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This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations:

"Topics that spark Wikipedia 'edit wars' revealed". BBC News. 18 July 2013. Retrieved 18 July 2013.
Doug Gross (July 24, 2013). "Wiki wars: The 10 most controversial Wikipedia pages". CNN. Archived from the original on July 27, 2013. Retrieved July 27, 2013. Circumcision and 'race and intelligence', both with obvious controversy attached, made the list, alongside a possibly more surprising page: a list of professional wrestlers on the roster of World Wrestling Entertainment.
Justin Ward (March 12, 2018). "Wikipedia wars: inside the fight against far-right editors, vandals and sock puppets". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on March 12, 2018. Retrieved March 17, 2018. In the article on 'race and intelligence', relatively equal weight is given to the two sides of the debate — hereditarian and environmentalist — though environmentalism is the mainstream perspective in psychology.
Shuichi Tezuka (December 11, 2023). "Introducing Justapedia". Quillette. Retrieved December 11, 2023.

Section sizes

Section size for Race and intelligence (31 sections)
Section name	Byte count	Section total
(Top)	2,627	2,627
History of the controversy	3,119	11,838
Early IQ testing	3,763	3,763
The Pioneer Fund and The Bell Curve	4,956	4,956
Conceptual issues	25	12,777
Intelligence and IQ	3,402	3,402
Race	9,350	9,350
Group differences	2,017	11,749
Test scores	6,620	6,620
Flynn effect and the closing gap	3,112	3,112
Environmental factors	26	28,726
Health and nutrition	8,895	8,895
Education	4,630	4,630
Socioeconomic environment	3,656	3,656
Test bias	2,671	2,671
Stereotype threat and minority status	8,848	8,848
Research into possible genetic factors	4,981	27,192
Genetics of race and intelligence	4,001	4,001
Heritability within and between groups	4,588	4,588
Spearman's hypothesis	3,826	3,826
Adoption studies	4,255	4,255
Racial admixture studies	2,450	2,450
Mental chronometry	1,939	1,939
Brain size	937	937
Archaeological data	215	215
Policy relevance and ethics	2,717	2,717
See also	142	142
References	18	50,123
Notes	28	28
Citations	31	31
Bibliography	50,046	50,046
Total	147,891	147,891

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Frequently asked questions

Is there really a scientific consensus that there is no evidence for a genetic link between race and intelligence?

Yes, and for a number of reasons. Primarily:

No evidence for such a connection has ever been published. A statement signed by 143 senior human population geneticists states categorically that genetics research in no way supports the view that "recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results". (See this, this, and this for context.)
As understanding of the human genome and the science of population genetics advances, it has become increasingly clear that race is not a biologically meaningful way to categorize human population groups. See for example this statement by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Even if we take ancestral population groups to be proxies for race, most subject-matter experts agree that cognitive differences between such such groups are unlikely to exist. A group of prominent geneticists explain why here.
Extensive evidence has been published which indicates that observed differences in IQ test performance between racial groups are environmental in origin. A group of leading psychologists summarizes some of these findings here.
Most researchers view the idea of a genetic connection between race and intelligence as scientifically obsolete. See e.g. this statement by the editorial board of Nature.

Isn't it true that different races have different average IQ test scores?

On average and in certain contexts, yes, though these differences have fluctuated and in many cases steadily decreased over time. Crucially, the existence of such average differences today does not mean what racialists have asserted that it means (i.e. that races can be ranked according to their genetic predisposition for intelligence). Most IQ test data comes from North America and Europe, where non-White individuals represent ethnic minorities and often carry systemic burdens which are known to affect test performance. Studies which purport to compare the IQ averages of various nations are considered methodologically dubious and extremely unreliable. Further, important discoveries in the past several decades, such as the Flynn effect and the steady narrowing of the gap between low-scoring and high-scoring groups, as well as the ways in which disparities such as access to prenatal care and early childhood education affect IQ, have led to an understanding that environmental factors are sufficient to account for observed between-group differences.

And isn't IQ a measure of intelligence?

Not exactly. IQ tests are designed to measure intelligence, but it is widely acknowledged that they measure only a very limited range of an individual's cognitive capacity. They do not measure mental adaptability or creativity, for example. You can read more about the limitations of IQ measurements here. These caveats need to be kept in mind when extrapolating from IQ measurements to statements about intelligence. But even if we were to take IQ to be a measure of intelligence, there would still be no good reason to assert a genetic link between race and intelligence (for all the reasons stated elsewhere in this FAQ).

