Sympathy for the devil

It didn't take long for Kate of Small Dead Animals to draw, er, certain conclusions from the recent killings in Kenya (which, not to underestimate their sheer brutality, weren't a patch on various activities in the Balkan states in the past few years).

So, who are these two theorists who came up with the bogus concept of "national IQ?"

Richard Lynn, in his own words:

My work on intelligence and brain size led me to consider the problem that women have smaller brains than men even when allowance is made for their smaller bodies. This implies that men should have higher average IQs than women, but it has been universally asserted that men and women have equal average IQs. In 1994 I proposed that the solution to this problem is that girls mature faster than boys and this compensates for their lower IQs, which only appear at the age of 16 onwards. Among adults men have higher average IQs than women by about 4 IQ points. This advantage consists largely of higher spatial abilities but is also present in non-verbal reasoning. In two meta-analyses of sex differences on the Progressive Matrices carried out with Paul Irwing (2004, 2005) we showed that in the general population men have a higher IQs than women by 5 IQ points, and in university students the advantage of men is 4.6 IQ points.

In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.

And here's his sidekick, racial separatist Tatu Vanhanen:

[Vanhanen] calmly predicts rising white consciousness in the face of increasing non-white demands, and suggests partition may be an option. He emphasizes that homogeneous nation-states are the most stable because citizens feel they are part of a kinship group. [from a sympathetic review on the neo-Nazi American Renaissance website]

Vanhanen's pseudo-science is characterized by howlers like this one:

Prof. Vanhanen notes that Tutsis and Hutus differ physically from each other considerably more than is usual for neighboring tribes in Africa, and suggests this contributed to the savagery of the violence.

In fact, the elite Tutsis (traditionally cattle herders)and Hutus (farmers) speak one language (kinyarwanda), share one culture, religion and mythology, and are distinguishable only by socio-economic status, conferred by Belgian and British colonial regimes. "Hutu and Tutsi were less sharply distinct, and individuals could and did move between the categories as their fortunes rose or fell."

[Gérard] Prunier makes the most insistent case for a constructivist position. He shows that the labels "Tutsi" and "Hutu" in Rwanda had primarily a class rather than an ethnic meaning in precolonial times, and notes research suggesting a porous boundary separating them. Furthermore, he shows that these ethnic labels are in the present political sense (that is, the notion of a foreign conquering master race over an oppressed peasant society) a historical Ž fiction invented by racialist Europeans and taken over by local political entrepreneurs seeking jobs and power, and especially by Tutsi politicians who used the colonial ideology as a means of material and psychological aggrandizement. The rigid dichotomy between Hutu and Tutsi was constructed by colonial authorities in collaboration with Rwandan elites and hardened as a result of political conflict. Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity, Fearon, J.D. and D.D. Laitin, International Organization, November 2000. v.54(4): 845-877. See Prunier, G. 1995. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press. See also Destexhe, A. "The Third Genocide." (Winter, 1994-1995) 97: 3-17.

Lynn and Vanhanen are much-quoted over at Stormfront. Once again, those who believe in an invisible curtain dividing fascism from conservatism are encouraged to comment.