That’s a journal I would never trust — after all, they were responsible for publishing Richard Lynn’s hacky paper on the IQ of nations. Now here’s another example of a terrible racist paper from it. It’s an evolutionary psychology paper by Kanazawa, a terrible combination that ought not to ever pass peer review.
On the basis of his theory of the evolution of intelligence (Kanazawa, 2004), Kanazawa (2008) proposed that, during their evolutionary travels away from the relatively stable and hence predictable environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA; i.e., the African savanna of the late Pleistocene), the ancestors of Eurasians encountered evolutionarily novel environments that selected for higher intelligence. Therefore, Kanazawa (2008) predicted higher average IQ scores in countries located farther away from the EEA. Kanazawa (2008) tested this hypothesis against data gathered by Lynn and Vanhanen (2006), who estimated so-called “national IQ-scores,” i.e., the average IQ of the inhabitants of nations in terms of western norms. Kanazawa (2008) found a significant negative correlation between countries’ national IQs and their distance from three geographic locations in and around sub-Saharan Africa.
This is from a paper analyzing the problems of peer review, using Kanazawa’s paper as a case study. That evo-psych paper flew through peer review, with reviewers missing a number of deep problems.
We point to a number of indisputable issues that should have precluded publication of the paper as constituted at the time of review. First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait. This assumption contradicts the received view on evolutionary population genetics and the main theme of the book (Oppenheimer, 2004) that was cited by Kanazawa (2008) in support of the Out-of-Africa theory. Third, the study is based on the assumption that the IQ of current-day Australians, North Americans, and South Americans is representative of that of the genetically unrelated indigenous populations that inhabited these continents 10,000 years ago (Wicherts et al., 2010b). In related work by others who share Kanazawa’s (2008) views on the nature of race differences in IQ, the latter issue was dealt with by excluding countries with predominantly non-indigenous populations (Templer and Arikawa, 2006). Thus, although Wicherts et al. (2010b) raised additional issues that may the topic of debate (see below), these three problems are beyond dispute.
I am amused that Kanazawa’s methodology assumed that the Earth is flat and that all peoples ignored geographical obstacles, like mountains and oceans, to make a beeline to their modern location. I am horrified that anyone would use Lynn’s deeply racist and wrong paper to make any estimates of a population’s intelligence. I reject the whole notion of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence in the first place.
The authors propose some changes towards a more open peer review process, which sound good to me. My simpler solution is to simply throw out the whole goddamn journal of Intelligence, along with anyone who publishes in it.
Speaking of flat earth follies, I see that YouTube is in a tizzy because someone is doing something called “The Final Experiment” — a group of people are flying to Antarctica to witness the fact that there is a period where the sun never sets, which ought to be impossible if Antarctica is actually a ring of land surrounding the whole planet. It’s ridiculous. No, flat earthers will find a new excuse and will not be persuaded by a “final” experiment — it’s not as if they reached their beliefs by experiment and reason in the first place, or as if all the other evidence that the earth is roughly spherical were insufficient.
Can you imagine someone proposing a “final experiment” to “prove” that life on earth evolved? I can’t. I know the idiots who are creationists far too well to think that.
