John G.R. Fuerst

Ulster Institute for Social Research

Intelligence tests are excellent predictors of school and job performance and racial/ethnic differences in mean IQ are common. Based on five lines of evidence, Warne (2021) builds a case for partly genetic causes of differences in general intelligence (g) across American Self/Parental-identified race or ethnicity. Based on a careful reading of Warn...

We reply to Giangrande and Turkheimer's (2021; hereafter, “G&T”) recent critique of our meta-analysis on racial/ethnic differences in the heritability of intelligence (Pesta et al., 2020). G&T misrepresented our paper and much of the relevant scientific literature, providing inaccurate comments about nearly every conceptual and methodological charg...

Admixture regression involves the regression of a medical or behavioral trait on sub-population admixture proportions, race and ethnic group identifiers, and other explanatory variables, to measure the environmental and genetic components to trait variation across self-identified racial and ethnic groups. Several recent admixture regression studies...

Frost (2021) and Meisenberg (2021) provide thoughtful commentaries on the two papers, Fuerst, Kirkegaard and Piffer (2021a) and Fuerst, Hu and Connor (2021b). This brief reply discusses a few key points.

Black and Hispanic children in the United States have lower mean cognitive test scores than White children. The reasons for this are contested. The test score gap may be caused by socio-cultural factors, but the high heritability of g suggests that genetic variance might play a role. Differences between self-identified race or ethnicity (SIRE) grou...

Amongst admixed American populations, polygenic scores for educational attainment and intelligence (eduPGS), genetic ancestry, and cognitive ability covary. We argue that this plausibly could be due to either confounding or to causally-relevant genetic differences between ancestral groups. It is important to determine which scenario is the case in...

Black and Hispanic children in the United States have lower mean cognitive test scores than White children. The reasons for this are contested. The test score gap may be caused by sociocultural factors, but the high heritability of g suggests that genetic variance might play a role. Differences between self-identified race or ethnicity (SIRE) group...

This presentation provides an overview of the ABCD dataset used in the analyses. We then detail the statistical foundations for the simple and powerful method of admixture regression, which can be used to decompose genetic and environmental variance between ancestry groups. Next, we detail our main empirical results. Finally, we discuss additional,...

Research from the 20th century showed that ethnic minorities under-performed White British on measures of cognitive ability in the United Kingdom. However, academic qualification results from the first two decades of the 21st century suggest minimal to reverse ethnic differences. To better understand the pattern of contemporary cognitive difference...

In a recently-featured commentary, Winston [1] defined scientific racism as “the use of scientific concepts and data to create and justify ideas of an enduring, biologically based hierarchy” [1, p. 425]. Winston further argued that scientific racism persists because of the “social genealogy and history” of the research program, rather than becaus...

Using a sample of ~3,100 U.S. counties, we tested geoclimatic explanations for why cognitive ability varies across geography. These models posit that geoclimatic factors will strongly predict cognitive ability across geography, even when a variety of common controls appear in the regression equations. Our results generally do not support UV radiati...

Peer-reviewed but not editor-approved on account of controversial research. --- Polygenic scores for educational attainment and intelligence (eduPGS), genetic ancestry, and cognitive ability have been found to be inter-correlated in some admixed American populations. We argue that this could either be due to causally-relevant genetic differences be...

Ethnic differences in measured cognitive ability is of interest to social scientists, since these differences, whether or not they represent latent ability ones, can exasperate social inequalities. As such, it is important to monitor them, particularly in multi-ethnic societies. To this end, we analyzed cognitive test score data for 84,138 British...

Via meta-analysis, we examined whether the heritability of intelligence varies across racial or ethnic groups. Specifically, we tested a hypothesis predicting an interaction whereby those racial and ethnic groups living in relatively disadvantaged environments display lower heritability and higher environmentality. The reasoning behind this predict...

Using data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we examined whether European ancestry predicted cognitive ability over and above both parental socioeconomic status (SES) and measures of eye, hair, and skin color. First, using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, we verified that strict factorial invariance held between self-identif...

Little research has dealt with intragroup ancestry-related differences in intelligence in Black and White Americans. To help fill this gap, we examined the association between intelligence and both color and parent-reported ancestry using the NLSY97. We used a nationally-representative sample, a multidimensional measure of cognitive ability, and a...

The relationship between biracial status, color, and crystallized intelligence was examined in a nationally representative sample of adult Black and White Americans. First, it was found that self-identifying biracial individuals, who were found to be intermediate in color and in self-reported ancestry, had intermediate levels of crystallized intell...

The relationship between biracial status, color, and crystallized intelligence was examined in a nationally representative sample of adult Black and White Americans. First, it was found that self-identifying biracial individuals, who were found to be intermediate in color and in self-reported ancestry, had intermediate levels of crystallized intell...

