally adjustable estimates of important quantitative variables available for your calculations, without the need to be firmly grounded in reality, you have the makings of a pseudoscience, in the truest Popperian sense: you can never be wrong no matter what the data says!

THE “WILLINGNESS TO MIGRATE” INSIGHT

How about the now-common argument that immigrants have higher intelligence since they have a willingness to migrate to a rich country? Both Pumpkinperson and Jayman had this idea in their arsenal of easy explanations. In Jayman’s words: “at the very least, there’s usually going to be selection for willingness to migrate vs. staying put ”.

I do not really know how it works in Jamaica, but I am quite confident that realizing that life is better in a very rich country than in your poor country is never exactly the most g-loaded epiphany among Africans. The immigration problem exists in Western countries precisely because just about everyone in the poor world has that “willingness to migrate” virtue; it is why there are no open borders. And if you know anything about the popularity of things like the green card lottery, you would probably suspect that it is not just a select few people at the top who possess this special insight.

In fact, as I claimed before, this sort of argument wasn’t always a hereditarian argument. But don’t take my word for it. We can quote from a book that is not generally considered a liberal environmentalist screed:

How about the idea that people who are willing to pack up and move to a strange place in search of a better life are self-selected for desirable qualities such as initiative, determination, energy, and perhaps intelligence as well? Given this plausible expectation, why not assume that the mean for immigrants is significantly higher than average for their ethnic groups? Here, the NLSY provides a snapshot of the effects on the distribution of intelligence of the people coming across our borders, insofar as we may compare the IQs of those who were born abroad with those who were born in the United States…

Think back to the immigrant at the turn of the century. America was the Land of Opportunity – but that was all. There were no guarantees, no safety nets. One way or another, an immigrant had to make it on his own. Add to that the wrench of tearing himself and family away from a place where his people might have lived for centuries, the terrors of having to learn a new language and culture, often the prospect of working at jobs he had never tried before, a dozen other reasons for apprehension, and the United States had going for it a crackerjack self-selection mechanism for attracting immigrants who were brave, hard-working, imaginative, self-starting-and probably smart. Immigration can still select for those qualities, but it does not have to. Someone who comes here because his cousin offers him a job, a free airplane ticket, and a place to stay is not necessarily self-selected for those qualities. On the contrary, immigrating to America can be for that person a much easier option than staying where he is.

From The Bell Curve, p 360 – 361.

Notice how rightly cautious scientists like Murray and Hernstein are about their claims here. They can not say for sure that intelligence was selected for even at the time in the past when it was extremely challenging for an immigrant to settle in the US. They knew that even then it was merely a plausible proposition (unlike more sure traits like initiative, determination, energy, bravery etc). Contrast this with the new intellectuals who are fully certain that intelligence is obviously being highly selected for today (among immigrants from everywhere), despite the fact that the challenging obstacles that would have made this claim merely plausible have largely dissipated, especially with the growth of the welfare state.

The bottom line is that all those extra intelligence points being thrown at the black migrants (to explain why their children are so smart) have very little basis in reality. There is probably more evidence for a negative selection than a positive one (generally), as the Bell Curve itself implied. There is certainly no evidence for the extremely high selection estimates from Africa asserted by the new HBD hereditarians.

Their common mistake of comparing the number of university degree holders in the immigrant group with those in the source population as a way of estimating selection is also based on faulty reasoning. We already know the IQ of students at an “elite” African university to be 85 or 1 standard deviation above the environmentally depressed African mean (according to the same hereditarian scholars like Rushton and Lynn). So, how can your calculations tell you that the immigrants are 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean when they even have a much smaller number of university graduates? How can a full sample of university students be lower in intelligence than a sample containing only 20 per cent university degree holders or 50 per cent in the best cases (I even have reason to doubt this high degree-holder estimate for some African country migrants)? It would be remarkable if these largely uneducated migrants (25 percent of whom migrated through the green card lottery in the case of the US) just equaled the selection of a full sample of elite university students by also being as high as a full standard deviation above the African mean. And yet most HBD bloggers estimate them at twice that level of selection or more!

HBD blogger and scholar, Chuck, apparently knew that such estimations of immigrant selection were unrealistic about three years ago (according to a link to his defunct WordPress blog that he shared with me), and it appears he was actually on the verge of falsifying the HBD position himself despite calling his blog “occidental ascent”. Instead of searching for more decisive data on the matter, his biases apparently finally got the better of him and he instead found some clearly weak counter-data that only worked to rationalize his faith in the guiding tenets of racial HBD. But apparently he also now wants to have his cake and eat it:

[Chuck]: “...But I think that it’s reasonable to posit that Black Africans are at least 1 SD selected in IQ .. Nigerian/African emigrants fall around at least the 84% percentile in cognitive ability relative to the Nigerian/African mean.”

“Generally, assuming that emigrant Black Africans are at least 1 SD selected relative to the mean and assuming that the h2 (narrow heritability) + c2 (shared environment) in Africa is ~0.6, the data is consistent with a proposed African “genotypic IQ” — a confused concept, but one everyone seems to employ — of 85.

This is precisely what I deduced 3.5 years ago!”

Understood. But is this what he “precisely” deduced 3.5 years ago? No. He actually rejected what he is now arguing for in the comments section to my article, because he resolutely believed (correctly) that it was not so reasonable to have such high estimates of African immigrant selection.

Let’s paste his precise words from 3.5 years ago, from the same link he gave me:

“A more reasonable scenario, to my mind, is that they [African immigrants] represent no more than the 70th percentile of the g distribution or are no more than 0.55 SD above the phenotypic mean.”

So, only 3.5 years ago, it was “more reasonable” to estimate that the immigrants were “no more than 0.55 SD” selected, but now “it’s reasonable to posit” that they are “at least 1 SD selected” and those deductions are “precisely” the same?

As I said, this ability to adjust your “selection” estimates means that even if the African immigrant children scored a standard deviation above the white mean IQ, this would not be empirical proof of anything since these HBD intellectuals can just retroactively push up that immigrant self selection estimate until the math can work, which makes the science unfalsifiable by empirical means.

POLITICS?