Isn't there research showing that there are genetic differences between races?

Yes and no. A geneticist could analyze a DNA sample and then in many cases make an accurate statement about that person's race, but no single gene or group of genes has ever been found that defines a person's race. Such variations make up a minute fraction of the total genome, less even than the amount of genetic material that varies from one individual to the next. It's also important to keep in mind that racial classifications are socially constructed, in the sense that how a person is classified racially depends on perceptions, racial definitions, and customs in their society and can often change when they travel to a different country or when social conventions change over time (see here for more details).

So how can different races look different, without having different genes?

They do have some different genes, but the genes that vary between any two given races will not necessarily vary between two other races. Race is defined phenotypically, not genotypically, which means it's defined by observable traits. When a geneticist looks at the genetic differences between two races, there are differences in the genes that regulate those traits, and that's it. So comparing Africans to Europeans will show differences in genes that regulate skin color, hair texture, nose and lip shape, and other observable traits. But the rest of the genetic code will be essentially the same. In fact, there is much less genetic material that regulates the traits used to define the races than there is that regulates traits that vary from person to person. In other words, if you compare the genomes of two individuals within the same race, the results will likely differ more from each other than a comparison of the average genomes of two races. If you've ever heard people saying that the races "are more alike than two random people" or words to that effect, this is what they were referring to.

Why do people insist that race is "biologically meaningless"?

Mostly because it is. As explained in the answer to the previous question, race isn't defined by genetics. Race is nothing but an arbitrary list of traits, because race is defined by observable features. The list isn't even consistent from one comparison to another. We distinguish between African and European people on the basis of skin color, but what about Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American people? They all have more or less the same skin color. We distinguish African and Asian people from European people by the shape of some of their facial features, but what about Native American and Middle Eastern people? They have the same features as the European people, or close enough to engender confusion when skin color is not discernible. Australian Aborigines share numerous traits with African people and are frequently considered "Black" along with them, yet they are descended from an ancestral Asian population and have been a distinct cultural and ethnic group for fifty thousand years. These standards of division are arbitrary and capricious; the one drop rule shows that visible differences were not even respected at the time they were still in use.

But IQ is at least somewhat heritable. Doesn't that mean that observed differences in IQ test performance between ancestral population groups must have a genetic component?

This is a common misconception, sometimes termed the "hereditarian fallacy". [1] In fact, the heritability of differences between individuals and families within a given population group tells us nothing about the heritability of differences between population groups. [2] [3] As geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell explains:

We need to get away from thinking about intelligence as if it were a trait like milk yield in a herd of cattle, controlled by a small, persistent and dedicated bunch of genetic variants that can be selectively bred into animals from one generation to the next. It is quite the opposite – thousands of variants affect intelligence, they are constantly changing, and they affect other traits. It is not impossible for natural selection to produce populations with differences in intelligence, but these factors make it highly unlikely.
To end up with systematic genetic differences in intelligence between large, ancient populations, the selective forces driving those differences would need to have been enormous. What’s more, those forces would have to have acted across entire continents, with wildly different environments, and have been persistent over tens of thousands of years of tremendous cultural change. Such a scenario is not just speculative – I would argue it is inherently and deeply implausible.
The bottom line is this. While genetic variation may help to explain why one person is more intelligent than another, there are unlikely to be stable and systematic genetic differences that make one population more intelligent than the next. [4]

What about all the psychometricians who claim there's a genetic link?

The short answer is: they're not geneticists. The longer answer is that there remains a well-documented problem of scientific racism, which has infiltrated psychometry (see e.g. [5] and [6]). Psychometry is a field where people who advocate scientific racism can push racist ideas without being constantly contradicted by the very work they're doing. And when their data did contradict their racist views, many prominent advocates of scientific racism simply falsified their work or came up with creative ways to explain away the problems. See such figures as Cyril Burt, J. Phillipe Rushton, Richard Lynn, and Hans Eysenck, who are best known in the scientific community today for the poor methodological quality of their work, their strong advocacy for a genetic link between race and intelligence, and in some cases getting away with blatant fraud for many years.

Isn't it a conspiracy theory to claim that psychometricians do this?

No. It is a well-documented fact that there is an organized group of psychometricians pushing for mainstream acceptance of racist, unscientific claims. See this, this and this, as well as our article on scientific racism for more information.

Isn't this just political correctness?