The cause(s) of ubiquitous cognitive differences between American self-identified racial/ethnic groups (SIREs) is uncertain. Evolutionary-genetic models posit that ancestral genetic selection pressures are the ultimate source of these differences. Conversely, sociological models posit that these differences result from racial discrimination. To exa...

Sex differences in mathematical ability were examined in a nationwide sample of 32,346 Jordanian 4th graders (age 9-10 year) on a 40-item mathematics test. Overall, boys were found to perform slightly worse (d = À0.12) but had slightly more variation in scores (SD = 1.02 and SD = 0.98 for boys and girls, respectively). However, when results were di...

An article’s keywords are distinct because they represent what authors feel are the most important words in their papers. Combined, they can even shed light on which research topics in a field are popular (or less so). Here we conducted bibliometric keyword analyses of articles published in the journal, Intelligence (2000–2016). The article set com...

Analysis of racially admixed people presents one way of determining the relative causal contribution of genetics and environmental factors to group differences in diseases, social outcomes and cognitive ability. We present an intuitive introduction to admixture analysis using simulated data based on a first principles approach, showing how to analy...

Differences in intelligence have previously been found to be related to a wide range of inter-individual and international social outcomes. There is evidence indicating that intelligence differences are also related to different regional outcomes within nations. A quantitative and narrative review is provided for twenty-two countries (number of reg...

The cause of socially defined ethnic/racial behavioral and social differences in the Americas is an open question of serious social interest. Different models have been proposed: common culture (X factor), appearance-based (e.g. skin color) discrimnation, and familial (vertical environment and genetics). In particular, it has been claimed that stud...

The genealogy-based classificatory programs of Kant and Darwin are briefly discussed for context. It is detailed how in biology there is no unambiguous term to reference infraspecific-level descent-based divisions. The term lineage population is introduced and defined for analytic purposes: a lineage population is one of a set of divisions of intra...

Analyses of the relationships between cognitive ability, socioeconomic outcomes, and European ancestry were carried out at multiple levels in Argentina: individual (max. n = 5,920), district (n = 437), municipal (n = 299), and provincial (n = 24). Socioeconomic outcomes correlated in expected ways such that there was a general socioeconomic factor...

Narrative reports suggest that socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with biogeographic ancestry (BGA) in the Americas. If so, SES potentially acts as a confound that needs to be taken into account when evaluating the relation between medical outcomes and BGA. To explore how systematic BGA-SES associations are, a meta-analysis of American studie...

Narrative reports suggest that socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with biogeographic ancestry (BGA) in the Americas. If so, SES potentially acts as a confound that needs to be taken into account when evaluating the relation between medical outcomes and BGA. To explore how systematic BGA-SES associations are, a meta-analysis of American studie...

Previously, we looked at the association between overall state-level biogeographic ancestry (BGA) and overall state-level outcomes. It was found that European BGA relative to African and Amerindian BGA was associated with better outcomes. In this paper, the analysis is extended by looking at the state-level ancestry-outcome associations individuall...

The relationship between fertility, intelligence, and education was examined in China using a large sample sourced from the population-representative China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) dataset. For the 1951–1970 birth cohort, the correlation between fertility and gf was −.10. The strength of recent selection against gf in China substantially increas...

The authors reply to 6 comments on their target article on admixture in the Americas. Theoretical and methodological issues are clarified.

We conducted novel analyses regarding the association between continental racial ancestry, cognitive ability and socioeconomic outcomes across 6 datasets: states of Mexico, states of the United States, states of Brazil, departments of Colombia, sovereign nations and all units together. We find that European ancestry is consistently and usually stro...

The authors conducted a meta-analysis of interactions between behavioral genetic variance components (ACE) and race/ethnicity for cognitive ability. The differences between the variance components for Black and White Americans were small, despite the large average test score differences. More substantial differences were found between Hispanics and...

Cognitive ability differences between racial/ethnic groups are of interest to social scientists and policy makers. In many discussions of group differences, racial/ethnic groups are treated as monolithic wholes. However, subpopulations within these broad categories need not perform as the racial/ethnic groups do on average. Such subpopulation diffe...

We obtained data from Denmark for the largest 70 immigrant groups by country of origin. We show that three important socialeconomic variables are highly predictable from the Islam rate, IQ, GDP and height of the countries of origin. We further show that there is a general immigrant socioeconomic factor and that country of origin national IQs, Islam...

We discuss the global hereditarian hypothesis of race differences in g and test it on data from the NLSF. We find that migrants country of origin’s IQ predicts GPA and SAT/ACT.