My analysis on this issue has no political agenda, not even on the immigration question. If anything, I too do not believe that the current US or UK immigration system mostly selects for the best people from places like Africa (as it probably used to do very long ago). So, I am actually with the right wingers on this. The problem is that the right wingers are not with themselves. They want to have their cake and eat it. They say the immigration system is so broken that it does not select for the best. When the topic changes to the question of intelligence and it is pointed out that the immigrants’ children appear to be very smart, then suddenly many of the same people start saying “oh, what do you expect when Africa is just sending their PhD’s and doctors and engineers?”

Accepting that their children are smart would mean rejecting the idea that they are genetically lower since they are not regressing as expected; so, it must be that their parents are just super-selected. But accepting that their parents are super-selected means accepting that the immigration system is still working just fine. Which is it?

CONCLUSION

It is very important to remember that my argument does not actually depend on immigrant selection being absent or negative (it is the hereditarian defence that depends on it being absurdly high, just to have any chance of surviving the cruel data). The racial hereditarian case is so weak that even if we grant that these immigrants are highly selected for intelligence, all the way up to something as ridiculous as 2 standard deviations above the African mean (because that’s what you supposedly need to realize that the UK is better than Nigeria and to borrow some air ticket money from family and friends already there), the hereditarian predictions are still even then defied.

Remember our reason: the African children do not perform anywhere near as badly as the children of much more highly selected black American elites (the 200,000 dollar family income kind – all degree holders from Western universities) relative to white children, when hereditarians predict that they should perform much worse or similarly bad, at best. Their actual performance is so opposite of that prediction that there is now even a discussion of whether some of the African ethnicities in the UK have sometimes beaten the infamously “testocratic” Chinese students themselves on average (see part 2 for more convincing data on that question) when the discussion should really have been on whether they can beat the Irish Travelers who, according to hereditarian estimates, are supposed to have a higher average IQ than the elites of Africa!

That’s as falsified as a system of models can get, and if you think it is super easy to explain all this away without contradiction or concession, trust me: it is because you do not understand it. Yet.

Chanda Chisala, originally from Zambia, has been a John S. Knight Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Reagan-Fascell Fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy.

http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-debate-part-i/

Closing the Black-White IQ Gap Debate, Part 3
Thomas Sowell vs. Richard Lynn

https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ScrabbleChampion.pngSCRABBLE World Champion (2015), Wellington Jighere, of Nigeria (on the left!).
“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!
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BritishIgboSisters.pngSuper-achieving British Igbo sisters, Chidera and Chindi Ota.
Chidera Ota was the best student in the UK in 2010 and it seems that her sister, Chindi Ota, may have repeated the feat in her own cohort three years later. It is certainly possible for a student to have such an extremely high achievement while her group fails to be anywhere near as impressive, but it is much more likely that a prior report claiming that her group is a super-achiever must be true.

Similarly, when a Nigerian Scrabble player, Wellington Jighere, won the 2015 Scrabble World Championship, it was possible that he was just an anomaly from a country that is not that great at such cognitively intensive games like expert-level Scrabble. However, common sense enjoins us to bet on the more likely proposition: Nigerian Scrabble players can’t be that bad as a group if they can produce an individual world champion, which should also suggest Nigerians can’t be that bad cognitively as a nation. In fact, further Googling confirms that Team Nigeria was indeed the best scoring team in the world at the world Scrabble championships.

The Nigerian performance in Scrabble is worth an article in itself and one can validly use it to cast some very serious doubt on the racial genetic hypothesis for the global black-white test score differences. For example, this is what some psychologists (2014) found on the elite players of games like Scrabble:

“Visuospatial and verbal abilities were measured in elite nationally ranked SCRABBLE and crossword experts and compared with college students matched on quantitative and verbal SAT scores, both exceeding 700 on average. SCRABBLE and crossword experts significantly outperformed college students on all cognitive measures.”

We could end our article right there and those who rely strongly on common sense could instantly see why it should be impossible for Nigeria to not only produce the world champion of scrabble, but to even produce the best team (which still lives in poor Nigeria), if they were as cognitively challenged as HBD tells us!

The trouble with common sense, of course, is that everyone can claim that it is their position that accords more with common sense, even if their analysis clearly contradicts what the eyes can readily see (hence, common sense). Fortunately, even commonsense-derived judgments have to be tested by their logical predictions. This is why we predicted that the performance of African immigrant children in the US should be as “shocking” as that in the UK, if investigated properly. My hereditarian friends have previously looked at data that convinced them that this is not so. They found that African immigrants of different generations, including the well-settled ones, perform quite as badly as native Black Americans. I was obviously skeptical about their research, given all the evidence in the UK and the well-publicized stories in the US, including Black immigrant composition at elite schools and colleges. So we had a clear case of opposition for testing our contesting judgments.

The Black-Black Gap

Fuerst is the scholar who previously did some research that found large gaps between Black immigrants and Whites, although he did this by doing some meta-analysis of other data, and inevitably with little disaggregation of Africans by nationality or tribal ethnicity.

Due to my persistent claims here, Fuerst was recently motivated by Peter Frost to do his own direct data analysis of Nigerian performance in the US, using the competitive National Achievement Awards (which permits a very large sample), to test my claim that children of African immigrants in the US do achieve significantly above native Black Americans, resulting in a gap that is ultimately expected to be at least as large as the gap between American Blacks and Whites.

When he informed me about his intention to look into this data, I gladly encouraged him to do so because I expected the data to back me up, especially since he was intending to also specifically look at Nigerian scores, rather than just the aggregated “Black immigrant” group that everyone uses in their analyses.

The reason my research has mostly focused on Nigerians, out of the many African nationalities, is mainly because they are the largest population both in Africa and in the African diaspora, which helps a lot with the difficulty of finding sufficiently large sample sizes in such typically small migrant populations, especially when disaggregated. It’s also helpful that they are the most similar genetically to native Black Americans.

Fuerst’s short paper is as usual quite technical, even though he based his analysis on a similar method used by Ron Unz in his famous investigation into possible bias in Harvard’s ethnic admittance policy. The relevant part for our purpose is his probing question near the end that betrays a hint of some slight intellectual frustration with the results, although he was honest and diligent in his method: “…why do African Blacks do so well? And why do Nigerians apparently do no less well than Whites?”