No, it's science. As a group of scholars including biological anthropologists Agustín Fuentes of Princeton and Jonathan M. Marks of the University of North Carolina explain: "while it is true that most researchers in the area of human genetics and human biological diversity no longer allocate significant resources and time to the race/IQ discussion, and that moral concerns may play an important role in these decisions, an equally fundamental reason why researchers do not engage with the thesis is that empirical evidence shows that the whole idea itself is unintelligible and wrong-headed". These authors compare proponents of a genetic link between race and IQ to creationists, vaccine skeptics, and climate change deniers. [7] At the same time, researchers who choose to pursue this line of inquiry have in no way been hindered from doing so, as is made clear by this article: [8]. It's just that all the evidence they find points to environmental rather than genetic causes for observed differences in average IQ-test performance between racial groups.

What about the surveys which say that most "intelligence experts" believe in some degree of genetic linkage between race and IQ?

These surveys are almost invariably conducted by advocates of scientific racism, and respondents to these surveys are also almost exclusively members of groups that promote scientific racism. In short, they are not representative samples of mainstream scientific opinion.
These surveys tend to have very low participation rates, and often consist of fewer than 100 respondents.
Many of the surveys suffer from methodological flaws, such as using leading questions. This leads to an increase in responses from those who agree, and a decrease from those who disagree.
Generally speaking, the better the methodology of the survey, the lower agreement it shows with the claim of a genetic link between race and intelligence.
Even the most poorly structured surveys, conducted among members of groups that are dominated by advocates for scientific racism, show much doubt and difference of opinion among respondents.
The vast majority of respondents have absolutely no qualifications to speak on genetics.

Is there really no evidence at all for a genetic link between race and intelligence?

No evidence for such a link has ever been presented in the scientific community. Much data has been claimed to be evidence by advocates of scientific racism, but each of these claims has been universally rejected by geneticists. Statistical arguments claiming to detect the signal of such a difference in polygenic scores have been refuted as fundamentally methodologically flawed (see e.g. [9]), and neither genetics nor neuroscience are anywhere near the point where a mechanistic explanation could even be meaningfully proposed (see e.g. [10]). This is why the question of a genetic link between race and intelligence is largely considered pseudoscience; it is assumed to exist primarily by advocates of scientific racism, and in these cases the belief is based on nothing but preconceived notions about race.

What is the current state of the science on a link between intelligence and race?

Please see the article itself for an outline of the scientific consensus.

What is the basis for Wikipedia's consensus on how to treat the material?

Wikipedia editors have considered this topic in detail and over an extended period. In short, mainstream science treats the claim that genetics explains the observable differences in IQ between races as a fringe theory, so we use our own guidelines on how to treat such material when editing our articles on the subject. Please refer to the following past discussions:

Piffer (2015)

Piffer (2015) found differing frequencies of cognition and IQ-enhancing genes in different racial populations:

https://gwern.net/doc/iq/2015-piffer.pdf

Wiki Crazyman (talk) 23:39, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

See Intelligence (journal) for some well-sourced commentary on the merits of that particular publication. AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:53, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The criticism appears to be sourced to a journalistic piece in a progressive political magazine and another in a pop-sci magazine. 'Well-sourced commentary' such as this doesn't weigh heavily when it comes to a highly-regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Elisha'o'Mine (talk) 01:42, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

'Highly regarded' went out the window when they had white supremacists on the editorial board. MrOllie (talk) 01:51, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Even the two critical sources stated describe it as 'one of the most respected in its field' and 'a more respected psychology journal'.

If any experts in the field of intelligence research have made a case against the journal's reputation, then its reliability could be questioned. As it is we have mixed criticism from two journalists of a well regarded peer-reviewed publication. Elisha'o'Mine (talk) 02:11, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nah. We can discard a source without needing to meet your personal standard, which doesn't have any relation to Wikipedia's policies so far as I can tell. It is worth mentioning, though, that the SPLC (noted experts on racism) published an article that spends multiple paragraphs on this specific paper and how it shouldn't be used as a source. A sample quote: Piffer’s credentials, affiliations and the scientific merit of the paper itself are suspect - MrOllie (talk) 02:54, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Based on which Wiki policy are you discarding it as a source? It's used several times in articles related to intelligence research.

Not than an advocacy organization's opinion really is of note when it comes to population genetics, I do note that these several SPLC paragraphs go into no more detail than to state that scientific merit of the paper itself are suspect (no reasons for this assessment or counterarguments given, at all), to question the author's credibility and to state that there are no reliable sources to dispute it. Which adds up to nothing in particular from an organisation with absolutely no standing in scientific matters. Elisha'o'Mine (talk) 03:38, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If this Piffer article is used several times, please point those usages out specifically because those definitely need to be removed. MrOllie (talk) 04:10, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As per my original comment and your response to it, I'm referring to the journal Intelligence. Which seems to have somehow achieved the status of a 'pick-and-choose' source.

