Book Review Article: Challenging the Belief in a (Genetically) Just World

Abstract

Challenging the Belief in a (Genetically) Just World Race Differences in Intelligence. An Evolutionary Analysis Richard Lynn Washington Summit Publishers, Augusta, Georgia, 2006. During the 1970s, the psychologist Melvin Lerner observed that people feel comfortable in the belief that the world is a just place where effort gets rewarded and vice gets punished, the rich are rich through their own merit and the poor are poor through their own fault, and where bad things never happen to good girls (Lerner, 1980). In pre-modern times, the desire to believe in a just world created the religious concept of divine justice, with rewards and punishments meted out in the afterlife. The intellectuals of the late 20th century could no longer believe in a world where everyone gets what he deserves; nor could they believe in divine justice. And so they retreated to a more defensible position: injustices and inequalities exist, but they are not inherent in nature, but are made by people; biological differences and specifically genetic differences among people do not exist for those abilities that are important for success in life, nor do they exist among races, all we have to do to ensure equal outcomes for everyone is to provide equal opportunity for everyone. The first part of this belief system, that there are no genetic ability differences among individuals, has been dismantled by the findings of behavioral genetics in the course of the past 40 years. Since the 1980s the evidence for a fairly strong genetic contribution to individual differences in intelligence and personality has been too overwhelming to be ignored by even the staunchest believers in the genetically just world. The question of race differences is far less settled in the scientific arena. This is because the quasi-experimental designs and statistical methods for partitioning the variance between genetic and environmental effects are not applicable to group differences. The topic is also under a stronger taboo than individual differences, and is therefore avoided by careerconscious academics to the present day. Richard Lynn's book Race Differences in Intelligence is one of the rare scientific treatments of this contentious issue. 149 of the book's 244 pages are devoted to a detailed compilation of IQ test results from virtually all regions of the world, from the Kalahari Desert to the Arctic. This is very different from much of the older literature on race differences, which was based on studies in the United States. The advantage of Lynn's approach is that worldwide patterns cannot be explained away by factors that are specific to a single country. Its disadvantage is that environmental differences between countries are so great that any inferences about genetic causes become tenuous. Borrowing from the work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his associates (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 2003), Lynn divides the human species into 10 races whose intelligence he investigates in turn: Europeans, Africans, Bushmen and Pygmies, North Africans and South Asians, Southeast Asians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Arctic peoples, and Amerindians. We learn, for example, that the average IQ is 105 for East Asians, 99 for Europeans, 91 for the Inuit and other arctic peoples, 84 for South Asians and North Africans, 67 for sub-Saharan Africans, and 54 for the Bushmen. The sheer amount of studies cited by Lynn is astonishing, and although many of them have serious limitations, the overall pattern is quite consistent. Lynn proposes that race differences in intelligence are to a large extent genetic. He attributes their evolution to two mechanisms. The first and most important mechanism is the need of people in northern latitudes to adapt to the challenges of a harsh and strongly seasonal climate, and especially the requirement for big-game hunting. The second mechanism is a shortage of IQ-boosting new mutations in small and isolated populations. …