Fuerst also admits an apparent discrepancy between his new finding and the one he published previously: “Now, I had previously found that all Black immigrants performed between 0.84 (second generation) and 0.99 (first generation) standard deviations below Whites. How can we reconcile that with the finding above?”

As they say, it is no longer a simple black and white issue.

Jensen’s Blacks

In his response article, Fuerst seems to suggest that Jensen did not really make the prediction on Black Africans that I am claiming has failed. However, it is clear that Jensen made no distinction between Black Africans and Black Americans on genetic intelligence (certainly not in favor of Africans), as the same paper that Fuerst cites (Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability) shows clearly:

“Other culture-only hypotheses have invoked Black role models, test anxiety, self-esteem, and racial stress as causal agents, but none of these have ever been consistently confirmed…Other ideas, such as stereotype threat (Steele, 1997), involuntary-minorities-are-castes (Ogbu, 2002), and race stigma (Loury, 2002), do not explain the low IQ of Africans south of the Sahara, where Blacks are in the majority. ” (My emphasis).

A similar argument making little distinction between American and African Blacks, and thereby using African test performance to refute environmentalist arguments, is made by Murray and Hernstein in the Bell Curve (page 289):

“How Do African-Americans Compare with Blacks in Africa on Cognitive Tests? This question often arises in the context of Black-White comparisons in America, the thought being that the African Black population has not been subjected to the historical legacy of American Black slavery and discrimination and might therefore have higher scores…For our purposes, the main point is that the hypothesis about the special circumstances of American Blacks depressing their test scores is not substantiated by the African data.” (My emphasis).

We are therefore only using the same method they used to test environmental hypotheses, except we are also correcting for present environmental differences between the two groups of Blacks (as they should have done), by observing African immigrants to the West instead.

The mere possibility that the African immigrants in our experiment could be an elite, unrepresentative group does not matter in itself (I don’t know how many ways to emphasize this point, which is the subject of the most popular straw man among those who keep arguing that the immigrants are “not representative” of their source populations). It does not matter *because Jensen gave us a prediction specifically concerning a sample of exclusively elite, “unrepresentative” Blacks.*

Reading from the same Jensen paper, we are told this about elite Black Americans:

“Matching Black and White children for the geographical areas of their homes, the schools they attend, and other finer grade socioeconomic indicators again reduces the mean group IQ difference but does not eliminate it. Black children from the best areas and schools (those producing the highest average scores) still average slightly lower than do White children with the lowest socioeconomic indicators (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, pp. 286–289; Jensen, 1998b, pp. 357–360). This is an anomaly for the culture-only theory but is explained by genetic theory through regression to the mean.”

Well, the African immigrant children test scores now present an anomaly for the racial genetic theory precisely because of regression to the mean (even if we ignore the more self-damning claim that American Blacks should have even higher intelligence due to their higher white admixture).

We know that children of native Black Americans earning $200,000 a year in family income score lower on SAT scores than children of Whites getting only $20,000 in family income ($10, 000 per parent!). We also know that the Nigerian income in the US is only $57,000, which is lower than the non-Hipspanic white income, and yet their children still score at least as high as children of Whites, which is the opposite of Jensen’s predicted result. For the Jensen prediction to be still true, we would have to assume that the average African immigrant income should in fact be higher by a factor of about 4 if the economic system was fair to them. But this is implausible because of reductio ad absurdum: if the African immigrants were rightly supposed to be higher than (or just equal to) 200,000 in household income (to explain why their children do much better than children of $200,000 Black Americans), then that would give them over twice the average income of the highest income group in America (Immigrant Indian Americans, who are reportedly the most educated group). Jensen therefore remains falsified by his own social status experiment.

Disappointingly, our tutor, Fuerst, is still invoking super-selection as a plausible explanation for why Nigerians or even Ethiopians etc defy this predicted high Jensenian regression for Black Africans, despite his own previous work, still being cited by Peter Frost, showing minimal cognitive selection from Africa. But we have now come to accept that hereditarian empirical findings are quite negotiable, depending on who is asking!

In an article that is supposed to be a tutorial on “rigorous” research, Fuerst informs us that he bases his radical transformation on this decisive question of African selection by taking a “cursory” look at brain drain literature!

Fuerst even makes simple logical errors in arriving at this position. For example, this is how he derived Somali super-selectivity:

“According to the IAB brain-drain data bank’s Emigration rates file, for example, in 1990, 2000 and 2010, respectively, 1.08%, 3.52%, and 4.43% of all Somalis emigrated somewhere, but at the same time 20.03%, 37.72%, and 44.86% of highly educated ones did. Thus educated Somali’s are seemingly massively over-represented in the emigrant pool.”

This conclusion is obviously a non sequitur because the calculation omits the total number of “highly educated” Somalis (and the total number of the Somali emigrants) that would give us their fraction. Furthermore, even if we got this ratio, we should also consider how far above the Somalian mean IQ they are, since “highly educated” could be just a standard deviation above the mean. It is the most common calculation mistake made by hereditarian bloggers and commenters: simply asserting that there are more educated people in the migrant population than in the general population, without considering the IQ gap between the educated and the average, does not prove super-high selectivity.

As for the brain drain claim, here is data reported by hereditarian James Thompson (in his response to my first article) on the occupation classifications of ethnic groups, including Black immigrants to the UK (does common sense tell us that Africa is only or mainly losing its brightest geniuses to Europe when we take a cursory look at this table?):

https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BritishSocioEconomicChart.png
Socio-economic classification of household reference person by sample members’ ethnic group
FROM FUERST TO FROST
Hereditarian scholar and founding member of the HBD movement, Peter Frost, may be the only one who has explicitly rejected immigrant super-selection as the explanation for Nigerian or African super-achievement in the UK. He arrived at this unpopular position by deciding to use some common sense: “You need to get out and meet a few African immigrants,” Frost advised a critic in the comments to his article, “most of them aren’t elite individuals, and many are dirt-poor.”

Unfortunately for Frost, being honest on that selection point means that he still needs a consistent explanation that can withstand the merciless data that we are seeing, without conceding any of the popular assumptions of his HBD system (specifically on the cause of the global Black-White IQ gap). I submit that that is impossible.

