It’s a big, weighty book that first appeared in 1994 and is controversial because it proves there’s a big difference between the 3 races. Rushton names Blacks, Whites including Hispanics, and Orientals. It’s an easy book to read although a lot of concentration is demanded in some places because the received wisdom from the WOKE community is very, very different than the facts in Rushton’s book. You can read the entire book on line or print it out. Here’s the internet address: (HERE). It’s destroys a lot of myth’s. It explains a lot of facts. It has never been refuted although the WOKE people hate it because it proves the differences between the races. There’s also a short version Here.

Here’s a sample from page 15 of the Preface:

“The IQ of 70 for Blacks living in Africa is the lowest group mean ever recorded and it caused consternation when brought to public attention in the debates over The Bell Curve and Race, Evolution, and Behavior. However, there have been several replications of the mean African IQ being in the 70s. For example, Mervyn Skuy and his colleagues (2000) found South African secondary students (in South Africa) had IQ equivalents in the 70s range on several tests, including the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, the Stroop Color Word Test, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Bender Gestalt Visual Motor Integration Test, the Rey Osterreith  Complex Figure Test, the Trail Making Test, the Spatial Memory Task, and various Drawing Tasks.

“The implied conclusion that in abstract reasoning ability, 50% of Black Africa is “mentally retarded” by European standards, was considered not only an injustice but an absurdity by many reviewers. Some therefore dismissed The Bell Curve and Race, Evolution, and Behavior as nonsensical for even reporting such data for serious consideration. But of course the facts are the facts and must be presented. Alternative explanations can then be offered for them.

“One argument has been that an IQ of 70 in abstract reasoning ability manifests itself differently in Blacks than in Whites. Jensen (1972, pp. 5-6) pointed out that Black children with IQs of 70 appear much brighter socially than do White  children with IQs of 70, who don’t play normally and appear to be more mentally retarded all round, not just in their performance in scholastic subjects and on IQ tests. Black children of IQ 70 routinely learn to speak, to play games, learn names, and act friendly with playmates and teachers. They appear quite normal, whereas White children with similar IQs “look” abnormal. This race difference may be consistent with a genetic interpretation of the mean African IQ of 70 in that it implies that a very low IQ is “normal” in the African population.

“In October 1998 I (Rushton) traveled to Johannesburg in South Africa to collect data that might help to resolve this debate. I decided to find a high-IQ population of Africans such as university students who were likely to be at least one standard deviation above the African mean and familiar with paper-and-pencil tests. I teamed up with Mervyn Skuy, Chairman of the Division of Specialized Education at the University of the Witwatersrand.

“To ensure they were motivated, we paid over three hundred first year psychology students $10 each to take an untimed Raven’s Progressive Matrices test. We gave the students an hour-and-a-half to do the test, although the great majority had done it in 30 minutes. Our final sample consisted of 173 African and 136 White 17- to 23-year-olds. The Africans solved an average of 44 of the 60 problems, and the Whites solved an average of 54. By U.S. standards, this translated into the African university students being at the 14th percentile, equivalent to American 14-year-old high school students. The African students had an IQ equivalent of 84 (Rushton & Skuy, in press).

Assuming that Black university students in South Africa are 1 SD above the average of the general population of that country (as university students typically are), then my finding of an IQ of 84 in that select sample implies that the general population of that country has an average IQ of 70. As such, this study confirms the earlier reviews of the literature (see Lynn, 1997, for an updated review).

In a second study carried out with university students in South Africa, we (Skuy, Gewer, & Rushton, 2000) again found an IQ equivalent of 84. This was an intervention study that looked for ways to boost IQ scores. We therefore gave the study participants several hour-long training sessions in the type of abstract reasoning methods required to solve Raven’s Matrices. At pre-test, we found once again that Black Africans averaged an IQ equivalent of 84. The training sessions managed to raise the test group mean to an IQ equivalent of 91.

The full explanation for the low African IQ has yet to be discovered. Perhaps the cultural contribution to IQ scores is greater in Africa than it is in North America and so has a greater suppressant effect. South African Blacks have far higher unemployment rates and poorer schools, libraries, and study facilities than do Whites. Thus, Africans may have had less exposure to or stimulation on the constructs measured by IQ tests. They also live in overcrowded homes, often with no running water or electricity, and have poorer nutrition. Therefore their poor performance is partly the result of these cultural disadvantages.

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