Is Nurture Returning to Dominance Over Nature?
Genetic inheritance vs. financial inheritance
From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
June 17, 2025
I’ve read numberless op-eds in recent years lamenting conservative distrust of scientific experts. Yet, progressives are remarkably anti-expert when it comes to the venerable field of research into human intelligence.
IQ psychometrics emerged as a scientific field of study in the first decade of the 20th century when Charles Spearman invented factor analysis, which led to him proposing the existence of a general factor of intelligence in 1904. And then, the next year, Alfred Binet invented the first IQ test.
By the end of the 1930s, the modern IQ test had largely matured. Over the past eighty years, IQ has proved itself to be the single most useful and reliable metric in psychology.
In the liberal 1960s and 1970s, IQ science was rigorously interrogated, especially over the racial gaps in average IQ, but emerged battle-tested and resilient.
That doesn’t mean that IQ is the be-all and end-all of the human sciences. Human beings are incredibly complicated. But it does mean that over the past 120 years, IQ research has proved its value again and again.
There are multiple reasons why liberals are such science deniers when it comes to IQ, but don’t overlook sheer ignorance. IQ is a complex subject. I’ve always found writing intelligently about intelligence to be cognitively demanding. The subject is out at about the boundary of my intellectual limits.
So, it’s much easier for progressives to sneer at the purported motivations of people who aren’t ignorant about IQ than it is to learn the science.
Read the whole thing there.
I should add that all the fashionable current year talk about generational wealth is just a fancy overglorified tu quoque to justify affirmative action and DEI, and also a lazy brain excuse to explain away that which is better explained by cognitive and IQ differences.
The Canadian journalist for Quillette had a interesting anecdote about this phenomenon. When he and his wife were house hunting in their upper middle class Toronto neighbourhood he was suprised by the number of newlyweds in their late twenties shopping for their first homes in this pricey neighbourhood. His real estate agent quipped"PHd: Papa has dough". Many young high achievers also have their lifestyle subsidized by their high achieving parents.
A relative of mine was surprised by how many of his law school classmates hade zero debt from both undergrad and law school, and then had their parents help by them a condo when they mooved to Toronto to start their careers.