The Igbo Algorithm?

Frost has grown from calling Igbos the “Jews of West Africa,” in his response to my first article, to boldly conjecturing that the academic success of any Sub-Saharan African nation can be predicted just by counting how many (migrant) Igbos they have in their own populations: the more Igbos representing your country, the higher your scores in the UK!

In trying to explain the differential achievements of the African nationalities in UK high school tests, Frost confidently asserts: “clearly, high academic achievement is due to something that is very much present in Nigeria, a little bit in Ghana, and not at all in Somalia and Congo. Could this something be the Igbo?”

The Yoruba Challenge

Not only do the Igbo not explain Africa’s higher than expected performance in the UK, they do not even explain Nigeria’s high performance. The data shows that the Igbo-speakers are a much smaller number compared to the rest of Africans or even Nigerians (combined) in the UK, so that even if they had a 100 percent pass rate, it would have a limited impact on the overall Nigerian pass rate. The data shows that not only are the Yoruba speakers a much larger group than the Igbo speakers in the UK, but that the Yoruba pass rate is sometimes just as impressive as the Igbo one, if not better.

In one of the papers cited in my note to my first article, Strand (Oxford University, 2015) collected some recent data that should put the matter to rest for Frost and Fuerst and other dataphiles. It should also put the matter to similar rest for James Thompson, who expressed skepticism about the reported tribal performance because he did not see the numbers involved or the mean scores from the particular sources I highlighted (he suspected that the actual scores may be very low). Strand’s detailed paper shows that both the Igbo and the Yoruba have a higher mean score than the British Whites (or any white group with a good sample size), not just in the “easy subjects” or in “attendance,” but even in English and mathematics, the two most g-loaded subjects. Their superior pass rate is therefore not a result of some hidden statistical tricks or merely dumbing down the tests, as Thompson seems to insist. Dumbing down the tests may indeed reduce the gap, but it cannot reverse it, certainly not without reversing it for everyone else so that you end up with something like the Irish Travelers outperforming the British White group.

Another point against Thompson’s dumbing down or statistical manipulation charge is that the groups that would benefit most from such things within the African group would not be the ones that are known to be intellectually and socially dominant in their own countries, like the Igbo and Yoruba for Nigeria. It would be random at best. How can reducing the g-loading of the tests just happen to be most helpful to the tribes that already have the best intellectual performance (and social dominance) in Nigeria (or Africa)?

In Strand’s paper, which is a longitudinal study of a cohort that graduated in 2013, the Yoruba actually slightly outperform the Igbo on the GCSEs. Both groups outperform everyone else from Africa, including the group of assimilated Africans who only speak English at home! (It is also noteworthy that the assimilated group of Africans, consisting of all African groups who speak English at home, already outperform the British Whites on both pass rate and mean score).
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BritishAfricanPassRate.pngAfrican pass rate and mean score by language spoken at home.
Yoruba-speaking students have a 76.2% pass rate and the Igbo speakers have 73.9% (page 78). The slight disadvantage faced by the Igbo may be explained by the fact that they had a slightly higher number of more recent immigrant children from Nigeria in this cohort than the Yoruba, indicated by the number of students writing GCSEs who did not write the earlier KS2 tests at 11 years old (page 79). In fact, at that earlier stage before the newer immigrants arrived, it was the Igbo who had a slight pass rate advantage over the Yoruba, which shows how significant this factor is.

There are also other African groups, including those outside West Africa, who do very well on these tests. The Shona-speakers of Zimbabwe in Southern Africa have an incredibly high pass rate, given how many of them migrated after the age of 11. They too beat the White pass rate (and mean score) despite having 30% of them arriving after the age of 11 (not to mention those who arrived after age 4), which might even place their achievement above the Igbo and Yoruba if late migration is controlled for!

The most interesting observation, however, is the total numbers of Igbo compared to Yoruba speakers. Let us pause for a moment and see what that data point implies for the immigrant self-selection debate.

The Igbo are quite a dominant group on many measures of intellectual achievement in Nigeria, as Frost correctly noted and as many other scholars, including Thomas Sowell, have stated, so how can they have a much smaller population than the Yoruba in the UK if the immigration system is highly selective? Their dominance in Nigeria is especially conspicuous at the very top levels of intellectual performance, the most selective levels. I did my own research on this question by simply looking at the names of the students who represented Nigeria at the (extremely selective) 2014 International Math Olympiads.

Chigozie Henry Aniobi – Igbo

Oluwasanya Oluwafemi Awe – Yoruba

Mmesomachi Nwachukwu – Igbo

Chilolum Christopher Uzoma Nwigwe – Ibibio

Princewill Chukwuemeka – Igbo

Okoroafor Akanimoh – Igbo

Boniface Udombeh – Igbo

This is an astonishing over-representation of Igbos, as they are only 18 percent of the Nigerian population, which is smaller than the Yoruba. (We will not be surprised if the Nigerian government begins to regulate tribal composition in future math Olympiads since they are quite obsessed with tribal affirmative action.)

Secondly, one anonymous commenter on James Thompson’s first response article looked at the list of the twelve richest Nigerians and observed that Igbo names represent 50% of the list!

There is also some data that shows that within Nigeria, the Igbo acceptance rate into Nigerian universities is much higher than every other group including the Yoruba.

Frost is therefore justified in his general assessment of average Igbo intellect, but unfortunately for him, their superior performance is insufficient as an explanation of Nigerian overall performance in the UK (and his genetic hypothesis for Igbo intellectual performance is also on very shaky grounds, as I explain later: it seems likely to be just an accidental matter of quite recent history rather than genetic evolution, but in any case, it is irrelevant since their numbers in the UK or the school system do not support his hypothesis).

What is interesting about this data, besides debunking Frost’s Igbo hypothesis, is that it also strikes a devastating blow on the super-selection myth that the other hereditarians are using for final refuge.

