By Gabriel Princewill-
The controversy surrounding Nathan Cofnas (pictured has reopened one of the most contentious questions in modern science: whether differences in measured intelligence between racial groups can legitimately be attributed to inherited genetic differences.
Cofnas, a philosopher associated with hereditarian arguments about intelligence, has argued that it is reasonable to investigate whether genetic differences contribute to average cognitive differences between populations.
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His position is controversial, not because genetics has no relationship to intelligence—it clearly does—but because a scientifically legitimate observation about individual heredity can be transformed far too easily into an unsupported claim about racial hierarchy. That leap is where the evidence becomes considerably weaker.
The strongest part of the hereditarian argument deserves to be acknowledged. Intelligence is not simply created by schools, families or culture. Decades of behavioural-genetic research show that cognitive abilities are substantially heritable within populations.
Modern genomic research has identified thousands of genetic variants associated, individually and collectively, with differences in cognitive ability and educational attainment. Intelligence is therefore influenced by biology, and anyone claiming that genes play no role whatsoever would be contradicting a substantial body of evidence.
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Notwithstanding this fact, genes play a fundamental role in understanding intelligence, not a holistic one.
But that finding does amount to the conclusion Cofman and his supporters try to establish. Genes play a fundamental role in understanding intelligence, not a holistic one. A trait can be substantially heritable within a population without differences between populations being genetic.
Height provides an obvious illustration. Height is strongly influenced by genes, yet average height can change dramatically between generations because nutrition, health and living conditions change.
The next problem is the word “race” itself. Modern genetics does not divide humanity into a set of clean biological races corresponding to familiar social categories such as Black, White or Asian. Human genetic variation is complex, overlapping and continuous.
The National Academies has specifically warned researchers against using race as a proxy for genetic variation, describing that practice as misleading and inaccurate. Genetic ancestry can be scientifically informative, but ancestry is not interchangeable with socially constructed racial categories.
That matters enormously when intelligence is being discussed. If researchers observe an average difference in test performance between two socially defined racial groups, they cannot simply point to the existence of genetic variation and conclude that the difference must therefore be genetic in a racial sense.
They must identify the relevant genetic variants, establish that those variants differ systematically between the populations in question, demonstrate that they influence the particular cognitive outcomes being measured ,and then rule out the enormous range of environmental explanations. That standard has not been met for claims that contemporary racial differences in intelligence are principally genetic.
The environmental challenge is formidable. Cognitive development is shaped by nutrition, prenatal conditions, education and zeal, family resources, exposure to stress, discrimination, expectations and influence, and countless other factors. Even within the field of genetics, researchers increasingly recognise that genes and environments interact rather than operate as separate forces.
Polygenic scores for intelligence are statistical probabilities, not just genetic verdicts, and they can be confounded by enviromental and socioeconomic factors. Parents transmit not only DNA but also education, wealth, habits, aspirations, language and social networks.Attributing intelligence levels to race is pathetic.
This last point also exposes a weakness in a simplistic racial-genetic narrative. If more highly educated Black or ethnic parents increasingly raise children in environments rich in books, educational opportunities, intellectually demanding occupations and high academic expectations, their children may benefit from both inherited characteristics and an enriched environment.
The level of that benefit can match or surpass that of children from other races who do not benefit from similar advantages, although genes can skip a generation.There is, nevertheless, a legitimate evolutionary question hidden inside this debate. Human populations can experience genetic change over generations when reproductive patterns and environmental pressures consistently favour some variants over others.
Genetic evolution does not stop in modern societies. But it generally operates across generations, and the relevant timescale and mechanism must be demonstrated rather than assumed.
It is true that genetic factors associated with education and cognitive ability can be transmitted across generations, and assortative mating can affect the genetic distribution of traits over generations. But this fact does not establish that one racial population has genetically increased its intelligence to the exclusion of others., since no particular race is insulated form the mix of genetic factors and assortative mating.
Claims of rapid genetic improvement through educational selection require evidence of actual changes in relevant frequencies, and proof that those changes affect cognitive ability to a degree that comprehensively eclipses children from other races with a lower degree of heritable qualities associated with educational history.
Indeed, one of the strongest pieces of evidence against simplistic genetic explanations comes from changes in intelligence-test performance over time. The Flynn effect describes the substantial rise in average intelligence-test scores observed across many populations during much of the twentieth century.
Such changes occurred far too rapidly to be plausibly explained by ordinary genetic evolution alone, demonstrating how profoundly cognitive performance can respond to environmental and social conditions.
More recent research has even identified reversals of earlier gains in some countries, again illustrating the sensitivity of measured cognitive performance to changing environments.
There is another uncomfortable problem for racial-intelligence theories. Even if a genuine average genetic difference between populations were eventually discovered, it would tell us remarkably little about any particular individual race. Human populations contain enormous internal variation.
A statistical difference between group averages cannot tell us the intelligence of an individual Black, White or Asian person. Any attempt to convert population averages into assumptions about individual potential would therefore be scientifically crude as well as socially dangerous.
The debate should consequently move away from the false choice between “genes” and “environment”. Intelligence is influenced by both, but their relationship is extraordinarily complicated. The scientifically defensible position is neither that genes are irrelevant nor that racial differences in intelligence have been proven genetic.
It is that genetic influences on individual cognitive differences are real, while the causes of average differences between socially defined populations remain unresolved and cannot responsibly be attributed to race.
That distinction is especially important because the language of racial hierarchy can give an appearance of scientific certainty where the underlying evidence is much more provisional.
Cofnas is entitled to argue that uncomfortable hypotheses should be investigated. Academic freedom protects the asking of difficult questions. But scientific seriousness requires something more demanding than asking the question: it requires evidence capable of surviving competing explanations.
At present, the strongest evidence does not justify a hierarchy of innate intelligence between racial groups. It supports a much more complicated picture in which genes, upbringing, education, socioeconomic circumstances, culture and biological development interact across individual lives and generations.
The future may reveal additional genetic influences on cognitive ability. What it has not established is that skin colour or conventional racial identity provides a reliable biological map of intelligence.
The real lesson from modern genetics is therefore almost the opposite of the racial-intelligence argument. Human cognitive potential is biologically influenced, but biology does not neatly divide humanity into intellectual races.
Intelligence is genetic, polygenic, environmentally responsive and extraordinarily complex. Any theory that turns that complexity into a simple racial ranking is not merely controversial; it is asking genetics to say considerably more than the evidence currently allows.
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