The argument against mention of the Piffer paper, whether it's flawed research or not, requires something more than commentary from a civil rights organisation. Elisha'o'Mine (talk) 04:30, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Contrary to what you might imagine, we rely on editor judgement for evaluating source reliability all the time, and Piffer is definitely a fringe source per our guideline. This would be ascertainable even without explicit debunking in a scholarly source. Some pseudo-scholars are too insignificant to draw that kind of attention. That said, here is a fine peer-reviewed source that explains in no uncertain terms what is so profoundly unscientific about Piffer's methodology. No matter how you squirm, you will get nowhere with this line of argumentation. Generalrelative (talk) 06:38, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A preprint is not a fine peer-reviewed anything.

Our guideline places Piffer as a fringe source based on his conclusions, or is it his associations?

I'm aware that a past RFC prematurely declared the suggestion that genetics plays a role in population group IQ differences to be 'fringe' rather than merely minority. As RFCs aren't binding and consensus can change at any time, hopefully this will be rectified at some point. Though a consensus against it is emerging, the idea hasn't been conclusively refuted and research is ongoing. Elisha'o'Mine (talk) 08:10, 20 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The author of that paper is Kevin Bird. Kevin Bird also said: "The past isn't an indication of how the future behaves...I do science because I find it intellectually engaging, to be completely honest...I do it with not as much interest in attaining or discovering truth." He then said that he is "not interested in discovering truth". It is completely impossible to take a person like that seriously. And that paper's not peer reviewed. Hi! (talk) 05:38, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Bird et al. has now been published by American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association. It is no longer a preprint. As to your gotcha quote about "truth"... Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall. Generalrelative (talk) 05:57, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the updated cite. But an Indiana Jones meme? What am I supposed to take away from that? Hi! (talk) 06:24, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That your attempt to smear Bird is thoroughly unconvincing. Also see Wikipedia:Verifiability, not truth. MrOllie (talk) 12:20, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The SPLC aren't experts on genetics, and they don't cite any scientific publications in their article to critique Piffer. The closest they come is citing a non-peer-reviewed book review of a book Piffer didn't write. Hi! (talk) 05:40, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The SPLC may be experts on racism, but is there any evidence that they're experts on science? Wiki Crazyman (talk) 23:21, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Correctly identifying racist pseudoscience is part of their expertise, yes. It's not like they're commenting on an article about astronomy. MrOllie (talk) 23:43, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Pseudoscience is that which does not employ the scientific method. Neither the SPLC nor Bird have made such an extreme claim about the Piffer paper. Bird may have the expertise to critique the methodology employed, but anything of the sort is well beyond the SPLC's realm of expertise. Elisha'o'Mine (talk) 14:42, 9 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please also read OpenPsych concerning the journal co-founded by Davide Piffer. NightHeron (talk) 23:57, 13 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Notification about Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence_(3rd_nomination)

I posted already on WP:FTN, but would like more eyes on the discussion to provide more perspectives.

Also I tried editing the article, to give it more substance, but this is not my area of expertise. Please feel free to clean it up anyway you want. Bluethricecreamman (talk) 05:20, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Test scores

The Test Scores section has a paragraph discussing disparities in academic achievement and math test scores in the UK, but surely those are a less reliable measurement of intelligence than general mental ability (GMA) tests, such as those discussed here?^[1] Is there any objection to replacing this paragraph with the results from this meta-analysis of GMA tests? Stonkaments (talk) 04:03, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is no reason to remove the current text or the sources used, but feel free to suggest additional text sourced to [1] for discussion here to reach consensus. How to define intelligence and what's a less or more reliable way to measure it are controversial. Many believe that intelligence includes many disparate capacities and that there cannot be a numerical value that measures general intelligence.

Note that the reliability of your source [1] is very questionable, since all three authors are closely associated with either Mankind Quarterly (see also Jan te Nijenhuis) or OpenPsych. NightHeron (talk) 06:39, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1359432X.2024.2377780?needAccess=true

Anyone around who can check recent edits for Richard Lynn?

[11] Thanks. Doug Weller talk 13:00, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Genome-wide association study recent changes

Editors who follow this page will probably take an interest in recent edits over at Genome-wide association study. MrOllie (talk) 21:46, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

[1] ttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1359432X.2024.2377780?needAccess=true

[1]