Had there been high cognitive selection from Nigeria (or had this been the correct explanation for Nigerian performance on UK GCSEs), the group which is most conspicuous at highest levels of achievement in Nigeria (the Igbo) would have been numerically over-represented in the UK population (or at least on these GCSE numbers), for the same reason that we see Igbo over-representation at the hyper-selective Math Olympiads and other such super-selective metrics. On the UK GCSEs, they actually appear to be under-represented, at least in comparison to the Yoruba. This is a clear case of falsification for the super-selection myth, especially since the Igbos are even over-represented on the high school pass rate within Nigeria (in spite of the affirmative action quota system of Nigeria that aggressively limits numbers of university students from the top performing tribes.)
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/NigerianUniversity.pngStudents accepted into university in Nigeria by region from 2002-2007. South East is Igbo dominated area. South-South is mainly Yoruba. Source: Nigeriaworld article.
By insisting on his Igbo hypothesis, Frost has inadvertently helped us find one of the strongest arguments against the immigrant super-selection myth. The data above confirms that, contrary to many HBDers’ arbitrary claim, qualification to university in Nigeria, which is 1 Standard deviation above the national mean IQ at most (if we can use Rushton’s research in South Africa as a guide, p262), is far more cognitively selective than getting an air ticket to the UK. But that just sounds like common sense.

Strand’s data also explicitly confirms another commonsense point that we claimed: most of the students in these groups who speak an African language at home were obviously born in Africa (page 66), which is not great news for HBD calculations for explaining away these results.https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BritishUKArrival.png
The African group has the lowest number that was born in the UK, which makes their achievement all the more intriguing. The segment of Black Africans who speak a foreign language are almost all foreign-born, with the majority arriving after the age of 5. We know this because most of the 44.5% in this table who are “UK born” are the ones who speak English at home. The English-speaking group is 38% of Black Africa, according to the GCSE results Table.

Notice how the high-scoring Indian group were over 90% born in the UK. On page 10, Strand tells us that international arrival has been identified as “a key factor” in achievement of EAL groups. The high performance of Africa-born groups makes an already impossible situation even more difficult for HBD defenders.

Fuerst also found something similar in his analysis of African students in the US and noted the problem this presents, especially if the super-selection myth is abandoned:

“The relatively large number of high performing African born students is nonetheless curious given claims that African Black populations in Sub-Saharan Africa are disadvantaged, for example by parasite load or radiation exposure, in biological based intelligence. Why, if so, are so many just-off-the-boat African Blacks performing so well? Either they must not be representative of their region of origin population or their home populations must not be biologically disadvantaged, either environmentally or otherwise.”

There is a third possible option that Fuerst misses here, and it might be the most scary one to HBDers: if the research on nutritional or parasite load impact on IQ is as solid as it seems (presently accepted by both hereditarians and environmentalists), then this “shocking” performance of the African children that we are observing could in fact be before they fully recover from such deleterious effects!

Fuerst also fails to notice how this observation complicates his super selection argument: each of these students who were born in Africa could only have had one parent being selected by the immigration system even if such high selectivity was not a myth (since that’s how the visa system works – one person is accepted and the rest of the family just follows), which makes calculations even harder for hereditarians who have been assuming high selectivity for both parents just to have the slightest chance of the math working.

The Impossible Chinese?

When you look closely at all the tables in Strand, you can also confirm our earlier reports that some Nigerian tribes can indeed beat the Chinese on average pass rate (in 5 GCSEs including English and Maths), an observation that many readers found very difficult to digest.https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BritishGCSEPassrates.png
It seems from this table (page 46, Strand) that when the Yoruba-speaking (EAL) Nigerians achieved the feat of beating their Igbo-speaking counterparts on pass rate, they also beat the Chinese-speaking (EAL) student pass rate!

The Chinese-speaking students have a 75.3% pass rate which is slightly lower than the Yoruba-speaking pass rate of 76.2%.

Although we do not know the scores of the Igbo or Yoruba who speak English at home (the ones who were most likely born in the UK), it is clear that the Chinese have no obvious pass rate advantage over these two large tribes from the south of Nigeria. The Chinese who speak only English at home beat their less assimilated Chinese peers, but the Yoruba and Igbo who speak English at home (the Chidera Otas) are also expected to score higher than their less assimilated Yoruba and Igbo peers, as Strand himself confirms.

Whatever the case, even if one may insist on some other better performance metric in favor of the Chinese, it is clear that beating the Chinese pass rate itself is not an impossible task. It is rather curious, though, that only African groups seem to have managed to achieve that feat, when they are supposed to be the ones most disadvantaged by genes!

JAMES THOMPSON
Dr. James Thompson is professor of psychology at University College London and a prominent scholar in the HBD world.

Besides expressing understandable skepticism on the validity of my initial data due to the small (or omitted) sample sizes in some of my cited sources, James Thompson’s instinctive response to my first article was to quickly invoke the usual super-selection argument:

“…As a general rule, single country immigrant histories are only indicators and not always representative, and currently the UK is a magnet for immigrant groups, particularly elites.”

But on the same blog, Thompson summarises for us the conclusions of a paper he published earlier with Heiner Rindermann:

“The natives of the United Kingdom have a competence score of 519 (migrants to UK 499), Germany 516 (migrants to Germany 471), the United States 517 (migrants to US 489). There, in a nutshell, is the problem: those three countries have not selected their migrants for intellectual quality…”

He gets more specific: “Here are the competence scores for some of the countries of origin of the current migrants: Syria 392, Iran 413, Algeria 396, Ghana 277… They vary somewhat, but all will impose at least a two generation disadvantage on the host countries…” (emphasis added).

We also get a table or two for that, converted into IQ score equivalents:https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IQConversion.png

However, we also know that the children of the same Ghanaian immigrants to the UK have an average pass rate that is above British Whites, and we know that this is not due to dumbing down the tests or statistical tricks (as argued above).

In this article, Thompson unequivocally states that the Ghanaian immigrants are imposing “at least a two generation disadvantage” on the UK. That means that they are, at best, representative of their home population in IQ.

So then, is the UK “a magnet for elites” or has the UK “not selected its migrants for intellectual quality” on average when it comes to Ghanaian immigrants etc?

It’s the HBD conundrum: to choose A and lose the immigration debate or choose B and lose the racial intelligence debate?

