Off to a good start there! Invoking the supreme authority of the late Stephen Jay Gould is a surefire way to persuade anybody familiar with the field of psychometrics that you know what you are talking about.
As I pointed out in my VDARE.com review in 2002, Lynn and Vanhanen’s finding of an average IQ of 70 in black Africa is strong evidence in favor of the nurture position that a better environment can raise IQs, because African Americans, who appear to be about 4/5th black, score 15 points higher. (Lynn subsequently adopted the logic of my critique.) So, Wicherts’ finding that if you only count the IQ tests that he likes, on which black Africans average around 80 or a little higher, then that strengthens the hereditarian view. (This is much too subtle for Kenny to grasp, of course.) (…)
…there are reasons of predictive validity for including test scores where black Africans simply failed to grasp the point of using abstract logic to solve puzzles (typically, culture-free nonverbal ones, not “regatta” questions as Kenny implies). Long ago, Thomas Sowell recounted an anecdote where two 17-year-old African youths were asked a standard IQ test question. They wittily ridiculed the impracticality and absurdity of this highly abstract question, displaying quickness of mind in social cognition.
On the other hand, as Sowell noted, if by the age of 17, your culture hasn’t introduced you to abstract thought yet, you probably aren’t going to pick it up very well as an adult, and you are probably not going to be highly productive in economic roles that demand that kind of nerdier thinking.
Thus, the high correlation between low IQ scores in Africa and low per capita GDPs in Africa, even if some of low scores are due to lack of acculturation in modern thinking.
My guess is that the spread of cheap smartphones in Africa will stimulate the kind of black box logical thinking that IQ tests measure and which the modern economy rewards.
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