Is the "Correlation Between Race & Intellect" Merely "Purported?"

Why can't critics of Jason Arday admit that Nathan Cofnas is the hero of their story?

Obviously, the hero of the Jason Arday brouhaha is philosopher Nathan Cofnas. But we have such a taboo on the Occam’s Razor explanation of why one of the world’s most famous universities would hire a literal self-proclaimed retard like Jason Arday — because hiring more blacks requires lowering standards — that everybody feels compelled to denounce Cofnas before expressing their concerns about Arday’s hoax.

Thus, from the New York Times op-ed page:

A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It

Aug. 8, 2026

By Jesse Singal

Mr. Singal is a host of the podcast “Blocked and Reported.”

… The [Jason Arday] scandal broke out only when the philosopher of biology Nathan Cofnas published a lengthy Substack post last month dragging all of the plagiarism accusations into full public view. …

Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the purported correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

Jesse Singal is a pretty brave opinion journalist who took on Big Trans for years back when that was enormously unfashionable in New York media circles.

So why does he refer to the correlation between race and intellect as “purported” when it is one of the most overwhelmingly replicated findings in all of settled science?

For example, here are summary tables from Philip L. Roth et al’s 2001 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology, ETHNIC GROUP DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY IN EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS: A META-ANALYSIS

Roth and company assembled 6,246,729 test scores from 105 test-years. Overall, they found a black-white gap in average test scores of 1.10 standard deviations (16.5 IQ points).

The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) showed a particularly large racial gap of 1.34 standard deviations overall (20 IQ points). I’m guessing that self-selection played a role: blacks tend to work more in government jobs where, say, a Master’s in Education gets you a bump in salary.

This is not pseudoscience or even cutting edge work

Now, obviously, this data doesn’t prove that the IQ Gap is due to Nature or Nurture. Typically, your parents provide both. So, distinguishing between the two is the Big Leagues of intellectual acuity.

I suspect what’s going on is that a huge number of people hear the word “race” and get a different picture in their head of what that means than what I am thinking. Here’s a reasonable tweet, but one that I very much disagree with:

In other words, the word “race” turns off the “Correlation Does Not Prove Causation” alarm that most people with a 3 digit IQ has in their heads in the 21st Century.

Instead, the word “race” is assumed to require genetic causality. In fact, the conventional wisdom often insists that race cannot exist without all sorts of absurd requirements about every single black person having genes that every single white person doesn’t have.

So, if somebody is not willing to concede that genetics influences racial differences in IQ bell curves, then they think that any “correlation” between race and intellect is unproven or complete spurious.

But of course, in the real world, racial differences in average IQ obviously matter, no matter what their cause, whether Nature, Nurture, or Noise.

Yet, few people realize that.

In contrast, when I use the word “race” in reference to test scores, what it means to me is:

Which Race Box (or Boxes) did the test-taker check on his paperwork?

America produces countless studies each year on racial differences (most of them designed and carried out by progressives). I’m a big fan of the social sciences, so I’ve thought carefully about how they are implemented.

Virtually all of them assign people to various race categories via the simple expedient of asking them to check one or more Race Boxes. Note that the vast majority of studies, whether done by the many blank slatists or by the few race realists, use the exact same method: …

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