Thompson’s strong faith in the genetic limitations placed upon the black race by evolution sometimes leads him to not even verify the statements he makes that concern Black societies. For example, in one blog article, he writes: “A marshy island called Singapore ends up rich, and resource-rich Nigeria remains poor (and very populous). Could this be because of any differences between Chinese and African peoples?”

Since he says “…and very populous,” it is clear he is referring to the GDPs of the two countries and not to the GDP per capita. Indeed at the time Lynn and Vanhanen wrote their book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002), which claimed to prove a primary causal link between national IQ and national income, Nigeria had a lower GDP than Singapore, despite the former being “very populous.” Thompson did not bother to check if something may have changed since then because the genetic theory indeed predicts that the situation should not change much, especially in such little time. So, let’s put the GDPs of Nigeria and Singapore into Google’s beautiful public data software and see what has happened since then:https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/NigeriaGDP.pngSOWELL vs. LYNN?
The question of why some societies or groups seem to have higher IQs or better cultures than others is a complex one that requires careful historical research for a particular society before settling for simplistic molecular reductionism.

For example, why do the the Igbo and the Yoruba outperform the populous northern tribes in Nigeria? We do not need to do all the primary historical research ourselves, fortunately. That’s what Thomas Sowell exists for.

Sowell writes in Race and Culture:

As of 1912, for example, there were fewer than a thousand students in elementary school in northern Nigeria, where more than half the population lived, and more than 35,000 in the rest of the country. …

In higher education, the disparities were even greater. As late as 1951, out of the 16 million people in the northern region, only one had a full university degree – and he was a convert to Christianity. …

(p 125)

A simple matter of where the elementary schools were constructed explains the pattern quite well. But why did the south get a lot of schools while the north got only a tiny number? Did their genes resist education while the genes in the south evolved to desire education? Not quite.

The presence of only one university graduate in the north who just happened to also be a Christian convert, is an important commonsense clue. Genes are unlikely to have left only one person free of their negative intellectual effects, but culture could.

Sowell doesn’t leave us guessing:

“Until 1898, all Western education in Nigeria was Christian missionary education – and that remained substantially true as late as 1942… Because education in Nigeria was essentially Christian, European-centered education, it was not welcome in the Moslem northern region of the country, where more than half the population lived…leading to large and lasting disparities in the educational levels of different tribes of Nigerians…” (p 123)

What about the Igbo intellectual advantage in the Nigerian south itself?

Sowell goes there too:

“Even within the southern regions, some groups were more receptive than others. Most receptive were the Ibos, a poorer, more fragmented group, once heavily raided by slave hunters, and living in a less fertile part of Nigeria. To the Ibos, Western education was a rare opportunity to be seized.” (p 123)
https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ChineduEchureo.jpg
Igbo serial entrepreneur and Harvard graduate, Chinedu Echureo, was the inventor of HopStop, an application that Apple acquired from him “in the billion dollar range” (Forbes), to use in the iPhone for street navigations.


Frost’s belief in the genetic uniqueness of the Igbos, whom he apparently believes are intellectually like Whites or better, meant that he also had to whitewash their cultural behavior. Thus he also grants a moral superiority to the Igbos, above the other lesser tribes who are supposedly responsible for the corruption of Nigeria. The real picture is more complex than that, of course. The most educated tribes (both Igbos and Yorubas) in fact feature prominently in reports of high level fraud and corruption within and outside Nigeria. A strong hereditarian will find this very difficult to explain (especially since the Igbo are apparently an “outbred” population). Thomas Sowell explains the historical roots of this corrupt culture in another book, (Conquests and Cultures, page 131-132) giving factors that can equally explain pervasive corruption in some white countries, or its extremely low levels in some Black countries like Botswana.

This widespread culture of corruption does not mean that there are no Nigerians who are morally upright or that the educated tribes of Nigeria only invent the infamous internet scams. Some elite individuals also invent some very useful technologies too, especially in the more capitalist Western environment.

CONCLUSION
None of the following are valid responses to my arguments at this stage:

The immigrants are not perfectly representative of their home populations? They do not need to be perfectly representative, and there is strong logical evidence against extreme selection. Show your counter-evidence in the real (not abstract) world, quantitatively.
Something wrong with the tests in the UK? The pattern holds for tests in the US and other European countries.
GCSEs are not pure IQ Tests? The pattern holds for SATs, CATs, and other tests administered to children. Also, the Africans perform just as well, if not better, on the more g-loaded subjects (math and English). They would have suffered more in those subjects if this was not real intelligence at work (see Arthur Jensen’s now-untenable prediction in his Spearman’s hypothesis and method of correlated vectors).
Something has just gone wrong in the British white culture? African groups are also beating non-British immigrant Whites in the UK, and their general “over-achievement” is repeated in the US (Fuerst, 2015) and other European countries (Kirkegaard, 2015).
Nigerian parents tiger mom their children and hire extra tutors? That’s a concession to the culture hypothesis, and it obviously also applies to the Chinese – the inventors of the Tiger Mom.
What about this new paper showing Black immigrants scoring much lower than Whites? The sampled “Blacks” in that new paper are likely not disaggregated. How many (recent) Somali refugees?
What if we have a study that directly finds less genes for education in Blacks even if they start showing higher educational achievements than Whites in the same environment? You might as well report finding that Jamaicans have the lowest number of alleles for running fast and expect common sense to trust your impeccable methodology.
The author of this article is just a …? No clairvoyant statements about the mind or presumable life experiences (and motivations) of the author are intelligent arguments!
It is also important to recognize the limits of the author’s arguments. I am not arguing against the heredity of intelligence in families or tribes or (theoretically) even races. Neither am I arguing that all ethnicities and races on earth necessarily have the same average intelligence, presently or potentially, or that races do not even exist – all straw men that so many commenters have been ascribing to me so that they could enjoy the illusion of making an argument. The average (genetic) potentials of intelligence could indeed be as varied as the heights of different populations. What I have contested is the empirical evidence for the specific genotypic estimates and rankings of the racial cognitive heights, if you will. These unfolding natural social experiments we are observing now, which have not yet even permitted a sufficiently long time for full assimilation of the Black African migrants in Western environments, should put serious doubt in the mind of any honest person who does not merely use science to rationalize his racial ideology.

http://www.unz.com/article/closing-the-black-white-iq-gap-debate-part-3/

Africa's Most Entrepreneurial Ethnic Groups

By AskAfricans

In the age of the globalization, the most entrepreneurial communities win. It’s not just a matter of individual success but some communities that possess certain skills will emerge to dominate significant sections of the economy. This can be seen in India’s Parsi and Marwari, and Punjabi communities, the Punjabi of Pakistan, the Chinese in South East Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Indians in East Africa or the Jews in the United States. But what about Africans? The domination of African economies particularly by Indian and Lebanese communities might lead one to deduce that there is a virtual dearth of entrepreneurial talent amongst sub Saharan Africa’s 1 billion people. However there are certain communities in Africa that have distinguished themselves through great trading skills which have seen them amass significant wealth. In the age of globalization where entrepreneurship and a sense of adventure in business determines who wins and who loses, they will be perfectly placed to reap from the global markets.

