Childhood iodine deficiency alone is associated with a reduction in IQ of about 12 points. But the racial IQ gap beloved by race scientists undermines their own thesis: that gap has closed for decades, at a rate far faster than any genetic explanation. Between 1984 and 1998 in Kenya, national IQ rose by a staggering 26.3 points, driven by improvements in national nutrition, health and parental literacy. Accordingly, racial IQ gaps in America and beyond are driven by environmental factors like education and socioeconomic status, exposing them not as a hallmark of genetic differences but a lingering phantom of inequality.
The idea that intelligence is generally determined and ethnically fixed is a blatant falsehood. Take, for example, the reportedly high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews. During World War I, IQ tests on Jewish soldiers yielded such lackluster results that psychologist, eugenicist and SAT inventor Carl Brigham insisted they tended “to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.” By World War II, however, Jewish people scored above average, a change inexplicable with genetic arguments. In a cruel irony, Alfred Binet invented the IQ test in France specifically to identify struggling students who needed extra support, recognizing from conception that intelligence had substantial environmental influence and was malleable rather than fixed. That some would subvert these tests from helpful intervention to discriminatory metric speaks volumes about their motivation.
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