Igbo of Nigeria
The Igbos of Nigeria are Africa’s most energetic and most entrepreneurial people. They are not ancient traders but emerged much more recently with the onset of the British colonialism. Through sheer grit, hard work and a talent for spotting new opportunities, they emerged as the dominant traders and business leaders as Nigeria raced towards independence in the mid 50s. The Igbo dominance of Nigeria’s commerce and industry was one of the reasons that led to the Biafran war. Today you can find Igbo traders all over the world from South Africa, Kenya, Ivory Coast, China, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ireland, Vietnam, India amongst others. They are mostly merchants although a significant number have diversified into industry, banking, and transportation and service businesses. Researchers have identified the Igbos along with the Ashkenazi Jews and the Swiss Protestants as the people with the greatest achievement motivation in the world.

Kikuyu of Kenya
Like Nigeria’s Igbos, Kenya’s Kikuyu established businesses with the onset of colonialism. Since Kenya’s pre-colonial economy was entirely in the hand of white settlers, many Kikuyu businesses emerged following Kenya’s independence in 1963. Today, the Kikuyu run businesses straddling virtually all sectors of the Kenyan economy ranging from transportation, retail trade, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, and much more. Kikuyu business communities can be found in virtually all East African cities such as Kampala, Kigali, Juba, Kinshasa, Bujumbura, Dar es Salaam and in countries such as the United States, Britain and China.

The Somali
With their country in shambles for over two decades, one can easily assume that the Somali must be the most impractical people with the worst management skills. But if their success in business is put into consideration, nothing could be further from the truth. The Somalis rank amongst some of Africa’s most entrepreneurial communities. They mainly operate as merchants owning several stalls and are dominant in import-export trade due to their networks in Dubai and Guangzhou. You will find Somalis in businesses such as imports of clothes, shoes, watches, laptops and other manufactured goods mainly from Asia. Export trader mainly involves miraa or khat to Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years, many Somalis have diversified into transportation, hospitality and banking.

The Chagga of Tanzania
Numbering just 2 million people, Tanzania’s Chagga are known for their great entrepreneurial skills and are the wealthiest ethnic community in Tanzania. They are also one of the most educated people in Tanzania. Together with their prowess in harnessing agriculture, the Chagga are great merchants and are present in almost every corner of the country. They have massive financial power in Tanzania and own businesses ranging from banks, insurance companies, tourist resorts, airlines (Precision Air) and are players in many other sectors of the economy.




Akan people of Ghana and Ivory Coast

From the 15th century to the 19th century the Akan people dominated gold mining and trading in the region and, from the 17th century on, they were among the most powerful groups in west Africa.

Akan Jungle Warfare,
The Third Anglo-Empire of Ashanti War.
The Graphic 1874

This wealth in gold attracted European traders.Initially the Europeans were Portuguese but, eventually the Dutch and British joined in the quest for Akan gold. Groups such as the Benin Empire in modern day Nigeria and states in Central Africa would serve as intermediaries who waged wars on neighboring states in their geographic area to capture people and sell them as slaves to Europeans(Portuguese) who subsequently sold the enslaved people along with guns to Akans states in exchange for Akan gold.[15] Akan gold was also used to purchase slaves from further up north via the Trans-Saharan route. The Akan purchased slaves in order to help clear the dense forests within Akanland.[15] About a third of the population of many Akan states were enslaved people. The Akans went from buyers of slaves to selling slaves as the dynamics in Akanland and the New World changed. Thus, the Akan people played a considerable role in supplying Europeans with slaves for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.[16] Ghana later apologized to the descendents of slaves for the role some of its people may have played in the slave trade.

Akan people, especially the Ashanti, fought against European colonists to maintain autonomy including many Anglo-Ashanti wars. the war of the Golden Stool, and other similar battles.

By the early 1900s all of Akanland in Ghana was a colony or protectorate of the British while the lands in the Ivory Coast was under the French. On 6 March 1957, following the decolonization from the British under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, the Gold Coasts Akanland was joined to British Togoland, and the Nothern region, Upper East region and Upper West region of the Gold Coast to form Ghana.[19] Ivory Coast gained independence on 7 August 1960.


https://m.modernghana.com/news/455846/africas-most-entrepreneurial-ethnic-groups.html

Four Questions to Ponder!
1. How can such an allegedly brilliant and scholarship group of people be led by Nnamdi Kanu the dilector?
2. Does this sound like Hutu and Tusti, as seen by the divisive Portuguese?
3. Can it be that only strengths of the Igbos are highlighted and plaguing-weaknesses are not noted and addressed?
4. Is there a suggestion of Igbos are better than others? If so, please provide scientific evidence, empirical observations are always subjective. Scientists should be able to reproduce the claims in some scientific, logical and sensible manner. It may be true, it may be false.
Please am only reasoning out.

themall:
Four Questions to Ponder!
1. How can such an allegedly brilliant and scholarship group of people be led by Nnamdi Kanu the dilector?
2. Does this sound like Hutu and Tusti, as seen by the divisive Portuguese?
3. Can it be that only strengths of the Igbos are highlighted and plaguing-weaknesses are not noted and addressed?
4. Is there a suggestion of Igbos are better than others? If so, please provide scientific evidence, empirical observations are always subjective. Scientists should be able to reproduce the claims in some scientific, logical and sensible manner. It may be true, it may be false.
Please am only reasoning out.

You see ya lyf? Who call u cum join table....

I command you to go back to sit on the floor where u were sitted and let human beings enjoy their meal..... envious people are not welcomed to the table..

Teen gets accepted by all eight Ivy League schools

By Gabrielle Sorto, Special to CNN

Watch this video here http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/05/us/ivy-league-student-2016-irpt/index.html


Story highlights
This is the second year an Elmont Memorial High School student has been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools.
Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna plans to pursue a science-related major.


(CNN) — There must be something in the water at Elmont Memorial High School.

For the second year in a row, an Elmont Memorial High School student has been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools. Last year, the Long Island high school's salutatorian Harold Ekeh chose to attend Yale University after having his pick of all eight Ivy League schools. This year, Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, Elmont's valedictorian, will face the same decision.

"Having two students get accepted into all eight Ivy League institutions in back-to-back years is humbling but also speaks to the incredible commitment to children by the families and staff within the EMHS Community," said Kevin Dougherty, Elmont Memorial High School principal.

Teen accepted by all 8 Ivy League schools chooses Yale

Uwamanzu-Nna was also accepted to the four additional schools to which she applied. The experience has been surreal, Uwamanzu-Nna said in a press release.


"My recent accomplishments reflect the hardworking ideals of the town of Elmont, my supportive parents and my dedicated teachers. I am elated, but most importantly, I am thankful," she said.



Ekeh and Uwamanzu-Nna are both Nigerian. Ekeh was born in Nigeria and came to the United States when he was 8. Uwamanzu-Nna is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants.

"Though I was born here in America, I visited Nigeria many times," Uwamanzu-Nna told CNN affiliate WABC. "And I've seen that my cousins don't have the same opportunities that I have. So definitely, whatever I do, I want to make sure that it has an impact on Nigeria."

Uwamanzu-Nna plans to pursue a science-related major. She was a finalist in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search for her research on cement that could help prevent underwater oil rigs from rupturing. On Monday, she received an invitation to the White House Science Fair.

She is hoping to attend a school where she is able to combine her varied scientific interests, which include biochemistry and environmental studies, she said in the press release.

There are no secrets to academic success, she said. Her 101.64 weighted GPA was earned through hard work.

"I've struggled with numerous classes in the past," Uwamanzu-Nna told WABC. "But I guess what allowed me to be successful ... is my persistence and my tenacity."

Uwamanzu-Nna hasn't made a final decision on what school she will attend, but with acceptance to 12 schools, she has a tough decision to make.

www.nairaland.com/attachments/3572877_one_jpeg6a15587f3c212b292732e49a2d20806c


http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/05/us/ivy-league-student-2016-irpt/index.html

Mood-lifter Fox TV,the most "racist" TV spends time celebrating our own


Hear her explain what she wants to develop....


https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10154194757061320&id=39442131319&refid=17&_ft_=top_level_post_id.10207940461482824%3Atl_objid.10207940461482824%3Athid.1035691586%3A306061129499414%3A2%3A0%3A1462085999%3A-3441813288344585198

www.nairaland.com/attachments/3594550_img20160412160919edit_jpegc3971ce95d87eee6381ee089622a1845

samobo:
Africa's Most Entrepreneurial Ethnic Groups
Igbo of Nigeria
The Igbos of Nigeria are Africa’s most energetic and most entrepreneurial people. They are not ancient traders but emerged much more recently with the onset of the British colonialism. Through sheer grit, hard work and a talent for spotting new opportunities, they emerged as the dominant traders and business leaders as Nigeria raced towards independence in the mid 50s. The Igbo dominance of Nigeria’s commerce and industry was one of the reasons that led to the Biafran war. [b]Today you can find Igbo traders all over the world[/b] from South Africa, Kenya, Ivory Coast, China, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ireland, Vietnam, India amongst others. They are mostly merchants although a significant number have diversified into industry, banking, and transportation and service businesses. Researchers have identified the Igbos along with the Ashkenazi Jews and the Swiss Protestants as the people with the greatest achievement motivation in the world. https://m.modernhana.com/news/455846/africas-most-entrepreneurial-ethnic-groups.html

The Igbo dominance of Nigeria’s commerce and industry was one of the reasons that led to the Biafran war. Today you can find Igbo traders all over the world from South Africa, Kenya, Ivory Coast, China, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ireland, Vietnam, India amongst others.
1. Dominance in commerce of a particular tribe need not cause war. It happens if there are other fears attached to such a dominance. In the case of the Israelite, it was fears over outnumbering them for political considerations and perhaps preservation of egyptians (hence kill all male children). In the case of the Igbos, among other things, it was the perceived attitudes, nuances and idiosyncrasies. this angered their hosts. It still does! NO ONE IS PERFECT.
2. Igbo traders are all over the world. The more reason why it should be careful how it carries itself as a nation. Do not be at the forefront of Drug-trafficking, Advance Fee Fraud and Fake and Expired Pharmaceutical. It gives everyone a bad name. More importantly, it DESTROYS TRUST! It destroys trust and confidence for every other tribes in Nigeria and spoils business. Of course NO ONE IS PERFECT and no tribe is innocent.

samobo:
You see ya lyf? Who call u cum join table....

I command you to go back to sit on the floor where u were sitted and let human beings enjoy their meal..... envious people are not welcomed to the table..

Fear of brains over brawn. Vice maybe! Use yours. Think!

I LOVE THIS THREAD!!!

...Frost’s belief in the genetic uniqueness of the Igbos, whom he apparently believes are intellectually like Whites or better.... . . . Igbo Kwenu!!!

themall:
Fear of brains over brawn. Vice maybe! Use yours. Think!

Chai see High blood pressure ooooo. dont worry, more coming...

daretodiffer:
IPOBS and narcissism

If you had taken time to go through the history of other ethnic groups, you would know that this so not new!

Why dont you open a new thread and post academic papers about other tribes, so that those that are interested in learning will read and be informed rather than trying to incite "tribal bashing"?

As you are aware our education system has failed in teaching us about our histories (histories of all ethnic groups) our biased knowledge are based on what we hear and how we feel about people rather than what is true and what potrays other in good light.

I wish every young mind like yours will often than not pick a book and read !